GLOBAL WARMING

JULY 2024

NASA DISCOVERS THAT 80% OF 'GLOBAL WARMING' IN THE LAST TEN YEARS
 WAS ACTUALLY CAUSED BY 'NET ZERO' POLICIES
By Olivia Murray, June 5, 2024

A team of “high-powered NASA scientists” has just stumbled upon a very inconvenient truth, and no, I don’t mean that they’ve found new evidence to support the Al Gore fear porn flick, but instead, they’ve discovered that 80% of “global warming” in the last ten years has not been caused by man’s use of natural renewable resources like gas and oil, but “draconian fuel shipping regulations” ostensibly “designed to help prevent global warming.”

From a report by Chris Morrison at The Daily Sceptic:

The world of climate science is in shock following extraordinary findings from a team of high-powered NASA scientists that suggest most of the recent global temperature increases are due to the introduction of draconian fuel shipping regulations designed to help prevent global warming.

Well, well, well, the “cure” is worse than the disease… except there was no disease. Now, I don’t contend that the “cure” is all that bad either, as long as we’re speaking only in the context of the environment; a relatively warm planet (of course, I’m talking within reason here) isn’t a bad thing because it means surviving is easier. But, they think it’s bad, which just goes to show you how ill-equipped these climate “scientist” bureaucrats are at deciding on policy.

However, if we’re talking about the global economy and international affairs? Then their “cure” has been unequivocally disastrous—it’s served as a vehicle for an unprecedented transfer of wealth and political power, from the people to the pseudo-elites, and it’s ushered in poverty and war. Energy makes the global market move, and oil and gas are the most affordable and reliable types of energy on that market; when you drastically cut back on affordable and reliable energy, i.e. implement “draconian fuel shipping regulations” around the world, it has the greatest negative impact on the 99%.

But not only that, when peaceful nations dominate the energy market, they put terroristic energy-producing regimes in check, all without firing a shot, by stifling the latter’s ability to fund war and terror—Iran, we’re talking about you.

Morrison continues with this:

The fantasy world of Net Zero is of course full of unintended consequences, but it is claimed that the abrupt 80% cut in sulphur dioxide emissions from international shipping in 2020 has accounted for 80% of global warming since the turn of the decade. Although the extra heat is described as ‘transient’, the warming is extraordinary and is expected to rise during the 2020s at a rate of 0.24°C a decade, 20% higher than the claimed warming trend since 1980.

Oh, the temperature increase is just “transient” now is it? Now where have we heard that before?

Oh that’s right, from the senseless bureaucrats and conniving politicians speaking about the “inflation” crisis that was unfolding before our very eyes when Joe Biden waged war against the established energy (gas and oil) sector and the free market, while ramping up government spending to unprecedented levels.

Someone in the comments of Morrison’s piece made a very astute observation:

It’s also important to keep in mind that man cannot create atoms. All carbon contained in coal and oil (and wood and anything else which burns) was originally atmospheric CO2 plants split into C and 2 O, using the C for themselves and releasing the Os into the atmosphere. Hence, it’s physically impossible to increase the level of atmospheric CO2 beyond what it was at some point in time in the past where life on this planet already existed.

Can these greens please stop wrecking literally everything? They love to tell us that “there is no Planet B” and we’re at the precipice of an “existential” crisis…which is half true. It’s not a looming climate disaster though for the majority of the world, but a financial and political disaster—so for the love of all that is good, please step away from the pen of government policy and bureaucracy.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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MARCH 2024

LAKE SHASTA RESERVOIRS 'WELL ABOVE' HISTORICAL AVERAGE
 AFTER  'EXPERTS' PREDICTED GLOBAL WARMING DROUGHT
By Jack Hellner, February 13, 2024

Why did the so-called climate change experts predict a continued drought in California, instead of predicting the record snow and rain the state actually received? Precipitation that has caused the reservoirs to be well above the historical average?

See the article below, shared by Yahoo News:

California’s Lake Shasta rising from severe-drought levels in stunning before and after images

Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, is on an unexpected—though welcomed—rise in water levels. Heavy storms in the state have saturated the area, with nearly 37 inches of rain falling in the Shasta Damn [sic] surroundings since October 2023. Recently, heavy rainfall has increased water levels by a foot in just one week, bringing the record to about 70% full, well above the historical average.

When looking at the timeline of the drought-riddled scene from just two years ago to now, there has been quite an impressive and dramatic change.

Why was it unexpected? Why should we believe they can predict climate conditions a hundred years from now when they can’t predict the current weather?

Why should we base policies on computer model predictions that have continuously been wrong?

How is Alaska reaching such extreme negatives when the Democrats and other green pushers tell us that everything we do and use are causing existential warming? From RedState:

Minus-30—Even for Alaska, That’s Cold!

The largest utility in Alaska delivered a record amount of natural gas this week as customers cranked up the heat to warm buildings and homes during a brutal cold snap that has lasted more than a week.

Enstar broke its record around midnight on Wednesday, delivering 268 million cubic feet of gas a day to its 150,000 customers, said Enstar president John Sims.

