Pro-Trump Group Claims Responsibility For Baby-Eating Activist

When a woman interrupted an AOC town hall yesterday to advocate eating babies to stop climate change, many people thought it was too good to be true. An obviously mentally-disturbed woman who was advocating a crazy policy that seemed to embrace the twin pillars of leftist ideology, abortion and climate change, was like a caricature of what many people think leftism is. One of my rules of thumb is that if it seems too stupid to be true, it probably is (although this guideline gets tested more and more these days, it seems), and that turned out to be the case with the baby-eater.

As Gabriella Hoffman pointed out earlier today, the woman was part of a hoax. A group called the Larouche PAC claimed responsibility for the in-person trolling on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/larouchepac/status/1179933213021626368

If you haven’t heard of Larouche PAC, don’t worry. It’s a name that I haven’t heard in decades. I remember “Lyndon Larouche” as a perennial fringe candidate from elections in the 1970s and 1980s, but being a kid then, I never knew much about him.

As it turns out, Lyndon Larouche was a Quaker and a conscientious objector during WWII. Beginning in 1944, he served with the US Army in noncombatant roles in India and Burma. At this point in his life, he was already dabbling with Marxism and joined the Socialist Workers Party when he returned after the war. In 1967, he organized his followers into the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and created a private intelligence network in which his supporters sent in information from around the world. During the 1970s, Larouche had contacts with both leftist groups such as the CPUSA and right-wing groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby.

By the late 1970s, Larouche was transforming from a Marxist to a fascist. He ran the gamut of the political spectrum with contacts in both the CIA and the KGB. He supported fusion energy and the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), while also embracing a variety of conspiracy theories. Larouche was famous for pamphlets that railed against the British, who he believed controlled international trade, as well as Jews and Israel, which he said was “a hundred times worse than Hitler.” A Holocaust, denier, in the 1980s, he also advocated concentration camps for AIDS patients. In a pamphlet series that became a book called “Children of Satan,” he alleged that followers of Leo Strauss in the Bush Administration, led by Dick Cheney, misled Congress and the American people in order to invade Iraq and that the September 11 attacks were an “inside job.” His group was considered to be a cult by many observers.

Larouche was convicted, along with several supporters, on charges of credit card fraud, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice in the 1980s. He ran a losing campaign for Congress while in jail. Larouche was never elected to public office even though he ran for president a total of eight times, most recently in 2016. However, in 1986, two of his supporters won Democratic nominations for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in Illinois. He faded from the headlines but remained active in politics well into the 21^st century. He died in February of this year.

I say all that to say that Lyndon Larouche was a complex man who had a wide range of political positions, many of them contradictory. He was also well-known as a nut. Considering the breadth of his policy platform and the fact that politics makes strange bedfellows, it should not be surprising to learn that the modern Larouche PAC supports Donald Trump.

The Greenwich (Ct.) Time reported last year that two members of the group were demonstrating with signs that read “DEFEND TRUMP” and criticized former special counsel Robert Mueller. The couple said that they like Trump’s economic policies. The website for the Larouche PAC is also unabashedly pro-Trump. The top of the home page contains several articles referencing the “coup” against Donald Trump as well as a number of articles attacking the British (including a press release that purports to have evidence that the British were behind the 2016 election meddling) and Joe Biden. A video on the site shows Larouche supporters with a display in Manhattan working to “protect the Donald Trump Administration from the coup.”

A 2017 article, posted while Larouche was still alive, on the site exults, “Not since William McKinley has a President been so clear in his intent to return the nation to the economic tradition of Alexander Hamilton, to end the policies of British Imperial free trade, and make a full commitment to industry, manufacturing, scientific advancement and world peace. Not since Franklin Roosevelt has our nation applied these principles for national recovery and development, which are so urgently required today. The American people must now take it upon themselves to understand this American System tradition, and the means by which it can be applied most successfully today.”

The common denominator in all this seems to be the group’s opposition to climate change policy. A Larouche webcast is titled, “CO-2 Reduction is a Mass Murder Policy” and the question at the AOC town hall was focused on climate change. Donald Trump also has a history of opposition to climate change policies and withdrew from the Paris Accords.

That the Larouche PAC and Donald Trump converge on the issue of climate change is not necessarily an indictment of the president. Nor does it mean that all climate change skeptics are nutjobs. But the underlying truth is that the Larouche PAC does support Donald Trump, even though there is no evidence that the president was aware of the group’s support, or even of its existence, before yesterday.

The trolling of the AOC town hall was a masterful piece of performance art, but the group behind it is a shadowy fringe group that is neither fully left nor fully right. They do seem to be fully enshrouded in tinfoil, however. Hopefully, the publicity from the “baby-eater” stunt will fade and the group will return to the obscurity that bigoted conspiracy theorists deserve.

Originally published on The Resurgent

After 30 Years Of Data, Global Warming Alarmism Is Proven False

It has been 30 years since the specter of global warming began to loom before the world. It was 1988 when James Hansen, a scientist at NASA, first testified before Congress about the supposed link between the greenhouse effect and observed global warming. Al Gore was late to the party when he released his Oscar-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006. With three decades of predictions about warming to look back on, we can now assess the accuracy of those early claims about global warming.

I am old enough to remember the dire predictions of the late 1990s and early 2000s. There were predictions of coastal cities being flooded and drastic temperature increases that would destroy crops and cause millions to become climate refugees. Weather site Stormfax.com compiled a list of “Bad Things Attributed to Global Warming” that ranges from acne to zoonotic diseases.”  A lot of severe problems were supposed to have happened by now.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science note that back in 1988 James Hansen presented three possible scenarios. The first scenario was “business as usual,” which showed emissions accelerating at a rate typical of the 1970s and 1980s. Hansen estimated that the current trends would cause the earth to warm by 1° Celsius by 2018. Hansen called the second scenario “most plausible.” This assumed that emissions would increase at the 1988 rate through today, which would cause the earth to be 0.7° warmer. The final scenario was constant emissions after the year 2000. This scenario would warm the earth by a few tenths of a degree before 2000 and then temperatures would level off. Hansen considered this unlikely.

As it turned out, the third scenario was the one that became reality. For almost a decade now, writers in the Journal have reported on a global warming pause. In 2014, Matt Ridley described how the pause in increasing temperatures had continued “for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere.”

Michaels and Maue point out that several of Hansen’s other predictions missed the mark as well. There was no “greater than average warming in the southeast US and the Midwest” in the late 1980s and 1990s as Hansen predicted in his Senate testimony. In 2007, he predicted that melting ice would cause sea levels to rise by 23 feet over 100 years. Subsequent research proved this to be impossible. In 2016, Hansen forecast stronger hurricanes, but there is no evidence of relationship between storm strength and global temperature. Hurricane damage as a percentage of GDP has also not increased.

If forecasts by Hansen and organizations such as the UN and the IPCC have been off base, the wilder predictions of Al Gore and other alarmists have had worse results. In 2006, the former vice president predicted a tipping point where global warming would be irreversible within 10 years. The United Nations warned of tipping points three times in 1989, 2007 and 2015. Decades later there is still little evidence of catastrophic warming.

Gore and climate scientists also made alarming predictions of rising sea levels that range from a few inches to more than 20 feet. Climatologist Judith Curry points out, “Sea level has been overall rising since the last ice age, with some ups and downs. Sea level has been rising for the past 200 years…. Humans are not going to stop sea level rise on the time scale of a few centuries by ceasing emissions of CO2.”

Regardless of cause, sea levels that increase even a few feet could be catastrophic for very low areas. The problem is that cutting emissions won’t stop the rising seas if the end of the ice age is to blame.

What about the polar ice caps? In 2016, Peter Wadhams, a Cambridge University scientist and an expert on Arctic ice loss, told The Guardian, “Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018.” Wadham’s prediction was obviously incorrect.

The predictions of the experts have been off base for decades. Michaels and Maue say that the reason is that most scientific models do not include the effect of aerosols in countering the warming caused by greenhouse gases. “Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures,” they write.

For whatever reason, the global warming forecasts have not been accurate for the past 30 years. The scientific method says that when a prediction based on a hypothesis is not correct, then it’s time to reevaluate the hypothesis. In this case, most scientific models have been observed to be inaccurate and fail to explain the pause in global warming.

While there has been a modest increase in world temperature, the alarmist predictions have failed. Scientists owe it to the public to tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric until they can develop models that accurately account for what is happening in the real world.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Actual Scientists School Bill Nye on Hurricanes

Bill Nye is a science guy. But, as the trope went for an old commercial, he isn’t a scientist, he just plays one on T.V. From time to time, Nye’s limited understanding of science can get him into trouble. One of those times was last week Nye talked about how global warming affected hurricanes.

On Radio Andy, a Sirius XM show, Nye told Dan Rather, “It’s the strength [of hurricanes] that is almost certainly associated with global warming.”

“Global warming and climate change are the same thing,” Nye said. “As the world gets warmer and there is more heat energy in the atmosphere, you expect storms to get stronger. You also expect ocean currents to not flow the way they always have and that will make some places cooler and some places warmer.”

“The more heat energy in the atmosphere strengthens the storms, Dan, that’s what you’d expect,” the science guy concluded.

Ryan Maue, a meteorologist whose Twitter bio also identifies him as a “think tanker” for the Cato Institute, took to Twitter to point out what should be obvious to a climate scientist, the fact that hurricanes draw their strength from the ocean not the atmosphere. “Bill Nye confuses the oceans with the atmosphere,” Maue tweeted, adding the hashtag, “#FakeScience.”

Bill Nye confuses the oceans with the atmosphere.  #FakeScience

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) September 7, 2017

As most weather-watchers know, the ocean feeds hurricanes. They draw strength from warm tropical ocean water and grow while at sea. Once a hurricane makes landfall, the storm begins to weaken and dissipate, no matter how warm the atmosphere is.

That begs the question of whether global warming caused warmer ocean waters to feed the current crop of killer storms. Cliff Mass, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, says “no” on his blog.

“Hurricane Harvey developed in an environment in which temperatures were near normal in the atmosphere and slightly above normal in the Gulf,” Mass wrote. “The clear implication: global warming could not have contributed very much to the storm.”

“OK, let me go out on a limb,” Mass continues. “Let us assume that all of the .5 C warming of the Gulf was due to human-caused global warming.  That NONE of it was natural.  And that the air was warmed by the same amount. Using the scaling described above implies an increase of 3.5% in the extreme precipitation of this storm.  So, for places that received 30 inches, perhaps 1 inch resulted from global warming. Not much.  Immaterial regarding impacts or anything else.”

“The bottom line in this analysis is that both observations of the past decades and models looking forward to the future do not suggest that one can explain the heavy rains of Harvey by global warming, and folks that are suggesting it are poorly informing the public and decision makers,” Mass concludes.

NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory agrees in a statement on its website. “It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity,” the agency points out.

NOAA’s statement does include a qualifier that climate change may cause worse storms in the future.  “Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario),” the statement notes. “This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.”

Nye did make a second point that was more valid. “The problem in the Southeast United States and Mexico is that these hurricanes are very powerful,” the science guy said, “and, as I say all the time, they are very expensive. We are all going to pay for Harvey. We are all going to pay for Irma one way or the other.”

Mass agrees here, saying, “What the media SHOULD be discussing is the lack of resilience of our infrastructure to CURRENT extreme weather.   Houston has had multiple floods the past few years and poor planning is a major issue.  When you put massive amounts of concrete and buildings over an historical swamp, water problems will occur if drainage and water storage is not engineered from the start.”

Hurricane Harvey, a category three storm, was not the strongest hurricane on record. The biggest problem was the that storm stalled over Houston rather than moving through quickly. This caused Houston’s Depression-era drainage system to overload. The area’s rapid growth and lack of planning have contributed to the problem.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were very damaging, but there is no evidence that they were the result of climate change. In fact, the storms were weaker and less damaging that the category four hurricane that killed 12,000 people in Galveston, Texas. If you don’t remember that one, it is because it happened in 1900, long before the advent of global warming.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Amelia Earhart Photo Debunked, But History Channel May Have Debunked Global Warming Concern

The History Channel special on Amelia Earhart this week fell flat with respect to finding the fate of the famed aviatrix, but, in addition to discrediting The History Channel, the special may have also helped debunk a major concern of climate change alarmists. The evidence for the survival of Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan was largely based on photograph. Ironically, it is a History Channel photograph that, if accurate, causes problems for the climate change crowd.

