Echoes in Eternity

1000 global scientists, including many from the UN's own IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), recently spoke out against the UN's claims that global warming either poses a threat or even exists at all. It's refreshing to see such honesty.

“We're not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” -- UN IPCC's Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.

“Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” -- NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.

“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself -- Climate is beyond our power to control...Earth doesn't care about governments or their legislation. You can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself.” -- Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This is funny.

Here is another scientist and professor standing up against the lies.

Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

Now a lead author of the IPCC's climate change report is admitting that they were lying when they claimed that there was a consensus of scientists backing the IPCC's claim that global warming was man-made. As it turns out, only a few dozen experts agreed while the majority (thousands) of scientists disagreed with the report.

This is great. Apparently, a law professor at the University of Penn law school did a "cross examination" of the evidence for global warming.

A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fail to stand up to scrutiny.

The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”

Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. {emphasis added} Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”

Here is a great interview with Dr. Willie Soon, a solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Examiner.com: What is your opinion of the anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming theory?

Dr. Soon: It’s never been about the science – even from the very beginning. It’s based on confusion and a mixture of ideology. We should deal only in the facts that we do know.

Examiner.com: Many of the scientists promoting the global warming theory appear to be driven by politics rather than hard scientific data. What are your thoughts?

Dr. Soon: I am a scientist. I go where the facts take me. And the facts are fairly clear. It doesn’t take very long to discover that their views [of man-caused global warming] aren’t grounded in the facts. Why would any solid science need so much promotion and advertisement and the endless shouting about how the science has all been “settled”? And now we’re supposed to believe that the growing consensus on the street that humans are not responsible for global warming is due mainly to the confusion created by climate “deniers.”
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Examiner.com: What needs to be done to combat the strong-arm tactics being used against scientists who disagree with the AGW theory?

Dr. Soon: Science needs to stand up. The AGW movement is killing science. It’s very unhealthy in many ways. They are corrupting science for material gain. It’s time for us to take back climate science.

This is a good sign.

The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.

The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.

The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.

Dr. Fred Singer, preeminent physicist from the University of Virginia, elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, wrote an open letter today to the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom, calling for sound science and the repudiation of the "anthropogenic global warming myth." He is backed by over 250 other members at the APS.

Considering how many other renowned scientists have likewise renounced global warming as a farce, it amazes me that anyone can honestly still take it seriously. Even if you ignore the idolatry involved, you still have to deal with the overwhelming data against AGW. It boggles the mind.

Dr. Gray, an eminent atmospheric scientist at Colorado State, is well-known for his criticism of the global warm-mongering community. Recently, he laid an intellectual spanking on a professor at MIT.

Living in an academic ‘ivory tower’ relieves Emanuel of having to face up to the hard economic and social realities of reducing fossil fuel usage. Following Emanuel’s logic we should move to implement the Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, agree to international standards to implement fossil fuel restrictions and follow UN-global government dictates. I wonder if Emanuel has factored in the ensuing much higher costs of renewable energy and the resulting significant lowering of the global population’s standard of living, which large fossil fuel reductions would bring. I wonder if Emanuel realizes the effects these changes would have on the increased poverty and starvation within 3rd world countries. And has he considered how little the environment would really improve if such human sacrifices for nature were made?

We should all feel an obligation to assassinate ‘faulty’ science wherever we see it, including the blind belief (without evidence except the faulty models) that humans are largely responsible for climate change.

A great piece by Pat Buchanan this week summed up the hoax of global warming.

What we learned in a year's time: Polar bears are not vanishing. Sea levels are not rising at anything like the 20-foot surge this century was to bring. Cities are not sinking. Beaches are not disappearing. Temperatures have not been rising since the late 1990s. And, in historic terms, our global warming is not at all unprecedented.
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Today's global warming hysteria is the hoax of the 21st century. H.L. Mencken had it right: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Doug Wilson comments on the current status of global warm-mongering:

So there's weather and there's climate. When the global warming shillists were back in their prime, they would regale us with anecdote after anecdote about the weather, claiming that this told us something about the climate. The actual climate claims were based on something else, but they sought to persuade the boobs by means of pointing to the weather. Katrina was the result of global warming, etc.

