Author: Norman Rogers | Published: American Thinker | Date: 12 July 2022
Climate science was an obscure and unimportant corner of academia until the professors lucked out with global warming. The global warming idea apparently struck a spark with the government and media establishments and caught fire. Money and influence flooded from Washington to academia.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the scientific-technological elite being dependent upon government grants. Eisenhower feared that the elite would use their influence and expertise to warp public policy for their own benefit. That is exactly what is happening. Global warming is only one of many current scientific frauds that enhance the welfare of the scientists and bureaucrats promoting the frauds.
Since World War II, the increasing flow of big money from Washington has contributed to a gradual change in the character of research universities. Money became more important than science. Administrators who were focused on money and power grew in number and became dominant. This change in character was documented in an important essay by the MIT scientist Richard Lindzen.
Global warming provided the professors and academic administrators with a junk science golden goose. They were determined to stop anyone from killing the goose.
A narrative was developed to crush “deniers” who dared to question the global warming narrative. The deniers were depicted as agents of the international oil companies. This is somewhat comical since the oil companies were constantly searching for someone to accept their surrender. The oil companies not only had no chance of winning a propaganda war with academia and the media, they didn’t want to try. They were ready to swear allegiance to the global warming narrative. They knew perfectly well that global warming nonsense was no threat to their business. But the mob needs a villain so they weren’t allowed to surrender.
Many fighters against global warming fraud dislike the label “denier.” They consider it an attempt by the global warming crowd to lump their opponents in with Holocaust deniers. My feeling is that we might as well wear the label proudly and thus destroy its effectiveness.
We deniers come from a small contingent of people with argumentative personalities, scientific background, and a job or income that gives some immunity to retaliation. Deniers are adult versions of the child who said that the emperor has no clothes.
It’s easy for the establishment to depict deniers as crackpots. Who are they to challenge the scientific consensus? That a few deniers actually are crackpots doesn’t help. But there are far more crackpots promoting phony climate scares, many of them in the most privileged ranks of human society.
Climate science groups have been spending billions of dollars developing computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere in an attempt to support the global warming narrative. The computer models are obedient to their authors. The scientists can manipulate the models to show whatever result that supports the desired conclusion — global warming or global cooling. Kevin Trenberth, no denier and one time head of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), may have clarified the situation when he said: “None of the models… correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.”
The beauty of a black box computer program with hundreds of thousands of lines of code is that it is difficult to know if it is an amazing work or a futile exercise. Academic scientists dare not criticize anything that brings money into their organization. When they do, they quickly learn that tenure is a joke compared to the importance of the money flow from Washington.
The average scientist promoting global warming really believes in global warming. It’s easy to believe in doctrines that bring in money. Academics outside of climate science who could challenge the global warming fraud prefer to keep quiet. Criticizing someone else’s junk science is dangerous for those who live in glass houses.
Professional climate scientists who are openly critical of the global warming narrative are either retired or so scientifically distinguished as to be impossible to fire. To my knowledge there is no such thing as a critical early career climate scientist. Such an aspiring scientist would not last long.
There are organizations fighting against the global warming fraud, but they don’t have the advantage of billions of government dollars to spread their message. They are always under attack by those supported in grand style by big government science. The Heartland Institute and the CO2 Coalition are two of many denier organizations.
There are numerous websites run by deniers or denier groups. One of the best, realclimatescience.com, is run by the electrical engineer Tony Heller. He hilariously exposes the lies of the global warming crowd as well as the sensationalism of the media. His specialty is exposing the tampering with climate data to make it agree with global warming theory. If a theory fails to agree with real world data, tampering with the data is one method of promoting the fraud.
People are fooled by prophets or gurus who pretend to have understanding beyond that of ordinary people. Such people may be called witch doctors by anthropologists studying African tribes. One has to ask who are the witch doctors fooling the anthropologists? The American Anthropological Association released a statement on climate change giving all-out support to the global warming fraud.
I don’t see an end to junk science because there’s too much money in it and the credible institutions that could puncture it lack objectivity and expertise. The ideological bias of the mainstream media attracts them to any crackpot theory that calls for more government money and power mobilized to solve the “problem.” For them the global warming narrative is wonderful because it provides an excuse for the government to regulate nearly everything.
