For starters, let’s recognize no “settled science” indicates human activities are dangerously overheating the planet; no remotely credible surveys indicate a consensus among scientists that we are; and no sensible people who challenge such false representations therefore deny either that climate changes or that recent warming — and cooling — has occurred. Such agenda-driven claims are antithetical to fundamental principles of scientific inquiry and honest discourse.

Earth’s mean temperatures have been warming since the last in a series of approximately 90,000-year-long Ice Ages ended about 12 to 15 thousand years ago; was at least just as warm as now 2,000 years ago and again 1,000 years ago; and has been warming in fits-and-starts since the end of the “Little Ice Age” during the mid-1800s. That warming began soon after Gen. George Washington’s troops suffered a bitter 1777 winter at Valley Forge, and Napoleon’s undertook a frigid retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Conditions warmed up considerably during the early 1900s through the mid-1940s, with temperatures much like now. That was followed by three decades of cooling which prompted leading scientific organizations to forecast a headline-grabbing imminent arrival of the next big Ice Age caused by fossil-fueled smokestacks.

A decade later, those same smokestacks were blamed for an opposite crisis . . . the world was suddenly at a calamitous overheating “tipping point.” The only hope for salvation was for developed nations to join a carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol, to buy carbon offsets from Al Gore’s hedge fund, and to give lots of money to the U.N. for redistribution in penance for unfair capitalistic prosperity.

Yes — much like the current Paris Climate Accord.

Immediately pinning the blame for this climatological catastrophe upon plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions (now re-branded as “climate pollution”) an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was convened to sanctify, sermonize — and sell this theory. In doing so, their dismissals of natural changes and influences, persistent defenses of provably failed computer model projections, politically-edited alarmist summary reports, and media-hyped activist anti-fossil climate confabs have succeeded brilliantly.

Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 candidly expressed the priority. Speaking in 2010, he advised, “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.”

Or, as U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres pointedly remarked, the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

That Paris conference agenda got a useful boost from U.S. government agency scientists at NASA and NOAA who conveniently provided “warmest years ever” claims. Both have histories of stirring overheated global warming stew pots with alarming and statistically indefensible claims of recent “record high” temperatures.

Whereas NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), a small climate modeling shop located in a Manhattan Midtown office building, reported that 2014, an El Nino year, was the “warmest year in the modern record”, it was statistically indistinguishable from 2005, 2010 and 2016.

GISS subsequently proclaimed 2016 as a new warmest year “since modern recordkeeping began,” whereas the difference versus 2015 was within one-quarter of the statistical margin of error.

A whistleblower who formerly directed NOAA’s climate data section has recently charged that the agency hurriedly prepared and released unverified and flawed global temperature information in order to push policy agendas favored by the U.N. and Obama administration at the U.N.’s 2015 Paris climate conference. The goal was to influence advanced nations to commit to sweeping reductions in their uses of fossil fuel and huge expenditures for climate-related aid projects.

NOAA’s politically sensationalized 2015 Thomas R. Karl study retroactively altered historical climate change data to eliminate a well-known “climate change hiatus” . . . a temperature period between 1998 and 2013 during which global temperatures remained flat despite much ballyhooed record atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Instead, the report claimed that the “pause” or “slowdown” in global warming never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising even faster than expected.

Although satellite measurements since 1979 show virtually none outside underreported margins of error, the altered record data now makes 2010 appear just enough warmer to suggest a media headline-prompting upward trend. Moreover, balloon recordings of the Earth’s atmosphere show no overall warming since the late 1950s, while U.S. surface records obtained from the most reliable thermometer stations — those not corrupted by local “heat island” influences such as instrument relocations, urban developments or other man-made changes — show no significant warming over the past 80 years. In fact, there have been more all-time U.S. cold records than heat records since the 1940s.

Get used to natural climate changes, there’s no sane basis for denying them. Meanwhile, let’s demand political climate changes as well.

Author

  • CFACT Advisor Larry Bell heads the graduate program in space architecture at the University of Houston. He founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. He is also the author of "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax."