This article first appeared in Forbes online on February 5, 2013.
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President Obama has put salvation from dreaded climate catastrophes on his action agenda hot list. During his second inaugural address he said: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” He went on to shame anyone who disagrees with this assessment, saying, “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and powerful storms.”
This sort of scary presidential prognostication isn’t new. He previously emphasized at the Democratic National Convention that global warming was “not a hoax,” referred to recent droughts and floods as “a threat to our children’s future,” and pledged to make the climate a second-term priority.
As much as I hate to nit-pick his doomsday scenarios, it might be appropriate to correct a few general misconceptions before getting back to that “overwhelming judgment of science” stuff.
Regarding wildfires, for example, their numbers since 1950 have decreased globally by 15%. According to the National Academy of Sciences, they will likely continue to decline until around mid-century.
As for those droughts, a recent study published in the letter of the journal Nature indicates that globally, “…there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.” And as the UN Climate panel concluded last year: “Some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.”
Also, by the way, global hurricane activity, measured in total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), is actually at a low not encountered since the 1970s. In fact, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century. Wilma, the last Category 3 or stronger storm, occurred more than seven years ago.
But supposing these recent circumstances were different … because after all, climate really does change. Even virtually all of those whom the President claims “deny” that “overwhelming science” recognize this. (If climate didn’t change, would we even need a word for it?)
The larger issue has to do with just how many of those who stoke the global warming alarm fires have real confidence in that “science.” So let’s briefly review just a few candid comments that some of them have offered on this topic. These are but a very small sampling of my favorites.
How Climate Alarmism Advances International Political Agendas
The term “climate” is typically associated with annual world-wide average temperature records measured over at least three decades. Yet global warming observed less than two decades after many scientists had predicted a global cooling crisis prompted the United Nations to organize an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to convene a continuing series of international conferences purportedly aimed at preventing an impending catastrophe. Virtually from the beginning, they had already attributed the “crisis” to human fossil-fuel carbon emissions.
Opening remarks offered by Maurice Strong, who organized the first U.N. Earth Climate Summit (1992) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, revealed the real goal: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S Undersecretary of State for global issues, addressing the same Rio Climate Summit audience, agreed: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Wirth now heads the UN Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.)
Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department said: “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
In 1988, former Canadian Minister of the Environment Christine Stewart told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald: “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
In 1996, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the importance of using climate alarmism to advance socialist Marxist objectives: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.”
Speaking at the 2000 UN Conference on Climate Change in the Hague, former President Jacques Chirac of France explained why the IPCC’s climate initiative supported a key Western European Kyoto Protocol objective: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”
How Some Key IPCC Researchers View Their Science
For starters, let’s begin with two different views by some of the same researchers that are reported in the same year regarding whether there is a discernible human influence on global climate.
First, taken from a 1996 IPCC report summary written by B.D. Santer, T.M.L Wigley, T.P. Barnett, and E. Anyamba: “…there is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcings by greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols…from geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change…These results point towards human influence on climate.”
Then, a 1996 publication “The Holocene”, by T.P. Barnett, B.D. Santer, P.D. Jones, R.S. Bradley and K.R. Briffa, says this: “Estimates of…natural variability are critical to the problem of detecting an anthropogenic [human] signal…We have estimated the spectrum…from paleo-temperature proxies and compared it with…general [climate] circulation models…none of the three estimates of the natural variability spectrum agree with each other…Until…resolved, it will be hard to say, with confidence, that an anthropogenic climate signal has or has not been detected.”
In other words, these guys, several of whom you will hear from later, can’t say with confidence whether or not humans have had any influence at all…or even if so, whether it has caused warming or cooling!
IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
The late Stephen Schneider, who authored The Genesis Strategy, a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity, later changed that view 180 degrees, serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports. In a quotation published in Discover, he said: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC report chapters, writing in a 2007 “Predictions of Climate” blog appearing in the science journalNature.com, admitted: “None of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state.”
Christopher Landsea, a top expert on the subject of cyclones, became astounded and perplexed when he was informed that Trenberth had participated in a 2004 press conference following a deadly 2004 Florida storm season which had announced, “Experts warn that global warming [is] likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Since IPCC studies released in 1995 and 2001 had found no evidence of a global warming-hurricane link, and there was no new analysis to suggest otherwise, he wrote to leading IPCC officials imploring: “What scientific, refereed publications substantiate these pronouncements? What studies alluded to have shown a connection between observed warming trends on Earth and long-term trends of cyclone activity?”
