By Dr. Tim Ball,
Most of the world still believes that humans are causing climate change. The belief persists, despite the evidence of deliberately corrupted science exposed in leaked emails, and consistently failed forecasts. It persists without any empirical evidence. Unnecessary policies and massively expensive policies evolved from the deception of certainty. Carbon taxes and alternative energies that are unable to replace fossil fuels without some massive breakthrough in energy storage capacity continue to drain budgets and divert from solving real problems. The momentum behind this deception is amazing and at present unstoppable. It is driven by a certainty that is supported by concocted evidence from the pre-programmed, pre-determined outcome, computer models. There is no empirical evidence, so how and why does the belief continue? How did the idea gain and maintain this force? I believe, there is one person to blame because he set the tone and created the mantra that facts don’t matter; he made it necessary to maintain the illusion of AGW at all cost. It was so effective that even to ask questions is to put you in a category of societal repulsion. You become one of those “deniers.”
I was very annoyed when I saw the eulogy to Stephen Schneider in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It reads in part;
The Synthesis Report of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is dedicated to the memory of Stephen H. Schneider, one of the foremost climate scientists of our time.
Steve Schneider, born in New York, trained as a plasma physicist, embraced scholarship in the field of climate science almost 40 years ago and continued his relentless efforts creating new knowledge in the field and informing policymakers and the public at large on the growing problem of climate change and solutions for dealing with it. At all times Steve Schneider remained intrepid and forthright in expressing his views. His convictions were driven by the strength of his outstanding scientific expertise… His association with the IPCC began with the First Assessment Report which was published in 1990, and which played a major role in the scientific foundation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. His life and accomplishments have inspired and motivated members of the Core Writing Team of this Report.
The last sentence tells the story but only if you know the complete involvement of Schneider in the greatest deception in history.
The dilemma for all these early advocates of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was that if they knew climatology, they knew that the work of the IPCC was corrupted science. If they didn’t speak out, they were complicit in the deception. If they didn’t know, and a remarkable number didn’t, then they are incompetent. Often, some only became aware of the deceptive science because of an untoward circumstance, such as associating with a known skeptic.
Schneider knew because he published a book about global cooling in 1976 titled, “The Genesis Strategy” when cooling was the consensus. He wrote,
“There is little food stored to cushion the shock of the kinds of weather problems that so suddenly and unexpectedly damaged crops in 1972, 1974 and 1975, and there is growing evidence that such damaging weather may occur more frequently in the next decade than in the last one. The most imminent and far reaching [danger] is the possibility of a food‐climate crisis that would burden the well to do countries with unprecedented hikes in food prices, but could mean famine and political instability for many parts of the nonindustrialized (sic) world.”
The author of the NYT article summarizes that Schneider was
“…reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”
I was part of the climate community at the time but knew from the historical records and understanding of underlying mechanisms that this was just another climate cycle. Too many people exploited the pattern of the moment driven by funding, career enhancement or political persuasion. None of them looked at the science or worse and they only picked the science that appeared to confirm their situation. They jumped on what I call the trend wagon and argued it would continue forever. It was wrong, cynical, exploitive and had nothing to do with the amoral and apolitical positions and work that are essential to science.
Stephen Schneider set the tone for what followed. His mendacious, manipulative philosophy entered the public arena with his 1989 interview in Discover magazine, part of which said,
On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but& which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
Sorry Stephen there is no decision between effectiveness and honesty. The fact he could even suggest that there was underscores and exposes the corrupt thinking that created and drove the massive deception. The problem is that people like Schneider are evil geniuses. It one thing to have such ideas, it is another to implement them. It parallels Maurice Strong’s implementation of the idea of “getting rid of the industrialized nations.”
In 1996 Schneider co-chaired a conference that put his idea of being effective without being honest into operation. It was a non-IPCC conference but included all the key players involved in the IPCC corruption ,and the CRU leaked emails. In fact, the conference titled was a manifesto on how to proceed, how to end-run science and the truth in every way. The conference titled “Characterizing and Communicating Scientific Uncertainty.” I urge you to read and weep but learn what Schneider did. Here is the opening paragraph.
Uncertainty, or more generally, debate about the level of certainty required to reach a “firm” conclusion, is a perennial issue in science. The difficulties of explaining uncertainty become increasingly salient as society seeks policy prescriptions to deal with global environmental change. How can science be most useful to society when evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, the subjective judgments of experts about the likelihood of outcomes vary, and policymakers seek guidance and justification for courses of action that could cause significant societal changes? How can scientists improve their characterization of uncertainties so that areas of slight disagreement do not become equated with purely speculative concerns, and how can individual subjective judgments be aggregated into group positions? And then, how can policymakers and the public come to understand this input and apply it in deciding upon appropriate actions? In short, how can the scientific content of public policy debates be fairly and openly assessed?
All the names are here, Santer, Schlesinger, Tol, Karl, MacCracken, and Trenberth with his first probability table (Figure1). It is an attempt to confuse by pretending to clarify.
Figure 1
The inclusion of Schneider’s eulogy and the sentiment it expresses about his influence on them and the entire IPCC process is absolute proof of my thesis. He more than any other person created and drove the biggest deception in history; intellectualized most perversely the concept of uncertainty into certainty and provided the method for converting inadequate and incorrect evidence into a form powerful enough to be the basis of world-changing philosophy and policy.
Forest for the trees. It’s the Sun, people. From spaceweather.com today:
SOLAR CYCLE UPDATE: An international panel of researchers led by NASA and NOAA has released a new prediction for the solar cycle. According to their analysis, the current solar minimum is going to deepen, potentially reaching a century-class low in the next year or so. This will be followed by a new Solar Max in the years 2023-2026.
There is a persuasive measured relationship of the solar cycle
and the stratosphere.
There is no persuasive measured relationship of the solar cycle
and the troposphere, and certainly not with
Earth’s global average surface temperature.
There is no 11-year temperature cycle,
except in overactive imaginations !
There were Central England cold periods during
minimums, and between minimums, during
the Little Ice Age.
None of the four solar minimums had the expected
temperature pattern, of generally cool weather,
getting COLDER until the minimum ended —
in reality, the actual temperature started rising BEFORE
each minimum ended, which makes no sense.
( I’m assuming Central England temperatures
were accurate enough for any conclusion ).
There is a persuasive measured relationship of the solar cycle
and the stratosphere.
There is no persuasive measured relationship of the solar cycle
and the troposphere, and certainly not with
Earth’s global average surface temperature.
Agree. Hopping on the solar-cycle climate bandwagon is no different IMO than the CO2 bandwagon. The causes of the major climate changes (glacial/interglacial) of the recent past are reasonably well-known now (w/a few caveats), and they have nothing to do w/magnetic solar cycles.
Exactly one year ago today:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/11/solar-activity-crashes-the-sun-looks-like-a-cueball/
There’s a little dark spot
on the Sun Today…
It’s not very big,
but it’s more than a phage…
It’s actually surprisingly large. It also clearly belongs to the sc24 butterfly.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/img3.htm
It’s the same old thing as yesterday.
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
― W.C. Fields
Who knew that W.C. Fields was providing the blueprint for modern day ‘climate scientists’?
It is BS, Mr. Homer.
I have a BS degree,
so I am an expert
in BS detection !
But it’s “brilliant” BS,
in my opinion, because
so many people believe it.
Consider the use of scientists as props:
— scientists with advanced degrees,
playing computer games (complex
computer models making wrong predictions),
annual wrong scary climate forecasts,
that continue year after year,
in spite of the fact that
the actual climate has been improving
for over 300 years, since the coldest decade
of the Little Ice Age / Maunder Minimum.
