Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Ben Santer, who infamously once threatened to beat up climate skeptic Pat Michaels (see Climategate email 1255100876.txt), has offered his services to President-elect Trump as a member of America’s “unarmed forces”.
Dear President-elect Trump—Don’t listen to the ‘ignorant voices’ on climate change
Ben Santer, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
Dear Mr. President-elect,
On Day 1 of your presidency, you will be faced with many significant challenges. Climate change is one of them. It will be there on every day of your presidency. It is indifferent to politics and to poll numbers. It does not care about national boundaries, or race or religion. It already impacts our lives and our livelihoods, and will have greater impact each year. It will be the backdrop against which all key events of the 21st century play out.
If you do not treat this problem seriously, it will grow. You won’t be able to ignore it. You won’t be able to isolate yourself or the United States from climate change. There is no sanctuary from its effects.
But if you choose to tackle climate change, you will have tremendous resources to draw on. You now preside not only over our armed forces, but also over powerful unarmed forces. You have access to the expertise of government-funded scientists who have spent their careers observing climate change, probing its causes, and trying to find creative solutions to the problems it poses. These women and men did not choose this work to get rich quick, or to alter world systems of government. The work chose them. They wanted to do something that mattered. They wanted to understand the climate system, and learn how it ticks.
I am one member of those unarmed forces. Thirty-five years ago, I signed up for a life in science. The attraction was the joy of discovering interesting stuff about this strange and beautiful world in which we live. In the last thirty-five years, I learned two things. First, human actions are changing Earth’s climate. Second, if we do nothing to address this problem, likely outcomes are bad. I want our country and our planet to avoid bad outcomes – which is why I’ve chosen to speak out publicly. I am not alone – thousands of my scientific colleagues are voicing their concerns.
…
Read more: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/22/trump-climate-change-take-action.html
Ben Santer is an old WUWT favourite, one of the more colourful characters in the Climategate drama.
Aside from the bizarre physical threat against Pat Michaels, he wrote emails describing being audited by Steve McIntyre as the 21st century equivalent of public hanging (Climategate email 3356.txt), and complained about “scientific competitors” using FOIA requests to access datasets before he was finished with them (Climategate email 1231257056.txt). He expressed concern about intentional or unintentional “misuse” of datasets by scientists who disagreed with his position (Climategate email 1229468467.txt). He wrote an apology to colleagues when McIntyre forced him to publish some of his data (Climategate email 1229468467.txt).
Santer also put his foot in it when he said in 2011, that periods of 17 years or more are required to identify the human footprint in the climate record. When 17 years came and went without any rise in temperature. Santer in 2015 tried to explain the pause as being due to lots of small volcanoes suppressing the anthropogenic signal.
I kindof hope President-elect Trump accepts Santer’s offer, keeps him around as the voice of climate science. The entertainment value of Ben Santer’s clown act would in my opinion justify the public expense.
Whoa there Ben! You’re telling Trump to ignore you!!
Best advice you have ever given wrt your hatred of CO2.
I like Rogerthesurf’s idea:
Santer Claus.
About as grounded in reality….
Ben Santer is entitled to his opinion but when real scientists are called upon
those that practice the scientific method will be of interest .
Let’s hope it keeps warming .
The Donald would be advised to ask several questions regarding the claims of Climate Change.
First, what ever happened to Global Warming? How come the change to Climate Change?
Second, is it real? Seems that the work of Smith and de Aleo call into question that most basic premise, as weather stations that contradict the “consensus” appear to have been systematically excluded, while other, obviously tainted stations have been kept. In several cases, buildings have gone up and concrete (a heat sink, a store of energy) have been built around originally isolated weather stations still in the mix. And in one case, a temp. of 600 degreees F, OBVIOUSLY an outlier, was kept.