The “lost evidence” for Earhart’s survival consisted of a photograph that showed people who resembled Earhart and Noonan on a dock on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The History Channel’s assumption, based on the resemblance of the people in the photo to Noonan and Earhart, was that the pair had survived their last flight and were taken prisoner by the Japanese and later executed.

In a post on July 9, Japanese military history blogger Kota Yamano challenged the History Channel claim. Yamano said that an internet search for the picture revealed that it was taken too early to be Earhart and Noonan. The picture was originally published in a travelogue, “The Ocean's ‘Lifeline’: The Condition of Our South Seas,” in 1935, two years before the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan.

“The photo was the 10th item that came up,” Yamano said in an interview with The Guardian. “I was really happy when I saw it. I find it strange that the documentary makers didn’t confirm the date of the photograph or the publication in which it originally appeared. That’s the first thing they should have done.”

There were other problems with The History Channel theory as well. The Daily Beast points out that when Charles Lindbergh made an emergency landing in Japan in 1931, he was given a hero’s welcome. The Daily Beast also cites a Japanese book from 1982 that detailed the story of a crewman on the Japanese navy ship in the picture. According to the testimony of Japanese veterans, the Japanese navy was instructed to join the search and rescue effort for Earhart. The ship’s log contains no mention of Earhart or Noonan.

Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937. At that time, relations between the US and Japan were still good. The attack on Pearl Harbor was four years away. Even though fighting in the Pacific predated America’s entry into World War II, the region was still largely peaceful at the time. Japan’s war with China began five days after Earhart’s disappearance with a battle between Japanese and Chinese forces at Marco Polo bridge in Beijing. At the time, Earhart disappeared, the Japanese had not motive to keep her rescue a secret.

The theory that Earhart went off course on her way to Howland Island and wound up crash landing in the Marshall Islands also strained credulity. The Marshall Islands are 1,000 miles away from Earhart’s intended target. To end up there, Earhart and Noonan would have had to fly to the vicinity of Howland Island, realize that they were lost, and then, low on fuel and disoriented in bad weather, fly past numerous other islands for another thousand miles.

On the other hand, Steve Milloy of Junk Science claims that a graphic used in The History Channel’s documentary undermines the argument for rising sea levels due to climate change. The graphic shows Mili Atoll, an island in the Marshall Islands, with markings that say “area between blue lines was shore in 1937.” The blue lines on the photo show a forested area in 2017. If the History Channel photo is accurate, Mili Atoll has grown since 1937 instead of getting smaller due to rising seas.

The History Channel documentary does point out that coral islands can change shape over time. A 2015 report by New Scientist found that, even if sea levels rise, many islands are rising faster.

If the History Channel expose’ was truly a bust on the scale of Gerado’s unveiling of Al Capone’s vault, what really happened to Earhart and Noonan? Sometimes the simplest and most obvious explanation is also the correct one. The pair were using primitive navigation methods to Howland Island, a small, isolated speck of land. The Pacific is a very big ocean and Earhart and Noonan are most likely at the bottom of it.

Read the full article on The Resurgent

Logical Thoughts About Climate Change

In the wake of President Trump’s long awaited decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate nontreaty (at least according to the Obama Administration), the liberal left has broken out into hysteria on the assumption that the slowdown in the rise of the sea levels that was brought about by the election of Barack Obama has been reversed by President Trump. Reports of the Earth’s demise due to the US exit from the “executive agreement” are likely to be greatly exaggerated.

The full text of the president’s speech seems to indicate that he is not opposed to a climate treaty in principle, but is chiefly opposed to the cost in American jobs and productivity through the agreement’s call for strict regulations on the United States, but more permissive approach to other countries.

In fact, Mr. Trump called upon climate activists to negotiate a new deal that he would be willing to sign and presumably submit to the Republican-controlled Senate for formal ratification. “I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under the terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers,” Trump said.

If President Trump is truly skeptical of the danger of climate change, then it seems unlikely that any deal that he could negotiate would be fair to the United States and its taxpayers. If climate change is a hoax, as the president has been known to charge, then any deal would not be beneficial to the American workers that President Trump represents. As a service to the president, I would like to present a logical framework for determining whether a future deal would be fair to the United States… or is necessary at all.

Is climate change real? The first point to consider is whether climate change is actually happening. I will concede that it is. In fact, as the NASA website notes, “Earth's climate is always changing. There have been times when Earth's climate has been warmer than it is now. There have been times when it has been cooler. These times can last thousands or millions of years.”

Is the world climate actually warming? This is a more difficult question to answer. There is debate on whether warming is still occurring. In November 2016, Dr. David Whitehouse wrote on the Global Warming Policy Forum, “Satellite data indicates a large fall in the temperature of the lower Troposphere back to pre-El Nino levels. This decrease has reinstated the so-called ‘pause’ in lower atmosphere temperature.”

If the assumptions that the world is still warming are wrong, it would help to explain why predictions by the global warming alarmists have been so far off the mark. Reason pointed out last year that James Hansen predicted in 1986 that global temperatures would rise by two degrees in 20 years. The actual increase in that time was 0.2 degrees. Hansen’s predictions were off by a factor of 10.

In 1988, Hansen forecast that global temperatures would rise by 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050 causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet. By 2007, the estimates had been reduced to “8 to 16 inches above 1990 levels by 2090.” Most of the long-term predictions about warming seem to have fallen short.

Is warming caused by human activity? It seems likely that at least some warming is the result of human activity, but warming that occurred prior to the industrialization of the late 20^th century cannot be legitimately blamed on human production of carbon dioxide since humans were not big emitters of CO2 in the early 1900s. Patrick Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, estimates that about half of the 0.9 degrees in warming since the Industrial Revolution can be attributed to humans.