That beat the previous record of 254 million cubic feet, set on Jan. 19, 2017 during a frigid spell then.

How many times have we been told falsely over the last hundred years that the ocean currents are collapsing? Well again, just the other day from CNN:

A crucial system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report, with alarming implications for sea level rise and global weather — leading temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions and rise in others.

How does a warming climate cause temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions of the ocean?

Why would any person with common sense believe that politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, or anyone else could establish policies that could change or control ocean currents with all the natural variables in the climate?

Does anyone believe that “complex and expensive” computer systems, that are programmed by people pushing the green agenda, could be unbiased and accurate?

Death Valley has essentially been in a 10,000 year drought that was/is clearly not caused by humans, CO2, or our use of natural resources. From Yahoo News:

California rainstorms brought — and kept — a lake at Death Valley

A temporary lake at Badwater Basin is rare, according to the park service. The basin is itself a former inland lake, called Lake Manly, which has long since dried up. It existed in two past periods, and most recently dried around 10,000 years ago, according to the park.

Here is a sample of things that have not caused (or even contributed to) reservoirs rising so rapidly in California, extremely cold weather in Alaska, ocean currents to change, or a Death Valley lake to temporarily return for the first time in 10,000 years:

moving from power produced by oil, coal, and natural gas to wind and solar power;

forcing people to buy vehicles powered by a highly flammable pollutant;

eating less meat;

burying carbon;

less breathing;

buying and selling worthless pieces of paper called carbon credits;

gabfests at the UN and Davos where elitists fly in their private jets to pretend they can control the climate;

the worthless Paris climate accord.

So what caused all these things to happen?

The natural cyclical pattern of the climate. The earth has gone through many warming and cooling periods throughout its history.

It is gratuitous for the media and other green pushers to denigrate those of us who tell the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally as “climate change deniers,” “anti-science,” and “stupid.” The purpose of such derogatory adjectives is to mislead the public and shame them into silence, to get people to capitulate. They are interfering in elections.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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DECEMBER 2023

ORGANIZATION DEMANDING FORCED TRANSITION TO EVs ALSO OPPOSES MINING PRACTICES TO PROCURE THE MINERALS TO BUILD THE CARS
By Olivia Murray, October 23, 2023

One need only take a very quick and superficial look at the “green” movement to rightly deduce the “greenies” are a bunch of morons—they’re either incapacitated with their hands glued to the road, protesting something by throwing soup all over a Vincent Van Gogh painting, or, demanding a forced transition to battery-powered vehicles, wind turbines, and solar farms… while also demanding no mining take place for the minerals needed to power such initiatives.

For a little context, see the excerpt below from a report at Just the News yesterday:

The Biden administration announced in April that it intended to enact some of the highest air pollution standards in the world for automobiles. In addition to other emission restrictions, the Environmental Protection Administration rules would require 67% of new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2032.

This is the sort of tyrannical and unconstitutional bureaucracy that drives me absolutely mad—I want incandescent light bulbs and efficient appliances, not endocrine-disrupting LEDs and “energy efficient” lemons.

But one organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, said Biden’s EPA wasn’t doing enough; from a press release on the matter, the group denigrated the initiatives as “sleep[ing] through” the climate crisis, accusing the agency of issuing rules too lenient and lackadaisical.

Yet, surprise surprise, this same group has also continuously fought the development of lithium mines, due to the devastating effects the methods have on wildlife, our environment, and the landscape. Also from Just the News:

In 2021, the CBD successfully sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect a type of buckwheat that would have been impacted by a proposed lithium mine in Nevada.

At another proposed lithium mine in Nevada, the Western Watersheds Project intends to sue to protect a species of snail from the mine.

(For anyone who didn’t know, lithium is necessary to manufacture lithium ion batteries, used by rechargeable cars, wind turbines, and solar panels alike.)

Now, I will say that as a conservative (meaning I support true conservation) who wants a green earth, not a “green” one, I’m thrilled that the group is dumb enough to fight their own agenda, and is waging lawfare to stop the development of land for lithium mines; what’s concerning though is that I suspect, in some way or another, they’re at the public trough gorging on my money, funding these lawsuits through federal grants or subsidies.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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OCTOBER 2023

THE INEVITABLE EV IMPLOSION
By Ron Ross, September 12, 2023

The electric vehicle honeymoon is over. Don’t expect the marriage itself to last much longer either.

The mass conversion from internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEs) to electric vehicles was never more than a Democrat/environmentalist hallucination anyway. It was the most ill-conceived government policy objective in modern history.

The transition should have been a non-starter. It’s riddled with numerous deal killers. It’s like having a dozen fatal diseases all at the same time.

Any goal as massive as a total conversion from ICE vehicles to EVs requires careful planning and infrastructure preparation. It would necessitate a rapid doubling of electricity generation and grid expansion. In today’s world that’s impossible.

EV promoters could never deliver on their promises. Their grandiose assurances were nothing more than wishful thinking.

There was no market research. Hmm -- I wonder why. There were no feasibility studies. Hmm -- I wonder why. Did they actually believe everyone would tolerate spending hours to charge their vehicles rather than the minutes they were accustomed to?