Some consideration from de Aleo: In the report, D’Aleo and Watts claim that “Just as the Medieval Warm Period was an obstacle to those trying to suggest that today’s temperature is exceptional, and the UN and its supporters tried to abolish it with the ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the warmer temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s were another inconvenient fact that needed to be ‘fixed’. In each of the databases, the land temperatures from that period were simply adjusted downward, making it look as though the rate of warming in the 20th century was higher than it was, and making it look as though today’s temperatures were unprecedented in at least 150 years.”[13] from wikipedia.
Third, is global warming really a bad thing? Remember, where I live now was at the edge of a one mile thick sheet of ice approximately 10,000 years ago. Was that better?
Fourth, why is it necessary to “adjust” data to “prove” that (pick your year) is/was the warmest on record? Does “adjusted” mean FAKED? Why or why not?
Fifth, in light of “adjustment,” how can we trust ANYTHING that comes from NOAA or IPCC?
BTW, I too studied the environment in college, and it took me less than 15 minutes to debunk Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” which according to his own data is an arbitrarily drawn line.
BEN SANTER: “In the last 35 years I learned two things. First, human actions are changing Earth’s climate. Second, if we do nothing to address this problem likely outcomes are bad.”
FATHER CAVANAUGH’: “Son, in 35 years of religious study, I have only come up with two hard, incontrovertible facts: there is a God, and…I am not Him.”
The fictional character of Father Cavanaugh is not only more entertaining, honest & believable, he is also much much much more likely to turn an original phrase.
Eric Worrall said:
“Ben Santer, who infamously once threatened to beat up climate skeptic Pat Michaels (see Climategate email 1255100876.txt)”
If by threaten, you me tell someone else that he would be tempted to do so…. You are being deceptive in your description of events.
Climate is, has been, and always will be changing, and any current change is not unprecedented; hence no more extraordinary challenges than usual are presenting themselves. The tone of urgency in regard to climate change, then, is exaggerated to an extent that makes this a false claim.
Thirty-five years of deferring to computer model forecasts of long-term climate shifts, when those same models fail to forecast the last eighteen or so years does not seem to qualify as learning about anything other than those computer models. What those models forecast , then, are not real effects of human actions. Your claim, then, is bogus. Your call to action based on this bogus claim, consequently, is also bogus.
Seriously ?
No argument there, but it’s very ironic that you offer this wisdom, in light of how wrong climate science appears to be progressing.
So, your credentials are supposed to validate this claim, and deter us from examining exactly what those other scientific voices are saying ? Seems like a power play to me.
But what you do NOT know … beyond any reasonable doubt</b is that human-produced CO2 causes unusual or catastrophic warming. Calling the impacts of human actions fingerprints is just being dramatic for the purpose of making humans seem like criminals for producing CO2 as part of their industrial evolutionary process., ignoring the fact that humans are parts of nature and that human development is part of natural development.
Leadership or denial ? … Dramatic, but a false dichotomy. Other choices could be leadership or following false consensus or leadership or complacency or leadership or caving to climeastrology and mathemagic
Op-Ed I published in the San Mateo Daily Journal on 1/4/2012
Dear Editor:
Ben Santer, of Climate Gate infamy and contributor to all four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization that shared the bogus 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, has as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) climate team’s lead researcher generated a new publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. This pro-anthropogenic global warming climate research effort at LLNL attempts with this new publishment a deftly crafted scientific research effort conjoined with a hazily veiled ideological statistical component to slowly validate a central planning hegemony over U.S. and world-wide production processes. If you control CO2, then you control most energy output and thus the means of production in the world economies by exploiting fraudulent logic to tax all carbon emitting industries from the local to the international level via the UN’s IPCC.
The central madness is that man-made global warming activists at the UN’s IPCC are in extreme dismay over how to cope with the earth’s lack of warming since 1998, especially so after NASA and the U.S. Solar Observatory publically revealed several months ago to expect moderate global cooling for the next thirty years owing to a quiet period on the sun with concurrent cooling of the mammoth Pacific Ocean heat mass. Enter IPCC’s and LLNL’s Ben Santer announcing that the climate computers had always correctly predicted non-warming lulls like the current one, stating that “tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human caused changes.” What sorcerer’s magic dwells in 17 years instead of 15 other than providing two additional years of “grace” prior to admissions that computer models are less than adequate? Will further self-justifying statistical minutia be offered then?