Is warming a bad thing? If the Earth warms, some parts of the globe will suffer, but other parts will benefit. A warmer Earth could mean longer growing seasons, lower energy costs and fewer cold-related deaths for much of the world. Loss of land from rising sea levels may well be offset by bountiful crops from areas where agriculture is not currently efficient.  

A common claim is that climate change causes more severe weather and worse storms than in the past. However, data from Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, do not support claims that climate change has led to more losses from severe weather. The trend has been mostly flat for the past 25 years even as warming supposedly reached critical levels.  

Can we stop warming if it is catastrophic? It is an unknown whether global warming can be stopped, but it is generally acknowledged even among environmentalists that the Paris agreement would not do it. Bjorn Lomborg estimates that the Paris promises would reduce warming by only 0.05 degrees Celsius over doing nothing. This is a miniscule gain at an enormous price.

Even if we can stop climate change, there are other indirect costs to be considered. Third world nations that are in the process of industrializing may pay the biggest price. Citizens of these nations may lose the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty because fears of climate change stop development and economic growth. Given that many of the dire forecasts of the alarmists have not come to pass, the cure for climate change may be as bad as the disease.

A better solution is to allow businesses to adapt to the changing climate. Technological innovation is reducing emissions as well as helping people to become more prosperous. Oil companies are now predicting that world consumption of oil will peak and begin to decline in the next few decades even without a top-down mandate from the United Nations.

If we want to enter into a treaty to protect the climate, then negotiate one that will actually acomplish its goal. And actually send it to the Senate for ratification. 

President Trump can take comfort from history as well. When President Bush decided to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The left predicted disaster then as well. Fifteen years later, however, we are still waiting on the apocalypse. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

Trump To Withdraw From Paris Climate Agreement

After weeks of seeming indecision, there are now reports that President Trump has made up his mind on whether to withdraw from the global climate treaty. The president has put off a decision on whether the US should reject the agreement for several weeks, but CNN, citing two US officials, reports that an announcement that the US will withdraw from the treaty will be made this week.

“I'm hearing from a lot of people both ways,” Trump said, but added that an announcement would be made “very soon.”

The United States “joined” the Paris agreement on September 3, 2016, but the Senate never formally ratified the treaty. White House advisor to Barack Obama, Brian Deese, told the Washington Times that the pact was an “executive agreement” that did not require ratification by the Senate.

“That’s a process that is quite well-established in our existing legal system and in the context of international agreements and international arrangements,” Mr. Deese said in August 2016. “There is a category of them that are treaties that require advice and consent from the Senate, but there’s a broad category of executive agreements where the executive can enter into those agreements without that advice and consent.”

USA Today notes that currently only two nations out of 197 are not party to the climate treaty. Syria and Nicaragua are the other two nations that do not honor the treaty. 147 countries have formally ratified the agreement. The agreement requires countries to make “nationally determined contributions” and “strive to formulate and communicate long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies.”

Donald Trump has long been skeptical of the claim that climate change presents a danger to the world. In 2012, Trump tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Trump later called the tweet a joke. During the campaign, Trump promised to cancel US participation in the climate agreement.

CNN did caution that the decision on the Paris agreement was not final and that the president was still hearing from advocates on both sides of the issue. In April, Trump made a dramatic reversal on withdrawing the US from NAFTA after signaling his intent to leave the trade pact.

The Paris agreement is unpopular among Republicans with 56 percent favoring withdrawal according to a recent POLITICO/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll. Sixty-two percent of the public as a whole supports remaining a party to the agreement.

With a campaign promise on the line and a majority of his base in favor of leaving the pact, the course for Trump, the climate skeptic, seems obvious. Why he’s drawing out the decision-making process is the real covfefe.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Energy Department 'Scrubbed' Climate Change References Before Trump Took Office

Federal employees at the Department of Energy allegedly spent the last days of the Obama Administration scrubbing documents of the phrase “climate change.” The purpose of the “cleansing” was to prevent the Trump Administration from cutting projects that believers in man-made climate consider important.

The report in the Daily Caller is based on claims made in a podcast called “This American Life” dated Jan. 20, President Trump’s inauguration day. A DOE employee identified only as “Laura” told the podcast producer how she and others had been “going through all their internal documents that describe ongoing projects and just scrubbing them, deleting the parts where it says ‘and here’s how this can help us combat climate change.’” David Kestenbaum, the producer of the podcast, described how renewable energy programs were being rebranded as “a jobs program.”

“Most federal projects have a reason for their existence,” Kestenbaum said, “Why draw attention to something by putting the words ‘climate change’ in the description?”

This may actually be a corrective action. For years, climate change has been incorporated into a broad variety of scientific studies. Many critics charge that scientists try to find a tenuous link between climate change and their field of study in order to gain access to grant money.

Several industrious skeptical sites have put together lists of the things that climate change has been blamed for. One of the most comprehensive is the “Not Quite Complete List of Things Supposedly Caused by Global Warming” on WhatReallyHappened.com. The list provides links to articles blaming global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change,” for a variety of bad – and some good – conditions. Among them are hotter summers, colder winters, Antarctic ice shrinking, Antarctic ice growing, rainfall increases, droughts, beer shortages, better beer, the Arab Spring and Hitler.

The move by the DOE employees may actually be in line with Trump Administration policy. Reuters reports that the Trump Administration instructed the EPA communications team to remove the agency’s climate change web page. The page contained links to climate research and detailed data on emissions.

More action on the climate may be coming soon. Mr. Trump was critical of the Paris agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that was negotiated by the Obama Administration. According to The Hill, Rex Tillerson said in his confirmation hearings that the US should not withdraw from the deal in order to keep its “seat at the table.” Nevertheless, since Congress never ratified the treaty, it does not have the force of law and the Trump Administration could ignore the agreement with no consequences. 

Originally published on the Resurgent

The climate change conspiracy

Today we don our tinfoil hat to look at the issue of climate change. While climate change, previously referred as global warming, isn’t usually considered a conspiracy theory, it does share many conspiracy characteristics.