When the average temperature fails to rise,
the “gang” just makes another
historical temperature “adjustment”.
There a lot of money being made from
climate change scaremongering,
through government grants, loans and
subsidies.
There’s a lot of political power to be gained
“trying to save the planet for the children”.
Yes, it’s all BS, with very little real science,
and the global warming so far has been
beneficial — “harmless”, if you want to be
a pessimist — but it works on many people.
The best BS Republicans ever did was
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In a few years people realized that was BS.
The coming global warming disaster
I trace back to Roger Revelle in 1958.
I know the BS didn’t get rolling very fast
until 1988 — but that was over 30 years ago !
A 30+ year science fraud is amazing.
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
In 2006, the Iraqi Military explained how the weapons were removed from the country. READ the SUN article.
I do not believe most of the world believes in humans causing climate change. However, I do believe that the media and politicians are continuing to inundate people with propaganda to elicit support for their ascension to power and pillaging for money.
I’d argue that the late Dr Schneider had a hand in that sort of thing, too. Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post about his early role in the notion that skeptic climate scientists should not be given equal time by reporters:
“‘Skeptic Climate Scientists Do Not Deserve Fair Media Balance.’ Spread This Line Widely; NEVER Check its Veracity and Don’t Examine its History.”
http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=1886
Very good Dr. Ball.
For most lay people who somewhat understand the Scientific Method and how it may influence social behavior, it is clearly known that arguments with an opposing viewpoint should be heard. This is where the “science” of Anthropomorphic Global Warming has miserably failed. Even your one voice should be sufficient to bring great cause for doubt for the subsequent “climate alarm-ism”. But no, your voice, along with thousands of other like-minded people are amazingly ignored. AGW (CAGW) is not science, it is politics – lying, fetid politics, and an attempt to subvert freedom, especially in the good old USA.
Well said that man
Succeeded, not failed. When subjected to critical scrutiny, demands for validated theory it must immediately collapse. The fact it’s been going for 31 years is a sign that refusing to debate, appeal to authority, and disparaging critics with slander is the only way to keep it going. But, … sc25, 26, and 27 are coming soon. The next 33 years are likely to be interesting climate times.
Here is some interesting read
1989 Nov 8
Margaret Thatcher
Speech to United Nations General Assembly (Global Environment) rem:(and global warming)
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817
Thanks!
What a whole pile of conjecture!
The Ozone hole is also controlled by the Sun, not by Humans….
http://www.breadandbutterscience.com/OzoneHole.pdf
Movement of the Earth’s magnetic poles…
https://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/historical_declination/
I have pointed out many times, and often as a comment to Ball’s articles, that it was Margaret Thatcher who pushed the idea into international politics.
https://john-daly.com/history.htm
Thatcher jumped too quickly on the climate issue for short-run gain. Then she quickly and completely corrected herself. She got “mugged by reality,” as they say. She saw in the climate movement an “ugly … anti-growth, anti-capitalistic, anti-American” political agenda had emerged.
Thatcher is a disappointment to red-green environmentalists, who preferred socialism to her privatizations. Her enthusiasm for green issues soon evaporated. In retirement she had nothing more to say about the environment until her 2002 memoirs, when she rejected Al Gore and what she called “his ‘doomist’ predictions.”*
“The doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism … the lack of any sense of proportion is what characterizes many pronouncements on the matter by otherwise sensible people. The fact that seasoned politicians can say such ridiculous things – and get away with it – illustrates the degree to which the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes…”
In her notes, Thatcher expressed gratitude for the fact that “the issues have been clearly analysed and debated by scholars in the United States.”
—
*14 Jul. 2018: James Hansen Finally Admits Theory Is Wrong
The scientist widely known as the “Father of Global Warming” has admitted for the first time that data used to promote his climate change theory was false and fraudulently manipulated by Al Gore to suit an agenda …. According to Hansen, Al Gore took the data provided in a “worst-case scenario” and intentionally twisted it, rebranding it as “Global Warming,” making tens of millions of dollars in the process. Hansen admits he is “devastated” by the way his data has been used by climate alarmists.
https://newspunch.com/global-warming-scientist-theory/
“According to Hansen, Al Gore took the data provided in a “worst-case scenario” and intentionally twisted it, rebranding it as “Global Warming,” making tens of millions of dollars in the process.
Did Hanson actually say that? Can anyone quote his exact words?
Thatcher made the speech at behest of CAGW Godfather Crispin Tickell
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/11/was-climate-change-alarmism-always-about-fears-of-overpopulation/#comment-2623744
James Hansen’s speech to Congress in 1988 and Thatcher’s speech to UN marked the Public Launch of the CAGW Hoax, although the agenda had long been in planning out of the public eye.
Environmentalism is just a new form of Leftism, invented and fostered by East German Stasis who supported and funded their moles in West Germany, Petra Kelly and her husband Gert Bastian, the leaders of the West-German Greens. All else, including Schneider, IPCC, AOC, Kerry, EU energy politics, &c., grows from that poisoned root.
Having realized they could not match capitalist growth, prosperity, and freedoms with their defective economic and political system, the Greens inverted the whole value pyramid: for them now growth, prosperity, and freedom are all bad, no longer something promised, something to strive for. The goal is a retarded totalitarian society that has destroyed its own infrastructure and sources of wealth, and descended into pre-industrial poverty and disease. Think Khmer Rouge, but on a much grander scale.
It’s like anything that might once have been worthwhile or simply popular – it’s co-opted and prostituted for just the agenda you described.
OMG! First time I’ve seen the range for the term “Extremely Confident”. Reminds me of binomial calculators. A cumulative probability refers to the probability that the value of a random variable falls within a specified range. And because of that definition, you can be extremely confident that no matter what the outcome, you predicted it within your specified range. That range could be cold to hot. Okee dokee! You are extremely confident it will be cold or hot or anywhere in-between.
I am gob-smacked!
Pretty sure it means the two extremes are extremely confident, as in 99% is extremely sure it’s right and 1% is extremely sure it’s wrong. However, the word confident seems to take in a lot of ground.
I like people who make intelligent comments
and also throw in a funny word or two, like “gob-smacked”,
which I had to look up because no one I know in the US
ever said that.
We used to say: “flabbergasted” here,
which is a pretty funny word too.
When I mention some real climate
science to a Democrat / socialist,
and suddenly they get that
“deer-in-the-headlights” look,
I describe them as “dumbstruck”,
or just “dumb”.
Having brain damage from West Nile, I am extremely happy that I said something someone else says is intelligent. Especially this week. On Tuesday I thought it was Monday and today I thought it was Wednesday. Which means that Tuesday I forgot what I did Monday, and Thursday I forgot what I did Wednesday. Short term memory loss sucks ass!
I was right! In the link provided in the post, it says this:
“13 A cumulative probability is the sum (or integral) of the probabilities (or densities) less than or equal to some value. For example, one might compute the probability that the temperature increase due to global warming is less than or equal to 3°C.”
They mark that with the term “Extremely Confident”. Slight. Of. Hand! So it could be from nada all the way to OMG!
Gob-smacked again!
The confidence levels “high (75%), very high(95%), and Extremely high(99%)” are statistical nonsense.
Say for example, you were to board an airplane and there was a 75% chance the plane would not crash. Would you have high confidence and board the plane, knowing there is a 25% chance of a crash?
75% means that 1/4 of the time your conclusions are wrong. Would any reasonable person have high confidence in this result? If so, contact Boeing.