Receiving no replies, he then requested assurance that the 2007 report would present true science, saying: “[Dr. Trenberth] seems to have come to a conclusion that global warming has altered hurricane activity, and has already stated so. This does not reflect consensus within the hurricane research community.” After that assurance didn’t come, Landsea, an invited author, resigned from the 2007 report activity and issued an open letter presenting his reasons.
Some Interesting ClimateGate E-Mail Comments
A note from Jones to Trenberth: “Kevin, Seems that this potential Nature [journal] paper may be worth citing, if it does say that GW [global warming] is having an effect on TC [tropical cyclone] activity.”
Jones wanted to make sure that people who supported this connection be represented in IPCC reviews: “Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.”
Raymond Bradley, co-author of Michael Mann’s infamously flawed hockey stick paper which was featured in influential IPCC reports, took issue with another article jointly published by Mann and Phil Jones, stating: “I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL [Geophysical Research Letters] paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year reconstruction.”
Trenberth associate Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote: “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC …”
Wigley and Trenberth suggested in another e-mail to Mann: “If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted [as editor-in-chief of the Geophysical Research Letters journal].”
A July 2004 communication from Phil Jones to Michael Mann referred to two papers recently published in Climate Research with a “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL” subject line observed: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is.”
A June 4, 2003 e-mail from Keith Briffa to fellow tree ring researcher Edward Cook at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York stated: “I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc…If published as is, this paper could really do some damage…It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically… I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review—Confidentially, I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting.”
Tom Crowley, a key member of Michael Mann’s global warming hockey team, wrote: “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.”
Several e-mail exchanges reveal that certain researchers believed well-intentioned ideology trumped objective science. Jonathan Overpeck, a coordinating lead IPCC report author, suggested: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.”
Phil Jones wrote: “Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds. …what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene! I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.”
Writing to Jones, Peter Thorne of the U.K. Met Office advised caution, saying: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary…”
In another e-mail, Thorne stated: “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”
Another scientist worries: “…clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.”
Still another observed: “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”
One researcher foresaw some very troubling consequences: “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…”
The Costs of Ideology Masquerading as Science
As Greenpeace co-founder Peter Moore observed onFox Business News in January 2011: “We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last 200 years…The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people. It’s not good for people and it’s not good for the environment…In a warmer world we can produce more food.”
When Moore was asked who is responsible for promoting unwarranted climate fear and what their motives are, he said: “A powerful convergence of interests. Scientists seeking grant money, media seeking headlines, universities seeking huge grants from major institutions, foundations, environmental groups, politicians wanting to make it look like they are saving future generations. And all of these people have converged on this issue.”
Paul Ehrlich, best known for his 1968 doom and gloom book, The Population Bomb, reported in a March 2010 Nature editorial that a barrage of challenges countering the notion of a looming global warming catastrophe has his alarmist colleagues in big sweats: “Everyone is scared s***less [fecally void], but they don’t know what to do.”
Yes, and it should, because consequences of subordinating climate science to ideology, however well-intentioned, have proven to be incredibly costly.
The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) reports that federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010 (a total $106.7 billion over that period). This doesn’t include $79 billion more spent for climate change technology research, tax breaks for “green energy”, foreign aid to help other countries address “climate problems”; another $16.1 billion since 1993 in federal revenue losses due to green energy subsidies; or still another $26 billion earmarked for climate change programs and related activities in the 2009 “Stimulus Bill.”
Virtually all of this is based upon unfounded representations that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis, a claim based upon speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions. And what redemptive solutions are urgently implored? We must give lots of money to the U.N. to redistribute; abandon fossil fuel use in favor of heavily subsidized but assuredly abundant, “free”, and “renewable” alternatives; and expand federal government growth, regulatory powers, and crony capitalist-enriched political campaign coffers.
It is way past time to realize that none of this is really about protecting the planet from man-made climate change. It never was.
The AGW movement has resulted in many new laws and regulations requiring CO2 free energy. Because all other forms of “green” energy are much less economical, the AGW movement requires that nuclear energy be adopted. In this way, by getting environmentalists to support AGW, the environmentalist opposition to nuclear energy is overcome.
Thank you, Larry Bell, for your excellent exposure of the alarmist agenda. I just hope that joe citizen takes the time and effort to think through the CAGW farce.
Ron Arnold wrote a book who names a lot of the people behind the global warming push . he names names and says what they spend . very good book called “Undue Influence”
Since we’ve been pushing climate alarmism for so long now, it has also become almost a religion to many people. As with most religions, no matter what evidence you provide which contradicts the belief, the faithful merely ignore it and carry on. This thing could be around for decades to come.
Great summary of the mischief caused by those promoting global warming as a means to control society. This article should be widely spread around the country for everyone to read
Do you also believe that 9/11 was an inside US government scam?
It’s amazing the number of people who justify the means even if they don’t believe the cause, as they believe in the end – justice, equality, etc. But are these ends the right ones? Do they in fact achieve what they think it will achieve? I very much doubt it. As soon as you instil the idea that people should be the recipients of wealth redistribution (i.e. legalised governmental robbery), which is what climate change is all about, they lose all sense of the necessity to earn it and demand it as ‘their right’, which it isn’t.
Do not believe anything that come out of the UN again, after the Climate change rip off and Agenda 21, we have had enough.
There are valid concerns about our energy policy, but the should be taken up by others as the UN has lost all creditability.
When the enemy tells you what their plan is…believe them.
I had no idea there was so many quotes from the who’s who of global warming that there is no evidence of man-made climate change. Yet they go ahead with gusto and implement their plan. The level of their treachery, deceit, hatred of human beings, knows no bounds. There is no insult satisfactory for these monsters.
There is big money behind AGW denial. Don’t be fooled.
List of scientific bodies that affirm human-caused global climate change
Academy of Sciences Malaysia.
Academy of Science of South Africa.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
American Astronomical Society.
American Chemical Society.
American Geophysical Union.
American Institute of Physics.
American Meteorological Society.
American Physical Society.
American Quaternary Association.
Australian Academy of Science.
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences.
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
Caribbean Academy of Sciences.
Chinese Academy of Sciences.
European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
European Geosciences Union.
European Science Foundation.
French Academy of Sciences.
German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina.
Geological Society of America.
Geological Society of London-Stratigraphy Commission.
Indian National Science Academy.
Indonesian Academy of Sciences.
InterAcademy Council.
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences.
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.
International Union for Quaternary Research.
Mexican Academy of Sciences.
Network of African Science Academies.
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts.
Royal Irish Academy.
Royal Society of Canada.
Royal Society of New Zealand.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Russian Academy of Sciences.
Science Council of Japan.
List of scientific bodies that dispute human-caused global climate change
..None..
Note: In 1999, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists issued a formal policy statement in which they disputed human-caused climate change. That position was retracted in 2007, leaving no remaining scientific body of national or international standing known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate changes.
So you get into academia and everything you’re exposed to is all pro-AGW all of the time. If you question or dispute you are ostracized…. never published, never peer reviewed, never PAID. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Give equal time to the paid liars?
we owe it to the children of future generations to address climate change, he is concerned about a fake climate thing for the children (notice how they always say for the children) but yet continues to use a fiat currency that is indebting future generations to explosive amounts of debt with little to show for it. wow, talk about hypocrisy. they are bailing out criminals left and right (who now don’t have to produce a good or service to earn their money) who get to circumvent the market place and get the money without earning it, who get to throw all liabilaties and debts on to people who are forced to be cosigners without their consent who bear the oppression that doesn’t belong to them. doesn’t anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
Global warmiing alarmists speak of “saving the world for our grandchildren,” but if their agenda is carried out in full, the world that will be “saved” for them will look a lot like the world’s poorest countries today – general extreme poverty except for a tiny socialist-kleptocratic elite (the beginings of which we are already seein here in the personages of peole like George Soros, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Dianne Feinstein).
“Wealth redistribution” is nothing but slavery. I earn bread and you eat it, as Abraham Lincoln said of slavery. It is stealing from those who produce and giving to those who don’t. In slavery times, the slaves earned the fruit of their labor, and the masters who earned nothing took it for themselves.
In the US, wealth redistribution schemes can properly be considered unconstitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment.
and you whant us to believe that your organization, that gets it´s money from exxon, chevron, the koch brothers, is whanting the good of mankiing and trying to make some kind of “truth” available is it? http://www.polluterwatch.com/category/freetagging/committee-constructive-tomorrow
Anytime one reads such articles as this one, keep in mind how they form the quotations, especially when… they like … to… cut off… some text to make…. some point. Its called filtering and I do not appreciate quoting others by using this filtering process.