One obvious parallel between climate change and conspiracies is that proponents of climate change have made numerous predictions about the effects of climate change. Like predictions about martial law and FEMA camps, very few of these predictions have come true.

The numerous doomsday predictions of climate scientists are well-documented, although few media sources compare the actual climate events to the sensational headlines from between 10 and 30 years ago. Partial lists can be found in sources as varied as the Washington Times, Townhall.com, and Daily Tech. A more complete list can be found on WattsUpWithThat.com. These failed predictions include:

· In 1989, a senior UN climate scientist said that nations could be destroyed by climate change by the year 2000.

· In the late 1980s, Dr. James Hansen of NASA predicted that New York’s West Side Highway would be underwater in 20-30 years and that severe droughts would lead restaurants to serve water by request only.

· In 2000, Dr. David Viner said that snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Recent winters in both the UK and the US have set records for snowfall and low temperatures.

· In 2005, the UN warned that there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

· In 2007, scientists feared that Arctic ice would be entirely gone by 2013. Yet less than a decade later, ice coverage in the Arctic has dramatically increased in both thickness and area.

· In 2006, Al Gore predicted in “An Inconvenient Truth” that sea levels would rise enough to threaten Pacific island nations. This was merely one of many fallacies in Gore’s movie.

· In 2006, Al Gore said that we had “10 years” to act on global warming.

Like proponents of other conspiracy theories, global warming alarmists are undaunted when their predictions fail. Like believers in martial law and FEMA concentration camps, global warming proponents simply revise their theory to explain the delay and change the dates on their predictions.

Perhaps because of the inaccuracy of these predictions, the term “global warming” has largely been replaced by the more ambiguous term “climate change.” Climate change can be blamed for a number of weather phenomena that global warming cannot. While denying that cold weather is proof against global warming, proponents simultaneously blame both hot and cold weather on climate change. The Daily Caller and the Daily Signal have both compiled lists of things that alarmists attribute to climate change. As other conspiracy theorists twist news stories to fit their theory, climate change proponents also frequently find a climatological angle to events of the day. Some of the things attributed to global warming include droughts, Ebola, rape, and the Syrian civil war.

The term “climate change” probably also entered the vernacular because global warming apparently stopped about 20 years ago in the late 1990s. Climate scientists who disagreed with the “consensus” wrote as early as 2006 that warming had plateaued. No computer models predicted this pause in warming and climate change theorists initially did not even admit that it was occurring. Today the response ranges from denial that there is a global warming hiatus to adjusting theories to fit the new facts. Revising theories is true to the scientific method, but climatic computer models should be taken with a grain of salt until they can accurately predict future climate changes, rather than simply explaining what has already happened.

Recent revelations that 2014 was the “hottest year in recorded history” often fail to note that recorded climate observations only go back to 1880, notes Robert Tracinski in The Federalist. Also missing from the stories is that the increase in 2014 was 0.02 degrees Celsius, which is far less than the margin of error of 0.10 degrees Celsius. Rising sea levels can be explained by the fact that sea levels have been rising since before the 20^th century. In fact, a NASA graph shows that sea levels have been rising since the last glacial maximum 25,000 years ago. Rising temperatures and rising seas are both far less than predicted by global warming alarmists.

Although warming proponents widely believe that humans are contributing to climate change, they do not claim that this is being done purposefully to destroy the world. Where is the conspiracy that turns the theory of climate change into a conspiracy theory?

Alarmists might argue that the conspiracy comes from a conspiracy of oil companies to undercut climate change activists, presumably selling out the world’s future for short-term oil profits. To the alarmists, this excuses ad hominem attacks against skeptics, commonly derided as “deniers.”

The reality is that there is a proven conspiracy to silence climate change skeptics. In 2009, a hacker stole 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted them online. Another 5,000 emails were hacked and released in 2011. As James Taylor wrote in Forbes, the emails show that many scientists who contribute to IPCC reports engaged in deception and tried to conceal how weak the data supporting manmade climate change really was. Additionally, the emails showed that researchers were at a loss to explain both the recent global warming hiatus and the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period from the 9^th to the 13^th centuries when the Earth was warmer than it is today.

Alarmists use several methods to stifle dissent. A popular claim is that there is a strong scientific consensus on global warming and that 97 percent of scientists are in agreement. Joseph Bast and Dr. Roy Spencer found the 97 percent claim baseless when they examined it in a 2014 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In 2013, Forbes reported that a peer-reviewed study of earth scientists, engineers, and meteorologists found that only 36 percent considered global warming a crisis. The majority believed that global warming was a natural phenomenon and/or not a serious problem.

Many scientists may not want to publicly identify as skeptics. There are numerous reports of harassment of scientists and public figures who are skeptical of climate change alarmism. As far back as 2005, there were indications that skeptical papers were not being published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals. The bias against skeptical papers may well explain the small number of papers published by skeptical scientists. Earlier this year, NPR reported on harassment of skeptics by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.). Some, such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have called skepticism “treason” and called for skeptics to be jailed. In another recent case, Western Washington University students tried to have the college degree of self-proclaimed “climate agnostic” Doug Erickson, a state senator from Washington, revoked by the university.

The bottom line of the debate may be whether climate alarmists put their money where their mouths are. There seems to have been no exodus of wealthy, liberal, climate refugees from low-lying coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to higher ground in “flyover country.” In fact, in 2010 Al Gore purchased an ocean-view mansion in California. In Florida, people will learn about climate change – and irony - at the new Frost Museum of Science, a $300 million facility located in Miami at about eight feet above sea level.

 

Read the full article on Examiner.com

Georgia Tech plays role in Climategate 2.0

Two years ago, before a UN climate conference in Copenhagen, an anonymous hacker revealed a trove of private emails in which climate scientists apparently colluded to cover up the lack of scientific evidence for global warming and discredit climate change skeptics. Several investigations of the emails in the US and the UK did not find wrongdoing on the part of the scientists. Under the Obama Administration, the scandal had little effect on federal climate policy.

Recently, just before the climate conference in Durban, South Africa, history repeated itself. A hacker calling himself “FOIA,” a reference to the Freedom of Information Act, released another bundle of more than 5,000 hacked emails. Many of the same figures from the 2009 release figure prominently in the 2011 release as well. The emails from both releases are compiled on the FOIA2011.org website in a searchable database. The emails span over ten years with the most recent dated November 10, 2009. Few media outlets in the US have picked up the story of the 2011 release.

The emails contain many examples of climate scientists making unguarded comments that are starkly different from their normal public statements. One scientist, Tommy Wils of the University of Swansea, cast doubt on the notion that climate science is settled: “Scientists talk about probabilities, not about truth or knowledge….” He continued, “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal [sic] natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably...” (1682).

Several scientists acknowledged the flaws in current climate models. Phil Jones, a prominent climatologist at the University of East Anglia, wrote that the “basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low level clouds” (email 4443). Rob Wilson of Edinburgh University wondered whether the sun might be responsible for warming. He wrote that “by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone” (2267). He worried that “Jeez - I sound like a sceptic [sic] - this is not my intension [sic].”

The Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period from the 9^th to the 13^th century when temperatures were warm enough to allow limited agriculture in Greenland, was difficult for the climatologists to rationalize. Edward Cook of New York’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory wrote that the MWP “was more regionally extreme (mainly in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts [sic]) than anything we have seen in the 20^th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA [Medieval Climatic Anomaly] period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.”

In another email, a Chinese scientist, Rean Guoyoo, wrote that “we did some analyses of the urban warming effect on surface air temperature trends in China, and we found the effect is pretty big…” (0044). Guoyoo went on to say, “Unfortunately, when we sent our comments [on how urban heat skews temperature readings] to the IPCC AR4 [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report], they were mostly rejected.” Guoyoo’s research seems to support anthropogenic warming locally, rather than globally.

In another email from 2004 that preceded the common usage of the term “climate change,” Asher Minns of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Bo Kjellen of the European Institute for Policy Studies discuss how “global warming freezing,” the idea that global warming might lead to a colder climate, causes public relations problems (4141). They discuss rebranding global warming as “climate change” to provide “a new story for the old news.”

A number of the emails refer to Georgia Tech. A Tech student, Jun Jian, requested and received climate data from East Anglia’s Phil Jones (1320). The email containing the data was also sent to Dr. Peter Webster, a professor at Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Dr. Webster apparently told Canadian mathematician and climate change skeptic Stephen McIntyre about the data. At the time, McIntyre was performing a statistical analysis of the famous “hockey stick graph.”

When McIntyre asked Jones for a copy of the data supplied to Georgia Tech, Jones apparently refused to supply it. According to one email (125676554), McIntyre then submitted a request for the data under the Freedom of Information Act and was again refused. When Jones refused requests for the data citing confidentiality agreements, readers of McIntyre’s blog, ClimateAudit.org, submitted requests for the agreements and only a few were found to exist. Neither Webster nor McIntyre were immediately available for comment.

This is not necessarily conclusive proof that global warming is not real. As the Atlanta Creationism Examiner wrote in a recent article, there is still strong evidence that the human activity is warming the earth. However, the comments in many of the emails do show that the data is not as convincing as many would have it appear.

Some hardliners evidently took pains to hide this doubt. Phil Jones himself wrote that “one way to cover yourself… would be to delete all emails” (2440). Jones also said, “I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts.” Further, Jones wrote that “Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden” (1577). Duke University’s Thomas Crowley assured Jones that “there will be no dirty laundry in the open” (2733). Crowley continued in another email (4693) that “truth” may not always be “worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” This attitude of secrecy and hiding data is at odds with the scientific ideal of objectively making predictions that can be verified and tested in the future.

 

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Nobel Prize winner beat scientific consensus

When the 2011 Nobel Prize winners were announced this week, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Israeli scientist, Dan Shechtman. Shechtman’s prize was the culmination of thirty years of struggle against conventional scientific wisdom.

According to a profile of Shechtman’s discovery in Business Week, Shechtman’s discovery was originally made on April 8, 1982 at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. After Sheckman rapidly chilled a molten mixture of manganese and aluminum, he noticed, while looking through an electron microscope, that concentric circles of ten dots each had formed. The formations violated the laws of nature.

When he reported his findings to his fellow scientists, most did not believe him. Shechtman was ridiculed. The head of his laboratory suggested that he read a textbook on crystallography to understand why what he saw could not be. A two-time Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling said at a conference, “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,” according to Shechtman’s recollection in Haaretz.

Shechtman said in an interview reported in the Atlanta Journal, "I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying. I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong."

Shechtman persisted and published his findings in 1984. Soon, other crystallographers were discovering previously unheard of crystal patterns. In 1992, ten years after Shechtman’s discovery of quasicrystals, the International Union of Crystallography changed its definition of crystals. In 2009, naturally occurring quasicrystals were discovered in Russia.

In Shechtman’s case, there was a scientific consensus that quasicrystals could not exist. This is not the first time that a scientific consensus has been wrong, nor will it be the last. Men of reason and logic once believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. The science of medicine once involved bloodletting to heal the sick. Astronomers mapped Martian canals that were not really there. The theory of eugenics, which was once widely accepted, held that some races were naturally inferior to others.

As Shechtman said in an MSNBC article, “A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks."

Being wrong occasionally doesn’t mean that scientists are bad or that science is not valuable. It does mean that scientific claims should be questioned and verified. In two of today’s most controversial scientific topics, evolution and global warming, one side tries to shut down debate by arguing that there is a scientific consensus. Those who are skeptical of this so-called consensus are ridiculed. Scientific journals blacklist scientists who question the consensus and refuse to publish their papers.

As Shechtman said in Haaretz, “In the forefront of science there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs.”

Science is based on seeking the answers to questions about our world. To shut out skeptics of the consensus is contrary to the whole purpose of science. Many of the greatest discoveries in human history would remain unknown if independent thinkers had not questioned the consensus of their day. As in the case of Shechtman’s crystallography text, science books often have to be rewritten when the consensus changes. Not all skeptics are destined to win a Nobel Prize as Shechtman did, but those who would close off scientific debates are decidedly ignoble.

Thanks to Don Thornton for providing the idea for this article.