Even the 99% (Extremely High) confidence level is no reason to be confident. Your airplane is still going to crash 1 in 100 times. Yet climate sciences operates at 95% confidence. 5 times out of 100 the plane will crash; or your tax money will have been wasted.
Statistically, 99.7% is 3 standard deviations. Anything between 0.3% and 99.7% is considered “likely” for randomly selected data. So, if you go looking for evidence of something, there is a very good chance you will find it, even if the evidence is a false positive.
It is only when you look at the very, very small range, when the data is outside of 0.3% and 99.7%, that you find the unexpected. And when you find the unexpected that allows you to have some confidence in the result.
The crisis in “false positives”, the inability to replicate 50% of all peer reviewed papers, is a direct result of the mis-application of statistics. The false confidence that results from misapplication of confidence intervals. The mistaken belief that observation of expected and likely results in some fashion is strong proof.
When you observe something that is expected and likely, what does this prove? Only in the weakest sense that something might be true. It is when we observe the very unlikely, the very unexpected that we have the basis for a strong evidence something might be true.
Ferd:
“The confidence levels “high (75%), very high(95%),
and Extremely high(99%)” are statistical nonsense”.
What statistics?
What math?
What science?
They just took a vote — a show of hands,
to decide how close to 100% they should
claim.
I happen have inside information
that the last IPCC vote was for 102% confidence,
so that even if a few scientists changed their minds,
the number would still be 100%, or close.
However, after a thorough investigation, it was determined
that 102% confidence was impossible, and must have
been caused by several scientists raising BOTH hands
during the “show of hands confidence vote”, so they
arbitrarily decided to use 95%, rather than 102%.
The IPCC has never seen a number they did not
want to “adjust”.
The last IPCC report used 95%. The next one should be priceless, maybe 102%.
You’re confusing statistical confidence with risk vs consequence.
In fact, your airplane analogy works in favor of climate alarmists. I mean even if you’re 95% sure that there’s no catastrophic global warming, there’s a 5% chance there is…so how “confident” are you that we should be emitting greenhouse gases?
100%.
+10
=110%!
A one in twenty chance of civilisation collapse? Is that all it is. Come in spinner.
The Israel’s spacecraft crashed on the moon surface.
this proves that man didn’t go to the moon 50 yrs ago \sarc
So it landed on the moon?
Consider for a moment, Galileo dropping two different objects of different weights. The result was very unexpected, as the classical notion for nearly 2000 years was that the heavier object would fall faster. It was this very unexpected result that gave rise to a rewriting of science.
What if however Galileo had compared the objects statistically? Say he took objects made of wood, iron, lead. He could easily have found that probably 95% of the time that the heavier objects fall faster than the lighter objects.
Using the exact same methodology as climate science, Galileo could have set science back another 2000 years. The earth would still be the center of the universe. Newton would never have happened. Einstein would have been burned at the stake for heresy.
There is much in this article that I could argue about, but none of it is important. The climate crisis myth was certainly created, and spread like wildfire. What is important is figuring out what to do about it now.
How do we reverse the effects of the crimes of Schneider and his many accomplices?
That is the only thing that sane people (a.k.a. the not crazy people) should be working toward. I’m afraid we are very close to the edge and will not ever be able to stop the nonsense. Since the “global cooling” crap argument fell apart years ago, and the “global warming” crap argument failed, we now have “climate change”, whatever that means. This fear has been taught to our children for at least 25 years now and we see the results everywhere. E.g., Alexandria O-Cortez and her babbling nonsense. Unfortunately when the dinosaurs like Pelosi, Shumer, and their gang, all die off we will be left with these twits who will spend, regulate, and control our lives until everyone dies. Or more likely, when they’ve weakened us enough, the Chinese will simple take over the world financially and crush us. Essentially we will become nothing more than another Mexico. I hope I’m long gone before it happens.
You can’t discount the role Hansen has played and at the very least, they were co-conspirators among many. Hansen’s malfeasance is legendary, from disabling the AC on a hot day when he was giving a presentation on climate change to his role in misapplying Bode’s feedback analysis to the climate. It seems like he would do anything to redeem himself of the ridicule he received from the Reagan and first Bush administrations for his climate alarmism, which at the time hadn’t even been supported by misinterpreting the Vostok ice core data.
While Schneider played a significant role, it’s hard to point to one individual as the driving force behind climate alarmism when it seems to have been a collusion of interests with a variety of motivations which contributes to why the supporting ‘science’ has remained so broken for so long.
Agree. Hansen was more useful to them too. Especially his (1) pro-nuclear advocacy. This brought over a load of pro-nukes to the climate scam side. Because Hansen is not so obviously eco-nutty, his “science” gets a free pass from criticism. (2) His greenhouse gas model is the “consensus model” and is 100% wrong. Too many people are conned into thinking the ‘greenhouse gas effect’ is in the same ballpark as alarmist projections imagine. We hear: ECS is not 3; it’s 1 or just above. Wrong. There’s no evidence that ECS is even a thing; let alone that more CO2 has any warming influence worth measuring.
In UK, I blame establishment & media physicists most: Rees, Hawking, Jim Al-Khalili, Brian Cox for promoting this post-normal climate science.
Mark P,
The evidence that the ECS is not zero is the fact that 240 W/m^2 of forcing from the Sun results in an average of about 390 W/m^2 emitted by the surface. Since the climate system can not tell one Joule of forcing from any other, all Joules have the same effect, including the next one. Each W/m^2 of forcing then contributes towards an average of a little more than 600 mw of excess surface emissions beyond the 1 W/m^2 of emissions per W/m^2 of forcing characteristic of an ideal black body.
The ECS of an ideal black body is given exactly by 1/(4oT^3), where o is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. The ECS of a non ideal black body representative of the Earth is a gray body with an emissivity of about e = (255/288)^4 = 240/390 = 0.62 whose exact quantification for the sensitivity to incremental solar input (what the IPCC calls forcing) is 1(4oeT^4). Plug in 288K as the average T and e=240/390, the sensitivity becomes about 0.3C per W/m^2. The IPCC claims doubling CO2 is equivalent to 3.7 W/m^2 of forcing, thus 3.7*.3 = 1.1C, although I have reason to believe that the 3.7 W/m^2 is over-estimated by as much as a factor of 2. The approximate 1C effect is not arbitrary, but has a relatively solid foundation in the laws of physics. Interestingly enough, the ECS of an ideal BB at the 255K emission temperature of the planet is also about 0.3C.
The IPCC idea of forcing via IR is in conflict with the specific heat of CO2. The specific heat tables for air and CO2 do not have a caveat saying the specific heat equation needs to be augmented if IR is involved.
Anthony’s CO2 jar experiment demonstrated that increasing CO2 does not cause an increase in temperature.
If climate science is correct there must be a change in the specific heat of air now that we are at 400 ppm, but that still leaves CO2.
Internal energy is a function of temperature. Cv dT = du
mkelly,
“The IPCC idea of forcing via IR is in conflict with the specific heat of CO2. ”
The specific heat of CO2 and that of the rest of the matter being heated by the Sun is independent of the definition of forcing or the sensitivity. The specific heat affects the rate that equilibrium is achieved, but not what that equilibrium must be. The specific heat affects the Joules required for a specific temperature change, while W/m^2 are the rate at which Joules are delivered and emitted and which are balanced in the steady state.
That being said, there is an ambiguity in the IPCC’s definition of forcing, but this has to do with claiming that an instantaneous increase in solar energy as equivalent to an instantaneous increase in atmospheric absorption on a Watt by Watt basis. Both instantaneous effects are consistent with the IPCC definition of forcing.
