By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
You might recall MIT’s Jonathan Gruber saying “the stupidity of the American voter” made possible to hide Obamacare’s true costs… which they did with the help from the media echo chamber.
The same has been true about the greatest lies ever told – about man’s supposed role in catastrophic climate change, and zero attention to investigating and reporting on how the published plans for decarbonization would quite literally devastate the economy.
My colleagues and I have given many lectures about the myths, misconceptions and outright lies in the global warming arena the last few decades. After an hour of graphs, charts and pictures detailing how a tiny trace gas, carbon dioxide, has no relationship to whatever warming and cooling or weather extremes has occurred we get the inevitable statement from someone in the audience.
“How can you deny that man made global warming and its effects are real when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that it is true?”
At that point we have to explain that the 97 percent figure is not what it appears to be. It is a convenient fiction to imply a consensus.
It is now the rule in the schools. Our students are not being taught the scientific method. In the classroom they are taught what to think and not how to think.
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE PHONEY CONSENSUS
The scientific method does not involve a poll or vote by scientists (that is in the realm of politics where you vote on a law or candidate), but validation of a theory with facts.
The famous Cornell Nobel prize winning Physicist Richard Feynman explained the scientific method. “If data disagrees with a theory, it’s wrong. “In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Michael Crichton, PhD, MD, famous author, producer, screenwriter and lecturer often talked about claims of a consensus.
“Historically the claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrel; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled”. “Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.
In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
INCONVENIENT DATA IS IGNORED OR DEMONIZED
There have been many polls and declarations that demonstrate a large percentage of real scientists believe in climate change but that natural factors are the primary driver.
Climatology wasn’t a recognized specialty or profession even at colleges when I first taught weather and climate in the 1970s into the early 1980s. It was mostly a small part of introductory classes on weather or in geography or geology courses. When climate change became part of an anti fossil fuel agenda and big money suddenly appeared, teachers never trained in climate suddenly became ‘climate scientists’. Environmental sciences emerged as a career path.
The UN, politicians, industry and the mainstream and on-line media would want you to believe that all scientists have now seen the light, that there is a consensus.
That is not the case. Most honest scientist know so. Many are forced into silence or if they vocalize their dissent, find their careers endangered or even destroyed. Still many when past the stage of their career where they can speak the truth, do.
The Global Warming Petition Project was signed by 31,487 scientists including 9,029 with PHDs in their fields. The petition states that: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth”.
1100 Climate Realists signed ‘The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change’ from 40 countries demanding an end to climate hysteria. 1000+ International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims to the U.S. Senate, 300+ Eminent Scientists Reject U.N. Climate Change Treaty (Paris Accord).
Thousands of papers listed supporting global warming is no surprise given the $165B given to universities and researchers (Universities, NOAA, NASA, national labs) to produce papers focusing on what would happen IF the climate models were right. Even with that, there were 1350 peer review papers questioning global warming and 1000 papers believing cooling has begun. See my team’s effort to fact-check popular alarmist claims here. We have many other peer review papers disprove the theory.
Scientists are aware of the failures too and now have proposed 54 excuses as to why their models have failed.
IGNORED OPINION POLLS
There are many well-educated people who do not agree with the survey and its 97% figure. In a 2011 Scientific American opinion poll on the state of climate science provided the eye-opening results cast by their “scientifically literate” readership. With a total of 5190 respondents, a consensus of 81.3% think the IPCC is “a corrupt organization, prone to group-think, with a political agenda” and 75% think climate change is caused by solar variation or natural processes vs. 21% who think it is due to greenhouse gases from human activity. 65% think we should do nothing about climate change since “we are powerless to stop it,” and the same percentage think science should stay out of politics. When asked, “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?,” 76.7% said “nothing.” Scientific American removed the poll when pressured by environmental groups.
In a 2013 Forbes article, it was reported only 36 percent of earth scientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show earth scientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists.
Even a global UN survey of the public, received 9.7 million votes and found in prioritizing what should be focused on, action on climate change finished last.
SO WHERE DID 97% COME FROM?
The first quoted source was an online survey that was published in 2009 by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman from the University of Illinois. The survey was sent to 10,257 scientists to, which 3,146 scientists responded to.
There were two primary questions in the survey. The first “When compared to pre-1800 levels, do you think mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
History has recorded a prolonged global cold era know as “The Little Ice Age” that lasted from about 1400 to 1850 AD. Since that time the global average temperature has risen. I know of no meteorologist, climatologist or anyone involved in the study of the earth’s temperature, who would argue this point.
Question number two asked “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
What constitutes “human activity”? The burning of fossil fuels to make energy is one. The changing of land surfaces to make cities, farmland and deforestation is “human activity” that can change temperature as well. Changing mean temperature can be accomplished by changing the environment around a climate recording station. This is also “human activity”. As rural climate recording stations are gradually surrounded by urban sprawl and eventually larger buildings and infrastructure, the temperature of the site will warm due to the “Urban Heat Island (UHI)” effect.
This has nothing to due with fossil fuel use increasing the efficiency of the green house effect but is a significant “human activity” that can change the temperature of a recording station over time. The results from the survey do not address the variety of just what constitutes “human activity”. A “yes” response to question two implies the responder is referring to fossil fuels but that is not necessarily the case. It is however, what the survey likely wanted to convey.
Question number two also does not address what the word “significant” means to each individual respondent. What constitutes “significant” can be very different from person to person.
The 97% figure from the survey comes from a whittling down of the accepted number of responses from 3,146 to 79. The 79 scientists are those that said they have recently published 50% of their papers in the area of climate change. Of these, 76 of 79 answered “risen” to questions one (96.2%). How this number is not 100% was a surprise. As to question two, 75 of 77 answered “yes” (97.4%).
An attempt at a more rigorous approach to confirm the 97% number followed and failed.
Cook et al. (2013) attempted to categorize 11,944 abstracts [brief summaries] of papers (not entire papers) to their level of endorsement of AGW. They found 7930 (66%) held no position on AGW, while only 64 papers (0.5% of the total) explicitly endorsed humans are the primary (50%+) as the cause. This was 97% of those who explicitly identified a cause. A later analysis by Legates et al. (2013) found there to be only 41 papers (0.3%) that supported this definition.
Cook et al. (2013) was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) which conveniently has multiple outspoken alarmist scientists on its editorial board (e.g. Peter Gleick and Stefan Rahmstorf) where the paper likely received substandard “pal-review” instead of the more rigorous peer-review. The paper has since been refuted five times in the scholarly literature by Legates et al. (2013), Tol (2014a), Tol (2014b), Dean (2015) and Tol (2016).
All the other “97% consensus” studies: e.g. Doran & Zimmerman (2009), Anderegg et al. (2010) and Oreskes (2004) have been refuted by peer-review.
AN UPHILL BATTLE
Alarmists have the advantage of a huge ‘social support’ group of grant toting modelers and researchers, agenda driven or ratings driven journalists, environmentalists and corporations that have realized green is their favorite color and see this as a way to keep green paper flowing into their coffers and pockets, farmers who are benefiting from the misplaced focus on alternative fuel from crops which has sent the cost for their crops to record levels, traders and major market firms licking their chops at the prospects of big time money from alternative energy companies that have realized this is the vector to bigger profits and the politicians and political activists who see it as a way to accomplish ulterior goals about changing society and increasing their powerbase.
In part 2, I will talk about how the universities, professional societies and even congress has taken serious and alarming steps to eliminate (punish) doubters and mold public opinion. They attack any of their own who speak out. That includes formerly outspoken environmentalists like Dr. Patrick Moore, co founder of Greenpeace and Michael Shellenberger whose apology for the false scare was published by Forbes but then forced to be removed. They even have threatened to use RICO against any doubters that remained. See why attention to this is important for our future here.
Tropical Hot Spot Research 