Theres too many deceivers like this one that try to mislead the public into point the monsters out to be scientists when in reality its capitalistic monopolies.
This has happened before with Lead poisoning in the air, no one thought it was a problem until a scientists paid by petrol companies said it was ‘safe’.
Then another scientist looking to find the age of the earth by digging down the layered ages of the earth core to find out Lead levels in the air were completely nonexistent in the past, which contradicts the lead ‘safety’ and ‘its been the same level in our atmosphere as always’ lie.
Its obvious companies will go to high lengths to promote the ‘nothing is wrong’ scenario. And it has in the past. If you look at the history of hemp for instance, companies bought off a patent to extract fibers from hemp because it was much more efficient than cutting down trees since hemp grows in 6 month increments while trees are a good 3 years.
So they bought the hemp fiber extraction patent and did NOTHING with it. They simply bought it to get rid of competition.
If all these politicians and anti/pro climate idiots keep fighting over this, just follow the money. It will lead you always to the culprit.
Another idi0t denier who thinks he knows more than the world’s climate scientists! It’s incredible that there are still so many f0ols like this. According to this clown, the world’s scientific institutions don’t know what’ they’re talking about. 33,700 peer reviewed papers supporting the consensus. The American Academy of Sciences, The American Geophysical Union, The American Meteorological society, NASA, NOAA, Union of Concerned Scientists, American Institute of Physics , American Chemical Society, Geological Society of American…. just to name but a few, too many to list. 197 institutions all together worldwide. And we still get this denier cr#p. Fact: about 10 Billion tons of heat trapping CO2 are being spewed into the atmosphere/year by one billion engines and hundreds of coal fired power stations and hundreds more coming on line. Go to NOAA website and SEE THE FACTS for yourself: 352 consecutive months of average world temp increase with no end in sight. Every decade since 1960 has been warmer than the last. THERE IS NO WAY TO STOP THIS NOW, it’s too late ; temps going to keep incrementally rising and life on this earth is gone.There is a 40 year time lag between emissions and effects so changes we’re beginning to see now are due to emissions from the 70s with a gargantuan amount emitted since and yet to come. At no point during at least the last 800,000 years has there been this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It will take at least 1000years after emissions stop for CO2 level to begin to drop while temp keeps rising. It’s already acidifying the oceans, destroying the phytoplankton, the bottom of the food chain. The oceans are dying! Small organisms in the ocean produce about half the world’s oxygen. If the oceans die, we die. It’s too late to stop it now, irreversible positive feedback loops have been triggered, e.g. previously frozen methane hydrates which are at least 20 times more potent than CO2 are now streaming. This is scary stuff, hence the alarmism. It’s a slow death for our ruined planet , like the frog in the pot of water with gradually increasing temp who doesn’t jump out and gets boiled. We dawdled too long, OUR GRANDCHILDREN ARE DOOMED and all of this earth’s beautiful creatures.
The 1500’s “The earth is the center of the universe” – The Vatican and 97% of the scientists
The 1960’s “Beware the coming ice age”
The 1970’s “The world will run out of fossil fuel in the next decade” Jimmy Carter
The 1980’s “Everyone will die of skin cancer because of the hole in the ozone layer”
The 1990’s “At the turn of the millennium, all the computers in the world will fail and send the world into chaos”
2000’s “Beware global warming”.
2010″s “Climate change will create monster storms and weather anomalies that will destroy the world”.
1880’s “There is a sucker born every minute.” P.T. Barnum
Care to guess how much C02 volcanoes put out that you can’t control?
Or cows and methane ?
Or how the sun affects and cycles that directly affect this planet that NO ONE seems to bring up ?
That’s the REAL problem – follow the money and global control.
We better worry about pollution in general – that destroys more especially in our oceans than the CO2 coming from factories these days ….
I don’t agree with this is all I will say. I find it totally bogus.
In the deceitful article, above, this misleading comment is made:
“IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
The truth about Edenhofer’s position on climate change can be seen in his following quote:
[ – In a profile published in Nature in 2013, Ottmar Edenhofer (Ottmar Georg Edenhofer is a German economist dealing with climate change policy, environmental and energy policy as well as energy economics) says that his interest in philosophy and economics… . Regarding climate change he says: ”Denying out and out that climate change is a problem for humanity, as some cynics do, is an unethical, unacceptable position.” – ]
So this is why the American middle class is being killed off.