The issue is that all of the incremental solar input affects the surface temperature while only about half of what the atmosphere absorbs has an effect, the remaining half being emitted into space contributing to the radiant balance at TOA and not the radiant balance at the surface.
BTW, the internal heat of the atmosphere is a consequence of the surface temperature and not its cause.
co2: When your mind is grappling with theory and empirical data that do not give any confidence that you are on the right track, if a revered, longtime expert in the field comes along and tells you how to make it okay to be grossly uncertain and gives you “confidence” in the collective subjective “knowledge” of experienced practitioners that should be “legitimized” as data in the “confident range, it relaxes the demands of critical thinking and integrity.
Such a loosening of the bonds of self discipline, in turn, leads to even sloppier research work and more outrageous claims than Schneider probably initially thought about. This eventually opens doors to manipulating and tailoring observational data, to fit the theory, removing all constraints and uncertainties. Hey cooking results has given these climate artisans 6 sigma certainty that we have put the planet and all its inhabitants in grave peril within 12 years.
Yeah, make no mistake. Schneider threw science under the bus. The kicker was that it was all for a good cause, the stuff of heroes. That most of the practitioners in Climate Science appear to be lesser minds than Schneider, was probably understood by him, too.
I believe it was then Senator Tim Worth who opened the windows the night before and had the AC settings adjusted.
Tim Wirth, who was an avowed climate alarmist (a Democrat), was the organizer of the testimony where Hansen was the primary witness. If it was Wirth who used his access to open the windows and adjust the AC, it’s certain that Hansen and likely Gore were both in on the scam, especially given how much coaching occurs between Congressmen and the witnesses they choose to promote their agenda. Wirth admitted that it was all stagecraft, but it doesn’t seem that he ever claimed that it was his idea.
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases-all?ID=b6a8baa3-802a-23ad-4650-cb6a01303a65
You’re dealing with Gaia worshippers, “concerned” scientists lining their pockets with government funding, and die-hard haters of capitalism (about half the human race). And all the major media have bought in hook, line, and sinker. How much impact will facts have in this situation? NONE.
Not only is the Earths temperature determined by the Sun’s Activity (Indirectly), but it turns out, the Ozone Hole is also determined by the Suns Activity in a similar way. See Paullitely.com for the details.
I have always had problems with the confidence, probability, possibility etc. and other wezel words given for the basis for prognosticated climate change. They just did not seem to fit with what I was taught in Applied Statistics. However as I took that course over 50 years ago I thought things had changed. They always seemed to imply a “95% probability with a 95% confidence level to all predictions. When you consider that a “loose” slot machine pays out 95% of the time and will empty your bank in one evening. Giving all of that 5% profit to the casino.
Whatever happened to the idea that if observations or careful experiment do not support your theory then your theory is wrong. If it has no predictive skills it is wrong. Subjectivity caries zero weight in the argument (even “collective” subjectivity or consensus doesnt carry any weight).
I wonder what would happen if a million dollar award was available for a description of the theory, the evidence for its robustness and half a dozen predictions in effects and time from it.
My 1st thought: What a great idea to have a $1m award for “proving” the AGW theory.
My 2nd thought: No, the reward would just be automatically given to some AGW believer.
My 3rd thought: Well, not if the judges were mostly skeptics.
My 4th thought: But then no AGW believer would submit his theory.
My 5th thought: Go ahead and seek funding for such a prize, but instead of restricting it to just AGW “science,” open it up to a skeptic’s theory and climate predictions over, say, the next 30 years; with the money going to his heirs if he’s not around to collect the prize money.
Perhaps I’m missing something but it seems to me that if the hypothesis of AGW is correct, we should see a pattern in the long term climate record with CO2 increasing or decreasing, and then temperature increasing or decreasing on a time scale of years or decades. The Vostok ice core is said to give us proxy data for temperature and CO2 going back 420,000 years, and there are large changes in both temperature and CO2 levels recorded in the ice. But as I understand it, the Vostok proxies show temperature first increasing or decreasing, followed many hundreds of years later by CO2 increasing or decreasing. So if there is a cause & effect relationship between CO2 and temperature, is it not true that it can only be temperature as cause, and CO2 as effect, not the other way around?
Doesn’t the ice core data definitively disconfirm the hypothesis that human activity, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, causes increasing temperatures in the atmosphere within a few decades? Or is there some factor I’m missing?
I have to agree with you. Further, if CO2 is the ‘driver’ of change, why do we get colder when CO2 is at its highest levels?
You do realize the antarctic ice is no older than 6000 years, the ancient chinese on their voyages around the world mapped the arctic and antarctic ice free.
brian, you forgot your /sarc tag.
This should help your understanding.
chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/http://static.berkeleyearth.org/pdf/annual-with-forcing.pdf
“Doesn’t the ice core data definitively disconfirm the hypothesis that human activity, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, causes increasing temperatures in the atmosphere within a few decades? Or is there some factor I’m missing?”
Yes, there is something you’re missing: they effect each other.
How does the ice core data support the claim that CO2 drives temperature?
There is some factor you are missing.
Any idea what that factor might be?
The driving force behind Climate Change and Global Warming is funding and un-natural selection.
Academics are like buddhist priests. They walk around in distinctive robes with their hands out, professing wisdom and piety. Unless someone feeds them, they must return to life with the rest of us or perish.
Thus, the science is driven by those that control the funding, which ultimately is politics.
Excellent Fred. As long as the predictions pan out, more power for the priests. During the Medieval Warm Period, Cambodia (the Khmer empire) thrived, creating enough spare people power to build Angkor Wat and thousands of wannabes. The Buddhist church owned 80% of the real estate.
The same thing happened to the Incas, when the Urubamba valley suddenly got warmer and wetter with the Medieval Warm Period. The priests whose predictions panned out became the wealthiest class as the empire flourished. It all came crashing down with the arrival of the Spaniards just as the weather was turning colder. They in turn built their capital for the Americas in Cusco, a garden paradise, just in time for the Maunder Minimum, during which they retreated to Lima on the coast.
So, any priesthood who can predict the future by virtue of their special relationship with the gods will be rewarded as long as their string lasts. When the tide turns, they are he first to go.
This proves that man didn’t go to the moon 50 yrs ago \sarc
It is highly probable that the summaries for policy makers of the latest IPCC reports are driven more by conviction than by research with a higher input from copy writers than from scientists and that is worrying. They are written to convince not to assess.
It is all one gigantic confidence game. “You can trust us – we’re scientists!”
There is excellent evidence that most published research findings, in all of science, are wrong.
There is one field where the replication of published findings is routine. That is drug research. Drug companies scan the literature looking for any new science that can be turned into a saleable product. The first thing they do when they find something promising, is to try to reproduce the experiment.
Bayer and Amgen found that they could not reproduce the vast majority of published research findings. link
Science is in bad shape for a variety of reasons. The take away is that we should be very selective about when to trust scientists. They’re actually a pretty craven and corrupt bunch.
What is unfathomable is that the IPCC’s confidence in the hypothesis of human-caused CO2 driven warming has increased from confident to very confident to extremely confident even though their CO2 driven temperature predication models have been shown to diverge further and further from actual temperatures over time. They’ve got it completely bas-ackwards.
“What is unfathomable is that the IPCC’s confidence in the hypothesis of human-caused CO2 driven warming has increased from confident to very confident to extremely confident even though their CO2 driven temperature predication models have been shown to diverge further and further from actual temperatures over time. ”
The UN is very confident that there is a LOT of money to be made and power to be gained by continuing with the AGW/ACC hoax. They could not care less about real science.