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http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/nobel-prize-winner-beat-scientifc-consensus

Meet the candidates: Jon Huntsman

Jon Huntsman was born in California, but grew up in Utah. His father is the founder of Huntsman Corp., a global chemical company.

Huntsman dropped out of high school in his senior year in order to pursue a music career as keyboard player for his band, “Wizards.” His website notes that with “priorities adjusted,” he earned a G.E.D. and entered the University of Utah the next fall. After taking two years to serve as a Mormon missionary to Taiwan, Huntsman returned to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in International Politics.

His political career began almost immediately, first as an intern for Senator Orrin Hatch and then as a staff assistant to President Reagan. Huntsman has served in a variety of appointed diplomatic positions beginning with the first Bush administration. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development, and Ambassador to Singapore for President George H. W. Bush. In the administration of George W. Bush, he was a Deputy Trade Representative and a Trade Ambassador. He also served as President Obama’s Ambassador to China until he resigned to run for president. While in China, Huntsman’s name was censored from internet searches by the Chinese government after he was captured on video at a Jasmine Revolution protest.

Huntsman has also held elected office, serving two terms as governor of Utah. He was a very popular governor, winning re-election with more than 70 percent of the vote. According to the Deseret News, his approval ratings were as high as 90 percent.

Huntsman’s tenure as governor was marked by business-friendly policies and tax cuts. He introduced an optional flat tax with a lower rate and cut the state sales tax on food according to the Cato Institute. The institute also notes that spending increased 10 percent annually during his tenure, however.

Huntsman also has a business experience with the family firm. According to Project Vote Smart, he has served as CEO of the Huntsman Family Holdings Company and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation as well as Chairman of Huntsman Corp. He has also served as a board member for numerous charitable organizations.

Huntsman has a strong record on diplomacy and economic policy, but his record on social issues will cause problems with many Republican voters. He is a supporter of civil unions for homosexual couples, although he does believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. He has also stated in a tweet that he believes in evolution and global warming. In a 2007 video clip, Huntsman also said that he was “comfortable” with a “requirement” for health insurance.

Huntsman does have a conservative position when it comes to abortion. He supports a right-to-life amendment according to the Salt Lake Tribune. As governor, he signed several bills that limited abortions including a parental notification law and a law that required that women be informed that a fetus can feel pain.

In the most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls, Huntsman placed second to last with 2.2 percent of respondents supporting him. The only candidate to fare worse was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. In an Insider Advantage poll of Georgia voters, Huntsman received only one percent. He may boost his numbers in Georgia when he comes to Atlanta this week. He will attend fundraisers on August 23 and meet with Georgia Republican leaders on August 24.

Jon Huntsman has a strong economic and foreign policy background, but his moderately liberal stance on social issues is troubling for conservatives. He would likely appeal to libertarian-leaning Republicans if Ron Paul were not already in the race and more well known. Nevertheless, his deep pockets make it possible for him to continue the race even with little support.

 

Read this article on Examiner.com

http://www.examiner.com/elections-2012-in-atlanta/meet-the-candidates-jon-huntsman

Global warming and the blizzard of '11

Kids in Georgia got almost a week of sledding early in the year.

As Georgia digs itself out of a record-breaking winter storm that followed its first white Christmas in more than a century, people are starting to ask, “What happened to global warming?”  After a series of mild winters, Georgia is experiencing its second harsh winter in a row.  In the winter of 2009-2010, Atlanta received more than its average annual snowfall in one storm on February 12.  Ironically, this was my son’s birthday and his party at Chuck E. Cheese was almost snowed out!  There were several other snowstorms in addition to that one. 

The trend seems to be one of bigger snowstorms in Georgia that occur earlier in the season than in the past.  The trend seems to be one of harsher winters in many countries around the world, not just the United States. Records for cold weather are being set across the United States and around the world this winter.

As global warmists are fond of pointing out when cold weather strikes, local weather conditions do not necessarily disprove a global trend.  Unfortunately, many of these same people are quick to point to local heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes as proof of global warming in other parts of the year. 

As countries around the world experience record cold weather, as well as record hot weather, the term “global warming” has slipped out of favor.  Instead, it has been replaced with the generic term “global climate change.”  It is difficult to argue against global climate change because the global climate is definitely changing.  It always has been and always will be.

When considering the possibility of global warming, we should ask ourselves a series of questions.  First, is global warming actually occurring?  If so, is it a natural phenomenon or is it caused by man?  Whether is caused by man or not, is it a bad thing?  Finally, if it is bad and if it is caused by man, is it possible to reverse it?  If so, is it worth the cost?

Al Gore (Steve Jurvetson)

As far back as 2005, global warmists such as Al Gore claimed that there was a consensus that global warming was occurring, was caused by man, and would be catastrophic if not stopped.  More recently, this claim has been shattered, first as more and more scientists began to dissent from the prevailing viewpoint on global warming, then as hacked emails from prominent climate scientists revealed a pattern of deception.  Global warming believers had faked much of the data that proved warming was occurring, covered up data that did not match their conclusions, and tried to discredit scientists who were skeptical of their claims.

The warmist claim that recent years are the hottest on record was shattered several years ago when it was learned that NASA’s algorithms for graphing temperatures suffered from a Y2K bug.  Previously, 1998 was believed to be the warmest year on record for the US.  With the new data, 1934 became the warmest year.  As of 2007, five of the warmest ten years on record for the US were prior to World War II. 

Further, more doubt was cast on the data itself by the website surfacestations.org, which is conducting a survey of automated weather stations in the US.  Many were revealed to be improperly placed in a manner that could make their readings seem warmer than actual.  For example, some stations are located adjacent to asphalt parking lots or near the exhaust of air conditioning units.  If these types of errors are found in the United States, it is likely that they are also present in other countries, especially in the third world.

