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

Pediatrician: Transgender Treatments Are 'Child Abuse'

The movement to normalize transgender medical treatments for children has seemingly come out of nowhere. In the course of a few short years, cases of gender-confused children, some in kindergarten, seeking medical treatment to alter their sexual characteristics have become commonplace. Today, at least one pediatrician is speaking out to call the practice “child abuse.”

In an op-ed for the Daily Signal, Dr. Michelle Cretella writes that the treatments advocated by many in the “transgender affirming movement” can cause severe damage to children and “constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse.”

“Today’s institutions that promote transition affirmation,” Cretella says, “are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage.”

Michelle Cretella is no stranger to controversy and criticism from the left. A graduate of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in 1994, she practiced pediatric medicine for 15 years before becoming president of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) in 2015, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center labels “an anti-LGBT hate group.”

Cretella attacks the sacred cows of the gay rights movement with science and logic. She points out that scientific studies of identical twins prove that gay and transgender identities are not a product of genetics since in 72 percent of cases of a transgender twin, the other twin’s sexual orientation is different. If sexual orientation were purely genetic, correlation would be 100 percent in identical twins.

She also points out that gender identity is very malleable in young children. Cretella cites the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology which acknowledges that 75 to 95 percent of children eventually come to accept their biological gender. In most cases, puberty is the cure for a confused gender identity.

Unfortunately, a new trend is preventing many sufferers of gender dysphoria, the new medical term for the problem, from going through puberty. A treatment that is becoming more common is the prescription of puberty blockers. Cretella writes that there have been no studies that prove these drugs are safe for the treatment of gender dysphoria. She writes that a new study of the treatments shows “evidence for decreased bone mineralization, meaning an increased risk of bone fractures as young adults, potential increased risk of obesity and testicular cancer in boys, and an unknown impact upon psychological and cognitive development.”

Perhaps even more disturbing, Cretella points out that there is not a single case in the scientific literature of transgender children choosing to discontinue the puberty blockers. “The only study to date to have followed pre-pubertal children who were socially affirmed and placed on blockers at a young age found that 100 percent of them claimed a transgender identity and chose cross-sex hormones,” says Cretella. Cross-sex hormones are associated with health risks including cardiac disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, strokes, diabetes, and cancers.

“There is an obvious self-fulfilling effect in helping children impersonate the opposite sex both biologically and socially,” writes Cretella. “This is far from benign, since taking puberty blockers at age 12 or younger, followed by cross-sex hormones, sterilizes a child.”

Cretella also debunks the liberal claims that therapies affirming gender identities will result in fewer suicides of transgender children. “Adults who undergo sex reassignment—even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBT-affirming countries—have a suicide rate nearly 20 times greater than that of the general population,” Cretella says.

The fundamental problem is that the transgender politics have outstripped medical studies and laws. The controversy over bathroom policies shows how difficult it can be to enact laws that restrict perceived transgender rights. Restrictions on the ability to administer puberty-blocking drugs to children or even commit children to gender-reassignment surgery would be no different. In the end, it will be the children who suffer.

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

Prominent Creationist to speak in Atlanta

Kenneth Samples, a senior researcher at Reasons to Believe, a ministry that uses science to defend the Bible and Christianity, will have two speaking engagements in the Atlanta area later this month.
Samples will appear at Christ Fellowship Church in Carrollton, Ga. on Tuesday, January 24 at 7:00 p.m.  The topic will be "Is Jesus a Man, Myth, Madman, Menace, Mystic, Martian, or the Messiah?"  For more information, call the church office at 770-834-1772.

The following night, Wednesday, January 25, at 6:30 p.m., Samples will speak on "Blaise Pascal and the Wager" at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta.  The church phone number is 770-973-6561.

Kenneth Samples is the author of "Without a Doubt" and "A World of Difference."  He cohosted the "Bible Answer Man" radio show and takes part in number of RTB podcasts.  He has also contributed to a number of other books, including the UFO book, "Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men."  Samples has undergraduate degrees in philosophy and social science and an MA in theological studies.

Reasons to Believe is a ministry started by Dr. Hugh Ross, a physicist and astronomer, who, according to reasons.org, "studied the world’s religions and 'holy books' and found only one book that proved scientifically and historically accurate: the Bible."