“It is an attempt to confuse by pretending to clarify.”
I might say:
“It was an attempt to obscure by pretending that their over-simplification was accurate.”
Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
Sorry Stephen there is no decision between effectiveness and honesty.
They jumped on what I call the trend wagon and argued it would continue forever.
Two excellent points
As I understand it there is no null hypothesis for 1) the hypothesis – “global warming exists” and climate models predict that “the earth will warm in the future… due to manmade global warming.” For proponents, it is … end of story. Statistics are measures of reliability and yet the statistics are not based on accuracy of fit to actual data, most often it is the statistical spread among groups of model projections of modeled future temperature trajectories. Not meaningful for testing of validity or reliability of models.
“Most of the world still believes t
hat humans are causing climate change.”
The reason for that is humans
ARE causing some amount
of climate change !
How much, no one knows
— the climate change in the past
80 years could have 100% natural causes,
100% man made, or some combination
of the two.
Some combination of the two
seems like a logical conclusion.
Start with the obvious man made warming:
The Urban Heat Island Effect.
Then move on to haphazard temperature measurements
that are frequently “adjusted” to show more warming
— the adjustments are considered global warming
whether they were justified or not !
Examples:
The really hot “Dust Bowl” 1930’s (in the US)
are now claimed to be cooler than 1998 !
In a few decades I expect the 1930’s
will be described as the “Snow Bowl” !
In 2015 the “pause” was magically “adjusted”
away, with a warmer oceans “adjustment”,
in one day !
.
.
I will also argue that Roger Revelle launched
the coming global warming fraud in 1958.
It didn’t catch on with many people then, but
he created the scenario where scientists made
scary predictions, stated with great confidence,
to get government grants, to study what was
predicted — that strategy sure caught on !
If you think about it, the coming global warming
catastrophe is just continuous predictions of
bad news that never arrives, with no recognition
that the predictions have been wrong for over 60 years
— over 30 years if you want to focus only on
wrong predictions from the climate models.
The wrong forecasts are never explained.
They are just repeated year after year.
If the measured warming slows down,
as it has after 2003, the climate scaremongers
become even more hysterical than they used
to be — and they’ve always been pretty hysterical,
( Life as we know it will end in 12 years ! )
to distract everyone from actual temperature data.
RG
The concern is not about temperature, but about the supposed effects of a temperature increase. One way to look at the problem is to look at the effects that are presumed to be the result of increasing temperatures. For example, the best available reconstructions of sea level suggest an essentially linear increase for about the last 7,000 years. If man is influencing it, then one would expect to see a change in slope of the trend beginning at the start of the industrial revolution, giving rise to a concave-upwards curve; actually, it appears to be slightly concave-downwards! Further, the change in slope should correlate strongly with anthropogenic CO2 emissions. So, I’m proposing that the linear trend for the period of 7,000 BP to about 1700 AD be compared to the linear trend since 1700. Any difference MAY be a human contribution, but establishes an upper bound on the anthropogenic influence. No difference would suggest no anthropogenic influence. Additionally, one might want to de-trend the SL rise and compare the trend (if any) of the residuals. Also, the standard deviation of the residuals for pre- and post-industrial revolution should be compared. I would expect that the results might show a trend for recent tide gauge changes.
RG and others,
I forgot to add the link to SL rise I was using for reference:
Dear Dr Ball
I cannot thank you enough for this post. It provides evidence disputing several arguments I encounter when attempting to discuss global warming or climate change. I have learned to come to this site whenever I need to further my understanding of the entire area of climate and you have proven once again that my decision to utilize this site was spot on.
Next Thursday, 18th April at 9:00 pm BBC1 are showing a program, “Climate Change: The Facts”. I am already drafting an email of complaint because I am pretty sure of the “facts” they are going to present. It will go unacknowledged as usual (I have emailed them a few times about their coverage of the subject) but I’ll send it anyway. Then it’s over to BBC4 at 10:00 pm for another televisual delight, “The Age of Stupid” which apparently is a docu-drama about a man in 2055 viewing archive footage from 2008 and asking “why wasn’t climate change stopped?” Should be good for haha’s.
Dr. Tim Ball,
Thank you for posting this. If this was a topic other topic than climate change, the media would be exposing S. Schneider and his cohorts for who they truly are. Unfortunately , I agree with your statement that, “The momentum behind this deception is amazing and at present unstoppable.” Very sad indeed!
The doom by climate is one of the oldest scams of humanity.
CAGW/CC is The Emperors New Clothes written anew.
The “science” the IPCCs “evidence” are as real as the “fabulous fabric”.
And the come back on every person who asks for more evidence is slander and insult.
Now I was given to understand Hans Christian Anderson was writing a cautionary tale..not an instruction manual for bureaucratic theft.
It is amazing how the warmistas spin Schneider’s comments in order to defend one of their own rather than shame him for what he said.
Great job, Tim, and good that Anthony lets you throughh. He bloccks ne at evey turn. Arno Arrak
Arno,
I see that you have once again been blocked! /sarc
Also how he went around his own 1971 paper on aerosols.
See paragraphs #10-14 here …
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/03/hidden-hand/
Thanks for the links Chaamjamal.
Scheinder : “We need to get some broad based support to capture the public’s imagination. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubt. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest”
From a plasma physicist, hence a trained scientist … isn’t that a clear incentive to commit scientific fraud ?
Seems nobody care in the politician and judicial sphere … and it’s even worse than that :
– there are a bunch of other pseudo-scientists like Schneider involved in this fraud who are actual authors of “scientif reference books”. Just look at some recent introductions or back covers in such fields as Radiative transfer, Ocean chemistry, etc. pushing the CAGW hype.
The climate fraud has corrupted not only the “climate science”, but sciences as a whole.
The confidence bands are in absolute error.Classifying “extremely confident” as being anywhere in the 1-99% band is the exact opposite of what it should be. Having mere “confident” in the middle range – a narrower band than “extremely confident” is totally incorrect.
We should be getting suspicious about how such a fundamental error that goes to the very core of reporting confidence levels (since the vast majority are incapable or too lazy to check the data) which leads to deceptive reporting slipped through. Just how could such a fundamental error pass muster???
I also note the reference to the core writing team. These are the people that come out with the summaries for policymakers that are the only ones anyone ever bothers to read. They have been influenced by someone who has made a fundamental error that is at the core of the entire narrative-the notion that the model predictions can be at the very edge of plausibility and be regarded as ever more confident. He has influenced reports that are the exact opposite of normality.
The clincher should be that the IPCC so highly reveres someone that would openly entertain the notion that being dishonest can be justified if it makes the message more effective. Hello, honesty in science is absolutely essential, otherwise the “science” is mere pseudoscience. A deliberate lie anywhere in the narrative makes the entire scenario invalid.
Schneider seemed much wiser in his younger days when he warned that the cure could be worse than the disease. Inhaling too much grant money seemed to diminished his reasoning capacity.
The History Channel Coming Ice Age video is here. https://youtu.be/1b2_g4ww6es Schneider appears 20 min in.
“and how can individual subjective judgments be aggregated into group positions? ”
Someone has built the system behind the IPCC. I always wondered who was the genius. This post gives a good indication for at least one of the persons that have been closely involved.
Very interesting information.