Then something funny happened. The weather shifted in some very odd ways, we started hearing about climate change instead of global warming, and the Al Gore effect became apparent in weather patterns. Everywhere that poor man went, a snow storm followed. Those who lived by the weather anecdote died by the weather anecdote.

They probably could have managed this, because enormous amounts of money were involved, not to mention a power grab of Orwellian proportions. Men like this were not going to slowed down by snow flurries in Georgia.

But then the climate data went blooey. Turns out the books were cooked, rigged, made up, massaged, bought and paid for, and then lost. There went the climate, and the phrase "the science is settled" took on a much more ominous meaning.

And then God, for His mercies endure forever, sent the world the winter of winters. The one enthroned in Heaven laughs; He holds them in derision.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto on the "melt-down" of global warmism:

This column was scoffing at global warming back when global warming was still cool. But even we have been surprised at the extent of the past three months' "meltdown" of global warmism, to use the metaphor that everyone seems to have settled on.

As we've written on various occasions, we didn't know enough about the substance of the underlying science to make a judgment about it. But we know enough about science itself to recognize that the popular rendition of global warmism--dogmatic, doctrinaire and scornful of skepticism--is not the least bit scientific. The revelations in the Climategate emails show that these attitudes were common among actual scientists, not just the popularizers of their work.

Still, we would not have gone so far as to say that global warming was just a hoax. Surely there was some actual science to back it, even if there was a lot less certainty than was claimed.

Now, though, we're wondering if this was too charitable a view. London's Sunday Times reports that scientists are "casting doubt" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution," a claim the IPCC describes as "unequivocal"...

Meanwhile, the BBC carries an extraordinary interview with Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the central Climategate figure. In the interview, Jones admits that the periods 1860-80 and 1910-40 saw global warming on a similar scale to the 1975-98 period, that there has been no significant warming since 1995, and that the so-called Medieval Warm Period calls into question whether the currently observed warming is unprecedented.

And then there's this exchange:

When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over," what exactly do they mean--and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

So "the vast majority of climate scientists" don't think the debate is over? Someone had better tell the IPCC, Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and most of our colleagues in the media, who have long been insisting otherwise--and indeed, who continue to do so.
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Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism's popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the "consensus" they have touted is a sham.

And they used to call us deniers.

The New York Times has a sad article about mainline (read: theologically liberal) churches in the American Northwest that have turned to environmentalism as a last ditch attempt to stave off the impending closure of their doors. It makes sense that they would turn to another religion to postpone the end; they abandoned Christianity long ago, but they've finally found a new god to worship: Gaia. This sentence says it all:

“I’ve never been good at door-to-door evangelism,” said Deb Conklin, the pastor {emphasis mine} at Liberty Park United Methodist Church in Spokane, Wash., where an aging and shrinking congregation of about 20 people worships on Sundays. “But this has been so fun. Everybody wants to talk to you. It’s exciting. It’s ministry.”

Thank God that only through Christ can a church remain alive. These churches will die, and good riddance.

So finally the main global warm-mongers admit that there has been no real warming in the last 15 years... about time someone was honest!

By the end of today, we may have a weather first: all 50 states covered in snow.

Dr. Dalrymple's been writing weekly over at Pajamas Media and so far every installment has consisted of his classic wit applied to everyday life. This week's, involving Dalrymple's new idea on how to save the planet, is no exception. Enjoy!

The best, indeed only, way to prevent road traffic accidents is to prohibit people from leaving their houses in the first place! By a process of association of ideas, I remembered the slogan that was used during the war to cut down the demand for public transport: “Is your journey really necessary?”