NASA image of solar flare striking Earth

If it cannot be conclusively determined that the earth is warming, it also cannot be said that it is beyond a doubt that warming is anthropogenic, or caused by man.  Another likely explanation is that global warming is caused by solar activity.  The sun is on an eleven year cycle that peaked in 2000 and reached a second peak in 2002.  Solar max is known to cause short-term climate change in the form of higher temperatures, increased clouds, and El Nino-like storms.  We are currently experiencing a very deep solar minimum, the deepest in over a century.  Solar activity has been at very low levels since 2008, which coincides with the onset of the harsh winters.  Historical data on cosmic rays shows an almost perfect correlation with temperature over a period of three thousand years.

On the other hand, the relationship of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with temperature is less certain.  Far from carbon leading historical changes in temperature, carbon dioxide levels actually follow changes in temperature.  According to historical data, carbon dioxide levels lag behind changes in temperature by about 1200 years.  On the other hand, scientists do seem to agree that carbon dioxide can act to amplify temperature changes that are caused by other variables. 

Further, increased volcanic activity may be contributing to the cold weather.  Volcanic activity has been known to affect weather since 1816 when an eruption on the Indonesian island of Tambora, coupled with a solar minimum, caused record cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere.  The year became known as “eighteen hundred and froze to death” and the “year without a summer.”  Failing crops led to food shortages in many parts of the world.  The dismal weather sparked emigration from New England to the American West and inspired Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein.”

Recent years have seen an upsurge in volcanic activity in some areas as well.  Undersea eruptions were revealed to be the likely cause of melting glaciers.  Last year, an Icelandic eruption shut down air travel across the Atlantic and Europe, stranding thousands.  In recent years, volcanic activity in Iceland has increased 30-fold.  As demonstrated by Tambora, it would not take a worldwide increase in volcanic activity to affect weather patterns around the globe.

2010 eruption of Icelandic volcano (Max Haase)

Additionally, yet another reason for warmer global temperatures may be that the world is still recovering from the Little Ice Age.  From 1250 to 1850, glaciers advanced and cold, wet weather led to diseases and crop failures.  As recently as 1862, during the Battle of Fredericksburg, the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) appeared in the skies of Virginia.

The link between warming and man is also tenuous.  For one thing, global warming has been reported beyond Earth’s globe.  The planets Mars, Neptune, Jupiter and Pluto have all been reported to have increasing global temperatures.  If global warming is a problem throughout the solar system, it would point toward a cause that is beyond Earth as well.  After all, there is little or no human industry on other planets.

The problems with global warming theory affect other areas of policy as well.  In 2008, polar bears were added to the endangered species list as a “threatened” species after a long campaign by global warming activists who were concerned that rising temperatures and melting seas could threaten the bear’s survival.  The listing led to a suit by the State of Alaska and countersuits by environmental groups.  The problem is that the polar bear population is actually increasing, something that is rare for a truly endangered species.  In some areas of the arctic, the number of bears is becoming so great that they constitute a safety issue for local villagers.

Are people a danger to polar bears or is it the other way around?

Contrary to what some warmists have claimed, current weather is not the warmest in history.  Climate during the early Pliocene Epoch (5.3 to 3 million years ago) and the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) (950-1100 AD) was much warmer than today.  Both periods occurred long before modern industry and manmade greenhouse gases.  In fact, the MWP coincides with the Medieval Maximum, a period of increased solar activity.

The MWP was warm enough to allow Vikings to colonize parts of Greenland and Newfoundland.  These colonies lasted until after the onset of the Little Ice Age.  Evidence of a warmer climate during the MWP is found around the world.

We can also examine the MWP to help determine whether global warming is actually a bad thing.  For example, agriculture flourished during the MWP when the “the climate was warm and dry, with high tree lines, glacier retreat, and reduced lake catchment erosion” compared to the numerous crop failures and famines of the Little Ice Age and 1816.  Further, the cold weather of these periods also caused the spread of disease, such as the Bubonic Plague (the Black Death), which killed a third of Europe.  Even today, cold weather is a bigger killer than hot weather.

Granted, a warmer climate would not be a boon to all areas of the earth.  Areas that are already warm might become too arid.  Sea levels would rise if glaciers melt, but even alarmists only predict rises of a few feet.  It is likely that much more land would be gained from the retreat of the ice, than would be lost.  Few global warmists were worried enough about the rising seas to oppose the rehabilitation of New Orleans, a city already below sea level.

The final question is whether global warming can be stopped by man and at what cost.  Environmentalist and global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, argues that proposed solutions for global warming will cost billions of dollars and only change projected warming by fractions of a degree. Lomborg argues that the money would be better spent on reducing third world poverty and fighting disease.  Humans are masters of adaptation and future generations, with the benefit of advanced technology, would be better able to deal with global warming.

The problem is compounded by the fact that developing nations do not want to be handicapped in their quest for a better standard of living by artificial limits on carbon production.  Large carbon producers such as China and Russia show little interest in cutting production of carbon.  If the United States were to enact cap-and-trade or some other type of carbon limits, we would effectively hamstring our economy. 

The best argument against global warming theory is the way the warmists have attempted to stifle the debate.  It has been years since Al Gore said, “There's no longer any debate in the scientific community about this,” yet the debate is stronger than ever.  Scientists who are skeptical of global warming theory are painted as members of “a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters” and oil companies, allegedly destroying the world to preserve their profits.  As we have already seen, climate scientists dedicated to the theory of global warming have conspired to suppress data that contradicts their beliefs and fought to prevent papers skeptical of global warming from being published.  Global warming skeptics have been compared to Holocaust deniers and criminals.  A recent promotional video seemed to advocate summarily killing skeptics. 

Predictions of global warming are often based on sophisticated computer models.  To accurately model the earth’s climate and weather, they must take a large number of variables into account.  If these variables are omitted or applied incorrectly, the results will be useless.  To put it simply, it is a case of “garbage in – garbage out.”  In the past, the results of this modeling has been less than stellar, though models are improving.  The failure of climate science to predict the recent and current harsh winters underscores the difficulty of modeling climate.

If the science of global warming were truly as solid as its proponents would have you believe, there would be no need for these kinds of heavy-handed tactics.  If the global warming believers truly want to advance the cause of science, they should tone down their rhetoric and allow an open debate on the subject.  They might also want to find a better explanation for the harsh winter weather.

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Polar bear photo credit:
naturespicsonline.com Alan D. Wilson