There is so much of “common sense” about the Earth’s Climate that is ignored, and Schneider was on the Cooling bandwagon before getting on the Warming bandwagon. We were all taught early about the Water Cycle that makes clouds, rain and snow, and how the Sun’s heat drives it. Water can change phases, absorbing and releasing vast amounts of heat. CO2 cannot change phase at Earthly temperatures and pressures. That is all we need to know unless we want to be in politics. See Paullitely.com.
Tim
You write good essays.
I’ll add that “Climate Change ” id caused by grant money.
On PBS tonight in Michigan is a show about CFCs titled “How we saved the world…” that I think is being aired in order to boost belief in CC and how enviro activists already “saved the world” once and therefore we need to submit to the CC alarmism.
Schneider’s biggest negative contribution to science might be his central role in helping Al Gore (President Clinton’s “climate czar” for eight years) set up the current funding system where nobody who casts shade on the Gore/Schneider alarm about dangerous human caused global warming ever gets another penny (from the the over $150b spent so far).
It is an entire field of bought phony-consensus and nobody can change it because we no longer live in a republic, one pillar of which is the principle that the people choose who shall present them, or more colloquially: that they can always “throw the bums out.”
Thanks to our 130 yr old Civil Service laws Presidents can only throw the top couple of bums out in any bureaucratic department. No way can they ever wrest control of hiring and research granting away from a bureaucracy that was built from the ground up to serve one ideology. We have no capacity to throw these bums out.
So we’ll continue to have mass government funded “human caused” hysteria no matter how thoroughly the dangerous-human-caused-warming scare is falsified by natural events. The bums will just switch back to Schneider’s original dangerous-human-caused-global-COOLING scare, with the same resulting prescriptions: capitalism, fossil fuel burning, and economic progress all must be replaced by totalitarian socialism and a return to the primitive for all but the ruling class.
Dr. Ball,
I had the privilege of knowing Geoffrey Dobbs, scientist and philosopher. I would say he well understood the nature of the battle we are in – but long before some of us were born.
He wrote a book “On Planning the Earth” (commenced in 1944) and later a sequel. The following is taken from the sequel, “The Local World”. The full text is available here: https://alor.org/Library/Dobbs%20G%20-%20The%20Local%20World.html
The Local World – Part I & II by Geoffrey Dobbs
A Sequel to: On Planning the Earth
“… Forty years and more ago I wrote a series of essays under the title “On Planning the Earth” which appeared serially in a weekly paper, though they were not brought out as a book until 1951. At the time they constituted the sole published criticism of and opposition on fundamental grounds to the massively urged policy of large-scale, centralised land-planning, as represented particularly by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and propagandised by some 3500 hooks and pamphlets, of which the best-known was TVA-Democracy on the March, by David Lilienthal, the Chairman of the Authority – a Penguin Special with 208 pages of advocacy, 8 pages of photographs, for 9d (=3.75p).
I remember that this somewhat inverted assault upon a David turned-Goliath was greeted by the Daily Mail with an unexpected, if jeering headline. The book sold a few hundred copies which soon descended to a trickle and about half the edition was remaindered. Twenty-five years later when events had rubbed in its message with quite appalling force, it attracted the award of a Senior Visiting Scholarship at an Institute in Menlo Park, California, with residence on Stanford University campus, coinciding with the visit of Professor von Hayek and his School of ‘Austrian’ economists to the same institute; which is quite another story.
The first Part of “On Planning the Earth,” was written and published in 1944 and was concerned with defending the soil against wholesale interference by remote financial and political agencies.
“You cannot enforce good farming by laws, restrictions and penalties. Such an idea can arise only from a childish misconception of the complexity of the links between men, animals, plants, micro-organisms, and the soil.”
The Second Part was written after a delay of five years, during which the Tennessee Valley with its huge hydro-electric power had produced the first Atom Bomb, and its Chairman had become the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a key member of the committee which made the decision to produce the H-Bomb. So much, then, for all that splendid and heavily financed ecological ‘jargon’ about grass-roots democracy and conservation which was used to ‘sell’ the TVA in the 1930s and has now become so innocently fashionable among the ‘Greens.’
The book, as it stands, has a message for today in that it puts on contemporary record the origins of the major menace to our lives and our planet which now arouses such passionate protest. It puts the case for ‘smallness’ and the dangers of ‘ ‘bigness’ twenty years before E. F. Schumacher coined that luminous phrase Small is Beautiful. It puts forward an ecologist’s and soil microbiologist’s defence of the integrity of the soil more than a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shook the world and initiated the ‘Green’ movement. It is a voice crying in what was then a wilderness, which had something to say that was rejected then, and is now ever, more urgently needed if this now fashionable and growing movement is not to follow the path of all previous movements for human advancement which have grown too great and felt the temptations of power…”
I was in the audience at a World Bank conference in Washington, DC sometime either side of 1990 for one of Schneider’s love fests with a panel of his AGC friends, who as I recall –and I admit that my memory at this distance may be faulty– were in the process of bootstrapping themselves into the first IPCC, then an organization without a constituency other than their own clique. I was just an attendee with a professional environmental interest, but no money in the climate game, which was just getting under way. I asked an innocent question about water vapor and how that greenhouse gas was accounted for. Schneider more or less laughed up his sleeve, asked one of his comrades to do the same, who also doused me with some mumbo jumbo about how water vapor zeroes out in the equations, etc., and left me a bit chagrined. It was my first taste of the disparagement greeting every honest question about the sacred screeds ever since. He set the tone, alright.
Dr Tim Ball has written many well-researched articles on the people behind the AGW scam, and this is yet another key player. The list of those who have prayed on society’s fear of a human caused apocalypse is long and possibly goes something like this:
Malthus (1798): a scarcity of resource means that mankind will inevitably slide back to a life of mere subsistence.
Jevons (1865): predictions that coal would soon run out
Club of Rome (1960) Active right through the 1990’s
Paul Erlich (1968): forecast mass starvation in the 1970’s and 1980’s based upon computer modelling
Rachel Carson (1962): The Silent Spring led to the ultimate banning of DDT by the USA, despite numerous scientific studies showing that DDT was no more dangerous than many other common drugs (including caffeine!).
Barbra Ward (1965-6): picked up Stephenson’s analogy of “Spaceship Earth” promoting sustainable development and the need for a world government. Fossil fuels targeted.
Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP) conference (1970): claims that emissions from SST would damage the Ozone layer, based upon bogus chemistry experiments. Molina and Rowlands (1974) extended the idea to propose that CFCs would destroy the Ozone layer, based upon model predictions that had no agreement with observations. Ultimately led to Montreal Protocol banning CFCs.
Maurice Strong (1971): commissioned to write a report for the 1972 Stockholm conference “Only One Earth” that summarized findings of 152 leading “experts” from 58 countries. It included statements like: We see around us growing evidence of man-made harm in many regions of the earth: dangerous levels of pollution in water, air, earth and living beings; major and undesirable disturbances to the ecological balance of the biosphere; destruction and depletion of irreplaceable resources; and gross deficiencies, harmful to the physical, mental and social health of man, in the man-made environment, particularly in the living and working environment. He was a key player in the emergence of the IPCC.
Bert Bolin (1971): produced a report that kicked off the whole European acid rain scare. Politics clothed in “science”, it was debunked in the 1980’s by Krug and Rosenqvist. Bolin was also a key player in the emergence of the IPCC.
Then we get to the modern CO2 warriors: Hansen, Schneider, Mann, Pachauri and Gore.
For more detail I suggest Tim Ball’s blogs and books and also “The Age of Global Warming” and “Green Tyranny” by Rupert Darwall.