The mission of Reasons to Believe is to demonstrate that "sound reason and scientific research—including the very latest discoveries—consistently support, rather than erode, confidence in the truth of the Bible and faith in the personal, transcendent God revealed in both Scripture and nature." 

Read this article on Examiner.com:http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/prominent-creation-apologist-to-speak-atlanta-area

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.

Read this article on Examiner.com:

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

The Climate Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories have become a hallmark of modern life. The modern conspiracy theory probably can be traced back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the belief that undiscovered gunmen actually killed the president. Another long lasting conspiracy theory is the belief in a government cover-up of an alien spacecraft’s crash in Roswell, New Mexico. More recently, conspiricists on the left and right have been busy promoting theories that the Bush Administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks or that President Obama’s birth certificate was fake.

From time to time, however, proof of an authentic conspiracy emerges. This was the case with the recent publication of hacked emails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit. After years of hearing about climate science being “settled” and that there was a scientific consensus supporting the belief in human-caused global warming, the leaked emails present a very different picture. Ironically, the story has received scant coverage from most media sources in spite of the implications to the upcoming Copenhagen conference and cap-and-trade debate.

The conspiracy was revealed when an unknown hacker penetrated the Climate Research Unit’s computers and forwarded thousands of documents and emails to a server in Russia. Shortly after, a link was posted to the documents along with the message “"We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it" [1].

Global warming skeptics quickly learned that the documents revealed two important things about global warming proponents. First, much of the data that “proved” the reality of global warming was corrupt. As global temperatures flattened or declined in the years after 2000, climate scientists were at a loss to explain the lack of warming. For example, an email from Dr. Kenneth Trenberth, a scientist at the US Center for Atmospheric Research, said “This means we can't fully comprehend or understand exactly what is going on. We know that it cooled in 2008 but we are not 100 per cent sure why….”[1].

Second, the documents confirmed the belief that there was a widespread conspiracy to discredit dissenting scientists and deny publication of scientific papers that pointed out the flaws in global warming theory. Scientific journals rely on peer review of scientific papers to ensure their validity. The climate conspirators would use their status as article reviewers to prevent scientific journals from publishing articles critical of global warming theory. In one email, Phil Jones of East Anglia University writes of dissenting articles, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" [4].

In 2003, after a paper questioning the extent of warming in the 20th century was published in the journal Climate Research, Dr. Michael Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, sent emails to his colleagues to boycott the publication: "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal" [3].

The scientists also discussed ways to mislead opponents. In one discussion of the medieval warm period, a period of extremely warm weather from AD 800-1300 which led to an economic boom, Dr. Trenbarth suggested creating a blog on a neutral web site and then referring inquiries to his own blog [5].

The email trail extended as far as the White House itself. One email was authored by President Obama’s science advisor, Dr. John Holdren. Dr. Holdren had sent an email in 2003 defending Dr. Mann’s research. Dr. Holdren was working at Woods Hole Research Center at the time.

Since many of the scientists who contributed to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report were implicated in the email scandal, the conclusions of the report itself have been cast into further doubt. The inability of climate change scientists to explain the lack of warming also casts global warming and the need for expensive government programs to combat it into doubt. The Environmental Protection Agency has been on the verge of regulating carbon dioxide due to the conclusions of the IPCC report.

Global warming defenders have decried the leak of the emails claiming that not all emails were released; only those that were the most damaging. They do not, however, deny the validity of the emails.

Already, the release of the emails has sparked legal action. In Congress, Republican lawmakers have launched an investigation into the role of the implicated scientists in the formulation of the IPCC report. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has also announced the intention to sue NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies for failure to provide climate-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The obvious question is how the revelation of the climate fraud will affect the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen and President Obama’s attempt to pass a cap-and-trade energy tax in the United States. Hopefully, diplomats and lawmakers will step back and examine the science on both sides of the debate before rushing into climate policies that would be potentially disastrous for the economies of the world.
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Q: How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. There's a consensus that it's going to change, so they've decided to keep us in the dark.
-James Taranto

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Sources:
A complete database of the emails can be found here: www.eastangliaemails.com
1. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/24/2752337.htm
2. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html
3. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125902685372961609.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular
4. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574557583017194444.html
5. http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=868&filename=1206628118.txt
Secaucus NJ