A possible reform is sending the money and control of scientific research to the states. That at least would provide fifty different approaches, even if some may turn out to be disasters. It would also promote competition and diversity of opinion. The top Washington bureaucrats could be offered early retirements. The younger bureaucrats could look for jobs with the states.
Norman Rogers is a long-time denier. He is the author of Dumb Energy, a book critical of wind and solar. He is a member of the board of the CO2 Coalition. He has a master’s degree in physics. He was the co-founder of the company Rabbit Semiconductor. He has websites here and here.
They “state ” climate change is a done deal , so why is it still being funded ? , the funding needs to be spent on mitigation of the problems that t hey have ” prooved ”
Never happen of course !
IMHO, the best way of debunking the global-warming hoax is to show data comparing actual temperature change since 1980 or so to what was predicted by the models, and arguing that if a model couldn’t predict the past, how can it predict the future?
The Biden policy of restricting oil drilling in the USA, then begging for oil from the Middle East is not only suicidal from a national security perspective, it also INCREASES CO2 emissions, and also increases emissions of real pollutants.
Burning a fuel in the USA will always generate CO2, regardless of whether the fuel was extracted in Saudi Arabia or West Texas.
But I have never seen a sail on an oil tanker (neither has anyone else), so that some fuel must be burned to push the sea-water displaced by the oil tanker out of the way. It takes much more fuel to ship a tanker full of crude oil through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean, and all the way across the Atlantic Ocean than to ship the same amount of oil by rail, pipeline, or truck from West Texas to refineries along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. The fuel burned to ship the crude oil across the Atlantic adds to the total CO2 emissions from burning the fuel itself.
There is another reason to prefer using American crude over MIddle Eastern crude, which the Biden administration ignores completely. Middle Eastern crude contains about 3% sulfur by weight, and is much denser than West Texas crude, which contains only about 0.5% sulfur by weight. In the refining process, sulfur is removed by reacting the fuel with hydrogen, which converts sulfur to hydrogen sulfide, which is then converted to elemental (solid) sulfur via the Claus process.
Hydrogen is usually produced in a refinery using steam-methane reforming, which produces 4 molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of CO2 per molecule methane used. West Texas crude requires less hydrogen to remove the sulfur, and so generates less CO2 emissions from the steam-methane reforming than Middle East crude.
If the USA needs fossil fuels to run their cars and trucks, they can REDUCE total CO2 emissions by drilling and refining American crude oil instead of importing Middle Eastern crude oil.
I dislike the false label “denier” because:
Hillary and other despicable politicians tried their darnedest to maliciously label voters who disagree with them as “deplorables”.
We are deplorables!
A deplorable is what Hillary and Bill used to be, ordinary people.
Hillary was thinking that she’d use a term roughly equivalent to ‘trailer trash’. An opprobrium viewed by many of all races as hurtfully bigoted.
Back in 1967, my first task out of graduate school was to design a radiation experiment containing 54 SS test specimens. The experiment was part of an alloy development project that was looking at the effect of neutron irradiation on SS. The test capsule was 24 inches long and contained two different temperatures. The specimens in the lower and upper regions were to be maintained at 750 F and the central region was designed to keep those specimens at 1000 F. I did the thermal design using my trusty slide rule, reviewed the results with my supervisor, and had the parts fabricated.
The next step was to prepare the safety analysis for the experiment. This was required by the INEL reactor before irradiation began. INEL required that a thermal analysis be performed using a specific computer code. I built the computer code model and ran the code. It did not calculate the desired result, so I was told to manipulate the boundry conditions until the computer calculated my design answers. When it did the computer printout was attached to the safety analysis report, which was accepted by the INEL reactor safety committee.
I thus forced the computer to calculate my slide rule answers. That experience gives me little trust in computer calculated results even today.
Computer programmers have little or even no knowldge of the physical world and how math rules physical phenomena. Variance in physical things is unknown to them. How many programmers truly understand the integral math used and how to properly implement it in code?