The common drivers are bad “science”, the press seeking disaster stories, NGOs seeking influence to pursue social engineering agendas, politicians seeking votes, government funded agencies seeking funding, the egos of the proponents and a gullible, uneducated population. The sad reality is that there is little, if any, learning from the past and none of the proponents are ever brought to account.
Acid rain was NOT a scare, it was documented damage to the environment, with supporting scientific evidence.
It was no more a scare than climate change, which has massive scientific evidence supporting it.
I have to say that I find the author of this piece and commenters here deeply delusional.
Climate skepticism is a political stance, specific to the USA and countries influenced by it.
Ok, Griff.
Name any observed (not modelled as models are not evidence) scientific evidence of AGW that can be clearly without doubt shown to be outside the historical climatic norms of this planet.
I will wait patiently for the “massive evidence” you claim.
Thank you Griff for that considered response, though I did find it a bit lacking any factual information.
A good summary of the acid rain issue is given in chapter 7 of Darwaal’s book “Green Tyranny”, which includes full references.
But let me start my reply with my paraphrase of the abstract from a paper by Richard Klein (Chem Eng News 1988, 66 (43) pp49-51):
In 1968, the Swedish Natural Science Research Council published a report by Svante Oden, “The Acidification of Air and Precipitation and Its Consequences on the Natural Environment.” Six years later, Charles V. Cogbill, Gene E. Likens, and F. Herbert Bormann alerted the North American scientific community to the existence of acidic precipitation. No public relations company could have possibly dreamed up a neater catchphrase. Acid rain conjured up images of tortured and destroyed landscapes, dissolving monuments, sterile lakes, the wheezing of asthmatics, and undrinkable water. Cartoonists had a field day, acid rain umbrellas and emblazoned tee shirts sold very well, newspaper editorials deplored, and environmentally conscious organizations took up their cudgels to give battle. The scientific community, too, was mobilized; ecologists, soil scientists, chemists, meteorologists, and civil engineers initiated research programs that are still a significant fraction of the scientific scene. Parliaments in Western Europe (with some notable exceptions, such as the U.K. and France) jumped on the band-wagon.
Sound familiar?
This concept provided focus onto the polluting industries of Northern Europe, which was very fortuitous for Sweden which was planning an expansion of its nuclear power industry and anything that demonised coal, its main competitor, was jumped upon. Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin (who will re-emerge as a chair of IPCC later on) was commissioned to produce a report that in many ways was a precursor to the IPCC reports to come later.
Later, in 1980 the USA Carter administration established five acid rain work groups following concern about possible acid rain effects in North America. The papers arising from the work groups were reviewed by a nine person panel overseen by William Neirenberg, who rapidly became embroiled in USA-Canada cross border politics. Neirenberg’s report was quite critical of the Work Group reports. For example, Work Group 1, on impact assessment, which had reviewed a huge amount of published work, was described as often incomplete or conflicting and had failed in its fundamental task of examining the link between acid deposition and chemical and biological changes. Work Group 2, on atmospheric modelling, had greatly over-emphasised the role of computer models. The panel concluded that the provisional nature of current knowledge was highlighted by the absence of scientifically robust answers. One member of the panel, Fred Singer, posed the question: will a reduction in emissions yield proportionate reductions in acid deposition and in the environmental impacts believed to be associated with acid deposition? This was not answered.
The panel was not aware at the time of a 1983 Science article by Edward Krug and Charles Fink in which they report findings that soils susceptible to acidification by acid rain (largely through bad land use practices) are in fact some of the most acid soils in the world. Also that many process attributed to acid rain, such as leaching of nutrients, release of aluminium and acidification of soil and water, were in fact natural processes. They concluded that increased deposition of acid and sulfate – that is to say the supposed scientific underpinning of acid rain damage to forests and lakes – was theoretically unsound and not supported by direct observations.
Following this work and further studies, the 1987 NAPAP report concluded that the effects of acid rain in the USA and Canada were neither widespread nor serious and were in fact less than had been anticipated ten years before. Needless to say the NGOs were horrified by the report which they dismissed as bad science and bad policy. Under pressure from Canada, Vice President George Bush pledged that USA would implement steep cuts in sulfur dioxide emissions should he be elected, which subsequently happened. Events followed a similar course of action in Germany and subsequently the European Community. All sorts of clean air acts were implemented as a result, with strict emission controls. However, this left the NAPAP report as an embarrassment since it did not support the scientific case for any such steep emission cuts.
Note that this is not to deny the existence of acid rain caused by the oxides of sulfur and nitrogen emitted by coal fired power stations, just that the impact originally thought to be destructive had not in fact not lead to devastation in lakes, forests, farms or our bodies. However, just like the AGW scare, media reports were heavily biased toward environmental scare and begged increased regulation (this aspect has been subject of an interesting study by Aaron Wildavsky).
Still the US$500 million NAPAP report wouldn’t go away. In 1990 the EPA, now a champion of the danger of acid rain, accused the report of “interpreting the data the way they want to” (which was in fact exactly what the EPA was doing!) and launched a PR offensive against Krug, its spokesperson at the time, with all dirty tricks imaginable. The EPA subsequently had to back down, acknowledging that their sham peer-review of the report was not justified.
In the late 1990’s interest in claims of forest degradation has started to wane and the focus on acid rain then shifted to health effects. Whether or not this was a real concern on a global basis is still a matter of some conjecture, with any such effect tending to be fairly local and subject to local remedies, but that is a whole new debate.
This all seems to me to have strong parallels to the current AGW scam: poor or incomplete science, research agencies with their snout in the funding trough, a sensationalist press with a great scare topic, NGO’s pushing a political agenda, government point scoring and so called remedies that cost huge sums of money.
Griff. Thanks for posting here. People like you make the case for climate skepticism all by yourself. Your endless ad hoc rationalizations to square the circle of climate baloney give us additional amusement. Lastly – if you didn’t exist we might have to invent you. But we’d never be able to create something as convincing as the real you. Our collective minds are probably not devious enough.
100%, from what I’ve read, Paul.
John Doran.
Paul Rossiter, thanks for a great summary but lets not forget Sir John Houghton.
From Wikipedia: He was the lead editor of first three IPCC reports. He was professor in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford, former Director General at the Met Office and founder of the Hadley Centre.
He is the president of the John Ray Initiative, an organisation “connecting Environment, Science and Christianity”,[2] where he has compared the stewardship of the Earth, to the stewardship of the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve.[3] He is a founder member of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is also the current president of the Victoria Institute.
Houghtons expertise was in the mathematical expression of climate processes. Loved his maths. Knew nothing of climate processes. Academically he was Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Oxford University (1976–83).
As an atmospheric scientist he was not a patch on Gordon Dobson who pioneered the study of ozone and its role in the stratosphere. Dobson pointed out that a map of total column ozone maps surface atmospheric pressure. This observation identifies the origin of change in the planetary winds and its the change in the planetary winds that is the essence of natural climate change. Houghton set out to kill that observation and any work that might follow that train of thought. That’s where ‘climate science’ lost the plot.
So, academically, he’s a Lysenko like figure.
Look at what Bernie Lewin has to say about the collaboration between Houghton and Ben Santer to ‘discover the human fingerprint’ at https://enthusiasmscepticismscience.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/remembering-madrid-95-a-meeting-that-changed-the-world-2/
Another worthy member of the Hall of Shame!
I’m sure there are some others we have missed?
“I believe, there is one person to blame …”
Remove the comma.