But the IPCC conjured up another rabbit in the hat; on November 18th came the proclamation that the real danger to humanity was not “warming” per se, but “extreme weather.” Thus the IPCC endeavors to marginalize NASA’s report and instead rely on the tired old politically correct media to irrationally propagandize every weather “disaster” in the world permitting CO2 emissions to be inexorably condemned to justify unconscionable green taxes at a time of extreme world-wide financial trepidations.
In concert with the IPCC, media alarmists are hysterically forecasting ice-free Arctic horror stories complete with starving polar bears, conveniently ignoring the fact that the earth possesses two poles while contemptuously indifferent to the reality that the Antarctic has been accumulating ice for the last 40 years. Concerning the Arctic, the first global warming during our current Holocene Epoch, the time between 8500 and 10,000 years ago was the warmest earth has been since the end of the last Ice Age about 19,000 years ago, as confirmed by the Norwegian research team of Dr. Lysa and Eiliv Larsen of the Geological Survey of Norway. This Norwegian team confirmed evidence of an ice-free Arctic during the aforementioned Holocene Epoch time interval. So much for hype on polar bear extinctions; if the Arctic was ice-free why did the polar bears fail to vanish given that they are not migratory?
If you are going to vanquish the global economy to the stone age through cap and trade regulation, with employment of inefficient and expensive renewables over abundant, relatively economical and efficient energy sources like shale oil and gas, you at least owe it to the taxpayers to establish your policies on rational, transparent and rigorous non-ideological science opposed to the sustained and specious scientific facilitations of snake-oil politicized rubbish perpetrated by Ben Santer and the charlatans at the UN’s IPCC.
Tony Favero
Freelance Writer
Former Science and Mathematics Instructor and Engineer
Half Moon Bay, Ca 94019
Ben Santer says that in the last 35 years he has learnt two things: First, that human actions are changing Earth’s climate. And second, that if we do nothing to address this problem, likely outcomes are bad.
The first one is completely wrong as you we shall see. The second one exposes his ignorance of what causes warming. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that warming has nothing to do with carbon dioxide. Just put up the global temperature curve and then put up the Keeling curve, in parallel to it. You can do it in your home, office, or laboratory. Looking at these two curves even a child can see that the global warming curve goes up and down and has peaks while the Keeling curve is completely free of any peaks and smooth. This applies to the entire length of these curves, starting in 1850 (the start of the industrial age). Keep in mind that the Keeling curve includes all of the atmospheric carbon dioxide, including the human-caused part that gives it an over-all upward trend. What the global temperature curve tells us is the fact that global temperature has not followed the steady increase of anthropogenic carbon dioxide as promised by IPCC, but significantly deviates from it. It strays so far from following the growth of anthropogenic carbon dioxide that significant cooling takes place to it. Thus, instead of warming, the temperature curve shows 35 years of cooling in the years 1875 to 1910. I get this from HadCRUT3 that was made before it was transmogrified into HadCRUT4 by undocumented changes. Plus, also another cooling from 1940 to 1950 or ten years. Such cooling covers more than one quarter of the time that has lapsed since 1850. And cooling makes a mockery of a “warming” curve. Consider also that there is absolutely no counterpart to any of the warm peaks in the Keeling curve where the carbon dioxide alleged to cause greenhouse warming resides. The only conclusion you can draw from all these facts is that global warming has nothing whatsoever to do with atmospheric carbon dioxide and should be regarded as an aspect of the natural world. Take my advice, Ben, and withdraw those two foolish statements I quoted. Act before it is too late to dissociate yourself from fake science.