The answer, of course, is usually a resounding no, especially in these days of the internet. I bet that if you took a spot survey of all the people who are moving about at any given moment, not one in twenty would have a really good reason for doing so. Here, surely, is scope for proper regulation: traffic police who would not only regulate the speed at which you go, but your reasons for going. If you could provide a good reason, a heavy fine would be payable, with imprisonment for subsequent offenses.

This, naturally enough, brings me to the question of global warming. It must be admitted that, for three reasons, things have not been going very well for global warmists of late, at least in Britain. The first reason is that the scientists have been caught doing the scientific equivalent of fiddling the books; the second is that we are enjoying, if that is quite the word, the severest winter in thirty years; and the third is that the economic recession has conclusively demonstrated that people care more about a decline in GDP of five percent than a rise in temperature of two degrees — if it had taken place, that is.

Now it so happens that the other night I went to dinner to a friend who is that most reprehensible character, a skeptic. He says that global warming, if it occurred, would be more likely caused by sunspot activity than by anything we — mankind — did. To think otherwise is to be like the madman in Doctor Johnson’s Rasselas who believes that he controls the rising and setting of the sun.

As my friend was uttering these heretical words — I am sure he would be burned at the stake for them, if it were not for the carbon emissions thereof — he happened to be screwing one of those new, energy-saving (and now mandatory) light bulbs into a light fixture. These new bulbs always seem to me to cast a kind of yellowing gloom rather than light, the color approximately of the pages of bad-quality paper in old books, reminiscent — perhaps not coincidentally — of artificial illumination in the Eastern Europe of the good old days.

Then it came to me — the solution. The problem with so many light fixtures is the lampshades of one kind or another that surround them. How much of the light emitted do they absorb! If they were prohibited, the necessary wattage to light a room would be much reduced, and the planet would be saved!

Moreover, the prohibition of lampshades would have socially desirable consequences. No one who has traveled to a poor part of any city can have failed to notice that in many rooms lights do not have lampshades. The bare bulb is exposed to the air.

The prohibition of lampshades would therefore have a socially equalizing effect, by definition desirable. I concede, of course, that a government program of distribution of lampshades to the poor would have the same equalizing effect, but without the healing consequences for the planet that the prohibition would have. Such a prohibition would kill two birds with one stone.

Of course, total nocturnal darkness would be best, but let us remain always in the realm of the possible and the realistic. We do not want to be mere dreamers.

This is a hilarious story regarding the U.N. climate change panel's recent embarrassing discovery that claims they published a few years ago about some glaciers were based on faulty data. Turns out, it was based on anecdotal evidence from a mountaineering magazine and a graduate student's dissertation, among other sources. Science has rightly gotten a black eye from this climate change scam, and hopefully won't recover too quickly. People need to recognize the dangers of a modernistic approach to science as the answer to all of life. Modern science is great, but it has its limits.

Investor's Business Daily has a piece this week on a new study which shows that CO2 doesn't pose a risk to the Earth after all. What? You mean God knew what He was doing? Astonishing!

A new study shows that Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset.

A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe.

This "settled science" has been upended by an unsettling (for warm-mongers) new study out of the University of Bristol in England. Unlike the Climate-gate charlatans at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Wolfgang Knorr of Bristol's Earth Sciences Department followed the data where it led instead of trying to manipulate it to "hide the decline" in global temperatures the earth has experienced in the last decade.

The new study, published in the online journal Geophysical Research Letters, does not deny that increasing amounts of CO2 have been generated as the world has industrialized, eradicated disease, produced agricultural abundance and improved man's standard of living. It does show that only 45% of man's emissions, not 100% as warmers claim, stays in the atmosphere, and that includes the carbon emissions of the private jets that flew to Copenhagen last month and the limos that drove the occupants around.

The rest is absorbed by nature, and that percentage hasn't changed since 1850. Knorr arrived at that figure by relying solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice. He did not rely, as the CRU did, on badly written computer models with built-in fudge factors to direct the data to a foregone conclusion.

It's not man-made.