I have been reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksadr Solzhenitsyn. The philosophical and moral distortions the Russian leaders went through in order to justify the imprisonment and murder of 10’s of millions of their countrymen is staggering. Concepts such as evidence and proof were warped to the point of absurdity. You were guilty if, through action or impression, the prosecutor had reason to believe you were guilty. And, the state could justify punishment — even capital punishment — because ultimately no one can ever actually know for certain about your guilt. Suspicion, therefore, is enough.
They could have used Schneider. I suspect he would have been a kindred spirit.
Steig is at it again…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09622-y.pdf
And after using his Antarctica Nature cover, the CBC doubles down and never misses an opportunity to quote another Nature paper in which Eric is an author…
A very interesting choice of location in Yukon, on warm air advection corridors…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/arctic-warmest-in-10000-years-1.5094392
CBC link to the story…
If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, a smattering of inconsistency apparently failed to trouble Stephen H. Schneider’s mind.
In 1971, during the late little-lamented global cooling scare, Schneider assured readers that up to 10 times atmospheric CO2 would not cause a runaway greenhouse effect. (“Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Cli¬mate,” by S.I. Rasool and S.H. Schneider [of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies], Science Magazine, vol. 173, 9 July 1971, pp. 138-141. Determining that while additional aerosols from fossil fuel burning would proportionally cool the atmosphere, added CO2 would have an inverse logarithmic effect, Schneider, with Rasool, reported:
“ . . It is found that even an increase by a factor of 8 in the amount of CO2, which is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years, will produce an increase in the surface temperature of less than 2°K. However, the effect on surface temperature of an increase in the aerosol content of the atmosphere is found to be quite significant. An increase by a factor of 4 in the equilibrium dust concentration in the global atmosphere, which cannot be ruled out as a possibility within the next century, could decrease the mean surface temperature by as much as 3.5°K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!
[Graph omitted.]
* * *
Fig.1. Change in tropospheric temperature as a function of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The dashed curve is computed for constant surface absolute humidity, and the solid curve is for the case in which the surface relative humidity is maintained constant. NOTE THAT THE RATE OF TEMPERATURE INCREASE DIMINISHES WITH INCREASING CO2 IN THE ATMOSPHERE. [Upper case added.]
* * *
“From our calculation, a doubling of CO2 produces a tropospheric temperature change of 0.8°K (12). However, as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the rate of temperature increase is proportionally less and less, and the increase eventually levels off. Even for an increase in CO2 by a factor of 10, the temperature increase does not exceed 2.5°K. There¬fore, the runaway greenhouse effect does not occur because the 15μm CO2 [solar radiation] band, which is the main source of absorption, “saturates,” and the addition or more CO2 does not substantially increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere. But if the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere becomes so high that the total atmospheric pressure is affected (which will require a CO2 increase by a factor of 1000 or more), then the absorption bands will broaden and the opacity will increase, and the temperature may start to rise so rapidly that the process could run away (13). However, this appears to be only a remote possibility for Earth, even on a geological time scale, as a large buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere will be severely restrained by its interaction with the oceans, the biosphere, and the crust (14).”
Missing from Rasool & Schneider’s citations was the much earlier identical finding in a paper by Guy S. Callendar, submitted in 1938 to the Royal Society. As merely a “steam technologist” his seminal paper was submitted to the Royal Meteorological Society by Dr. G.R. Dobson, F.R.S.
I believe later calculations have confirmed this conclusion.
“… effect. Schneider, with Rasool, reported …” Who edited this?
Tom Anderson. Thanks.
Dr. G.R. Dobson, F.R.S. The inventor of the Dobson Spectrometer to measure the ozone content of the atmosphere. Dobson knew a lot about the atmosphere and his presentation of Callender’s paper indicates an endorsement of the ideas therein, I would suspect. Dobson, was a very cautious and observant scientist.
FWIW
1975 ‘Endangered Atmosphere’ Conference
Where the Global Warming Hoax Was Born
http://21sci-tech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/12364366/Where_the_Global_Warming_Hoax_was_born_Hecht_
Brent, thanks for that lovely stuff. The extracts below particularly caught my attention:
From Margaret Mead
“What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at
the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats
Throughout her presentation, Mead stressed the need for consensus, an end-product free from any troubling
“internal scientific controversies” that might “blur the need for action.”
The idea took on:
The rock-sex-drugs counterculture of the ’68ers lapped it up. Man was seen as just another animal, but an exceedingly greedy one, using up Mother Nature’s resources and making a mess in the process. The unique cognitive ability of the human being, with its power to create new resources, to develop more advanced science and technology, and thus to provide better living standards was trashed. Scientific pessimism invaded the scientific organizations.
Finally from me, some observations of the manner in which surface temperature has changed over 120 years at a specific southern hemisphere site, free from the influences of urban warming and land clearing, that indicate that carbon dioxide plays no role in warming the atmosphere, the surface or the oceans: See https://reality348.wordpress.com
Thanks Erl, an interesting paper.
There are some other sites in Australia that have been relatively free from relocation and urbanization effects and the raw data similarly shows little or no change that could be attributed to AGW. Jennifer Marohasi has been highlighting this and also leading a discussion about the dodgy “homogenization” of the data by the BOM.
See: https://jennifermarohasy.com/temperatures/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/22/changes-to-darwins-climate-history-are-not-logical/
See also: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/30/long-term-temperature-records-contradict-giss-temperature-record/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/04/the-australian-bureau-of-meteorology-gets-it-wrong/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/08/darwin-temperatures-unscrambling-the-acorn-sat-2-series/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/02/darwin-temperatures-what-is-going-on/
Strange how the “homogenization” always leads to a cooling of the past !! Thank heavens for sites like WUWT .
Paul Rossiter,
Yes I am aware of the problems with the BOM Acorn data. There is no rationale for adjusting the Cape Leeuwin data and yet Acorn adjusted data is different to the raw data in ways that make no sense. eg minimum adjusted and not the maximum.
Climate change is here and now. The evidence is staring US climate sceptics in the face but they continue to reject it. They don’t how absurd they are.
https://mankindsdegradationofplanetearth.com/2019/04/14/while-the-rich-world-braces-for-future-climate-change-the-poor-world-is-already-being-devastated-by-it/
Very interesting – Schneider may have indeed been a major factor in the man-made climate change narrative, though nature itself played a part when the temperatures started rising in the ’70s. “Global warming” was essentially fathered and nurtured by David Rockefeller, who decided that an anthropogenic global warming scare offered the best opportunity for furthering global governance, and in 1977 funded a report along those lines. Subsequently David R, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the other globalist elites have spent many billions buying up media, academic institutions and politicians in order to push the message and silence all dissent. https://stovouno.org/2019/02/23/globalism-of-climate-how-faux-environmental-concern-hides-desire-to-rule-the-world/
Thanks for that post and link Barbara, a fascinating article that makes an explosive expose of the whole sham.
Surely there must be somebody out there with enough resources to make a feature based upon this sort of material and distributed through the cinemas, TV and on-line media, or does everyone of such influence have their nose in the AGW trough? As the alarmists have shown, all it takes is money.
Are there no investigative reporters with any integrity left or have they all been muzzled?
There are comments here regarding Margaret Thatcher’s involvement in starting the climate change hysteria. At a conference in DC a couple decades ago, I recall hearing Christopher Moncton say that he was an adviser to Thatcher, and that the reason she started the process was that she was angry with the Welsh coal miners for frequently going on strike and interrupting Britain’s energy supply. She intended that the global warming issue would lead Britain to switch from coal to nuclear power, but the approach didn’t turn out as intended. Now even the electric utilities are on board, since they recognize they can increase their profits if they can justify selling a kilowatt hour for 25 cents instead of 10 cents.