Guest post by David Middleton
Whether dismissing global warming as a hoax, questioning humanity’s role in it, exaggerating the unknowns, playing down the urgency of action, or playing up the costs, President Donald Trump and his team have served up every flavor of climate denial.
Although the arguments varied—as if they were different shades or stages of denial—they all served the same purpose: to create an exaggerated sense of dispute in order to bolster a case against decisive climate action. The latest gambit is to avoid the subject entirely.
In his announcement last week that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump didn’t bother addressing… [blah, blah, blah]…
[…]
In Trump’s retelling, the negotiators of the Paris deal were not grappling with a planetary crisis… [they weren’t]…
[…]
To help understand the arguments, we have developed a guide to what the science says about the five types of climate denial we’ve heard from Trump, his team, and their supporters, and how each served as a stepping stone on the path of a retreat from Paris.
‘It’s Not Real’
The deepest shade of denial—outright rejection of global warming—is embodied by Trump’s infamous 2012 tweet that called global warming a Chinese plot to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
[…]
To the hard-core unbelievers, climate scientists are conspirators in it for the grant money. They are not to be trusted, deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland suggested last month by giving Trump a print-out of a purported 1970s TIME magazine cover predicting a coming ice age. (The cover is an internet fake that has been circulating for years. It was cited last year by White House strategist Stephen Bannon in a radio interview he did while running the conservative media outlet Breitbart.)
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[Bracketed, bold, red = my comments]
Debunking Shade #1
Technically, as a “luke warmer,” I won’t address the totality of Shade #1. I will just debunk Ms. Lavelle’s smarmy psuedo-intellectual handling of the 1970’s global cooling scare.
Well, I suppose that Ms. Lavelle is correct that a 1970’s TIME magazine cover did not predict “another ice age.” The prediction (sort of a prediction) was from a 1974 TIME magazine article…
The full text of the article can be accessed through Steve Goddard’s Real Science.
TIME, like most of the mainstream-ish media, has acted like a climate weathervane over the years…
Dan Gainor compiled a great timeline of media alarmism (both warming and cooling) in his Fire and Ice essay.
Then there was Newsweek…
And who could ever forget Leonard Nimoy’s 1977 narration of In Search of The Coming Ice Age?
While the 1977 TIME cover was a fake, this 1975 magazine cover and article were very real:
Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics was a 1977 National Academies publication. It featured what appears to be the same temperature graph, clearly demonstrating a mid-20th century cooling trend…
The mid-20th Century cooling trend is clearly present in the instrumental record, at least in the northern hemisphere…
Why are people like Ms. Lavelle so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so “inconvenient” that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?
So, in accusing K. T. McFarland of Shade #1 of Climate Denial, Ms. Lavelle engaged in climate denial… Irony is so ironic!
The Other Shades of Climate Denial
Debunking Shade #2 “It’s Not Our Fault”
It’s not all our fault. The mythical 97% consensus only asserts that it’s at least half our fault. We certainly could be responsible for some of the warming that has occurred over the past 150 years. The point is that the warming observed in the instrumental temperature record doesn’t significantly deviate from the pre-existing Holocene pattern of climate change…
Over the past 2,000 years, the average temperature of the northern hemisphere has exceeded natural variability (+/-2 std dev) 3 times: The Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the modern warming. Humans didn’t cause at least two of the three and the current one only exceeds natural variability by about 0.2 C. And this is a maximum, because the instrumental data have much higher resolution than the proxy data.
Debunking Shade #3 “It’s Too Uncertain”
Uhmmmm… It *is* too uncertain.
Debunking Shade #4 “It’s Not Urgent”
Melting icebergs are NOT beheading Christians in the Middle East. For that matter, all icebergs eventually melt… While no Christians ever get beheaded without someone else doing the beheading, except in very rare and bizarre accidents.
Not only is it not urgent. It is steadily becoming less urgent:
“It’s About Jobs”
It’s not just about jobs. This is what Vice President Pence actually said in context:
The White House
For Immediate Release June 01, 2017
Remarks by the Vice President Introducing President Trump’s Statement on the Paris Accord
The Rose Garden
3:29 P.M. EDT
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary Ross, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, members of Congress, distinguished guests, on behalf of the First Family, welcome to the White House. (Applause.)
It’s the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Vice President to a President who is fighting every day to make America great again.
Since the first day of this administration, President Donald Trump has been working tirelessly to keep the promises that he made to the American people. President Trump has been reforming healthcare, enforcing our laws, ending illegal immigration, rebuilding our military. And this President has been rolling back excessive regulations and unfair trade practices that were stifling American jobs.
Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, American businesses are growing again; investing in America again; and they’re creating jobs in this country instead of shipping jobs overseas. Thanks to President Donald Trump, America is back. (Applause.)
And just last week we all witnessed the bold leadership of an American President on the world stage, putting America first. From the Middle East, to Europe, as leader of the free world, President Trump reaffirmed historic alliances, forged new relationships, and called on the wider world to confront the threat of terrorism in new and renewed ways.
And by the action, the President will announce today, the American people and the wider world will see once again our President is choosing to put American jobs and American consumers first. Our President is choosing to put American energy and American industry first. And by his action today, President Donald Trump is choosing to put the forgotten men and women of America first.
So with gratitude for his leadership — (applause) — and admiration for his unwavering commitment to the American people, it is now my high honor and distinct privilege to introduce to all of you, the President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump. (Applause.)
END
3:31 P.M. EDT
President Donald Trump is the President of these United States of America. He took the following oath of office:
“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Since the Paris climate agreement was effectively a treaty and the prior occupant of the Office of President of the United States failed to submit it to the Senate for ratification, the only way President Trump could uphold his oath of office was to either withdraw from the agreement or submit it to the Senate where is would not be ratified.
That said, President Trump campaigned on the promise to put America, including American industry and energy, first.
If the Times and others reporting on the coming ice age means nothing because it was the press, then anyone getting their information about global warming from the news media should immediately stop doing so since the press is not reliable. Only if you read the actual science papers can you decide. The media is not an acceptable source of scientific information. It follows that movies made by Hollywood are not acceptable sources either.
Is collected a team of wise excellent and honest men
So voice to post doesn’t work so well lol.
It is clear that the President has collected a team that understands the situation quite well.
Based on the paleoclimate record and modeling results, the reality is that the climate cchange we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is no such evidence in the paleoclimate record and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. One researcher found that the initial calculations of the climate sensivity of CO2 were too great my more than a factor of 20 because the calculations failed to take into consideration that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight but very significant decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troosphere which constitutes a cooling effect. Then there is the issue of H2O feedback. Besides being the primary greenhouse gas, H2O is a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere as evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate hence more H2O in the atmosphere promotes cooling, not warming.
The primary flaw in the AGW conjecture is that the radiant greenhouse effect upon which the AGW conjecture is based has not been observed anywhere in the solar system. The Earth’s convective greenhouse effect accounts for all 33 degrees C warmer the surface of the Earth is because of the atmosphere. An additional radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed. If CO2 really affected climate then the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years should have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but such has not happened. Because the radiant greenhouse effect is nothing but sceince fiction so must be the AGW conjecture.
Climate alarmists should stop worrying so much and embrace The Donald
Climate alarmists should stop worrying so much and embrace The Donald
“Decisive climate action” – you’ve got to love that little oxymoron. How does someone dumb enough to write such gibberish survive in the real world?
“Decisive climate action” = “Devisive climate action”
Is space cold or hot? There are no molecules in space so our common definitions of hot and cold don’t apply.
The temperatures of objects in space, e.g. the earth, moon, space station, mars, venus, etc. are determined by the radiation flowing past them. In the case of the earth, the solar irradiance of 1,368 W/m^2 at average orbital distance has a Stefan Boltzman black body equivalent temperature of 394 K. That’s hot.
But an object’s albedo reflects away that heat and reduces that temperature.
Because earth’s albedo reflects away 30% of the sun’s 1,368 W/m^2 energy only 70% or 958 W/m^2 actually stays behind to “warm” the earth at a S-B BB equivalent temperature of 361 K, 33 C colder than the earth with no atmosphere or albedo.
The earth’s albedo/atmosphere doesn’t keep the earth warm, it keeps the earth cool.
On Thu,Jun 29, 2017 at at 8:32 AM Tanya Zwick wrote:
>spam > again>
I became a climate realist (read skeptic) when I met John Maunder and he stayed with me and I invited him to speak at our Rotary Club John was a climatologist and he taught climate around the world in various universities .John came back to New Zealand and was appointed as the head of our Meteorological Service .He was involved in the initial conferences in Villach in Austria and Rio deJaneiro on global warming .He took the same line as Roy Spencer now takes but what made my mind up was that he said there was no mention of ruminant farm animals warming the world with methane at the early conferences .This myth was brought to the Kyoto conference and embodied in the Kyoto treaty .The politicians lapped this up without any proof the same as they were fed the climate change scam .The green activists were pushing this because they dont like livestock farming and believe that the world can feed it self on vegetables . Farmed livestock eat vegetation and during digestion they belch up methane .Methane lasts in the atmosphere for 8 to 10 years and breaks down to CO2 and H2o ,. And guess what — that is exactly what grass and crops need to grow well and the cycle repeats with no additional CO2 or methane than before so where is the problem . The atmosphere .contains about 1.7 parts per million of methane and if you do the maths a constant number of cattle and sheep or equivalents can never increase the percentage of methane in the atmosphere .That is entirely different than the burning of coal oil and natural gas that has been extracted from the earth although there is little proof that higher CO2 will have a noticeable effect on the temperature of the planet.
I still can’t believe anyone would use a phrase like “climate denial”. To be a warmist do you have to be dyslexic? Or is this a commentary on our present educational system?