Car dealers are resisting further deliveries of EVs because of swelling inventories. Avis and Hertz can’t even get people to rent EVs! Yet, manufacturers are ramping up production just as consumers are balking. Something will have to give, and soon. EV makers and their shareholders will tire of pouring money down a rathole.

We are spending trillions of dollars on a fabricated dream, all for imaginary payoffs decades in the future.

When the EV house of cards collapses what will the reaction be? Ordinarily, for normal persons, it would be a time for regret, rethinking, and humility.

It would be good if the Democrat/environmentalist true believers learned something from the EV debacle. However, the same utopian blindness that caused this fiasco will prevent any lesson-learning on their part. We are more likely to see them doubling down instead.

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. He resides in Arcata. California and can be reached at rossecon@aol.com.

His website is rossecon.com.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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JULY 2023

ON GLOBAL WARMING, SO MANY PROBLEMS WITH THE DATA
By Jack Hellner, May 23, 2023

It is hard to find any data to support what we have been told about temperatures and the climate, yet, we repeatedly see the talking point that “the science is settled” and people saying the dire predictions have been true.

Here (https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/)  is a report that shows that Arctic Ice, which has only been measured since 1981, is melting slower than normal, because it is cooler than normal. And that it is at 95% of the average. 5.4 million square miles vs. 5.67 million square miles.

The prediction was that the ice was melting fast and would soon be gone, not that sometimes it is melting and sometimes it is expanding.

The rate of sea ice loss for April 2023 was slow, owing to cool conditions across the ice-covered Arctic Ocean and below-average to near-average temperatures near the ice edge.

The April 2023 average Arctic sea ice extent was 13.99 million square kilometers (5.40 million square miles), tied with 2004 as the tenth lowest April in the satellite record (Figure 1a). The average monthly extent was 700,000 square kilometers (270,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average of 14.69 million square kilometers (5.67 million square miles), but 560,000 square kilometers (216,000 square miles) above the record low set in April 2019.

We have been told for years that we would have snowless winters, not that sometimes we would have record snows as we did out west this year.

We have been told that oceans are rising rapidly, and coastal cities would soon be underwater, not that they have risen an essentially immeasurable 9 inches in 140 years.

Why don’t the media and other green pushers tell the truth instead of giving dire predictions. The answer is that people wouldn’t capitulate if they learned the truth.

Global mean sea level has risen about 8–9 inches (21–24 centimeters) since 1880.

Anybody who believes that oceans, that average 12,080 feet deep, can be measured accurately within inches over centuries and that they can tell the cause of the increase needs to have their IQ examined.

The average depth of the ocean is 12,080 feet.

Why are people, especially children, told the intentional lie that thousands of species are dying each year because of humans and our use of natural resources when the truth is that scientists can only identify 800 animal species that have gone extinct in the last 400 years, or two per year? The answer is clearly that the truth would not get support for the radical green agenda.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which involved more than a thousand experts, estimated an extinction rate that was later calculated at up to 8,700 species a year, or 24 a day. More recently, scientists at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: “Every day, up to 150 species are lost.” That could be as much as 10 percent a decade.

Yet only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years.

“There are almost no empirical data to support estimates of current extinctions of 100, or even one, species a day,” he concluded.

The media say they couldn’t report about the Biden family corruption because they couldn’t verify the story but they gladly report the made-up numbers from W.H.O to scare the public.

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) warns in a report released Friday that rising temperatures could lead to more than nine million additional deaths each year by the end of the century.

Why don’t we read the facts instead, which is that more people die from the cold than heat, and it is very few people.

According to a 2014 study by the CDC, approximately 1,300 deaths per year from 2006 to 2010 were coded as resulting from extreme cold exposure, and 670 deaths per year from extreme heat.

Or this:

The study — published in the British journal The Lancet — analyzed data on more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Of those, 5.4 million deaths were related to cold, while 311,000 were related to heat.

Here are some of the destructive policies of the radical greenies that are based on predictions, not scientific data:

The destruction of energy-producing companies that produce reasonably priced energy. (They clearly don’t care about the harm to the poor and middle class by high inflation).

The promotion of the highly flammable pollutant lithium while seeking to control CO2, a non-pollutant, clear gas, that makes plants grow and allows the world to be fed.

Spending trillions on carbon capture.

Selling worthless carbon credits so people like John Kerry can pretend they care as they fly in their private jets.

Outlawing gas stoves, furnaces, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and gas grills.

The destruction of fishing and killing of whales by wind farms.

Environmentalists claim to worry about landfills and pollution so where are they going to put all the gas- powered equipment which will be worthless when the wind turbines wear out?

Why should anyone trust the same people who did the following when they said they could control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity, if we just hand over trillions, and give up our freedom and quality of life?

They lied that we could keep our health plan, doctor, and premiums would go down.

They lied throughout COVID and then claimed to be surprised when children became depressed, and their test scores went down.

They refused to control the border but lied that the border was closed.

They supported soft on crime district attorneys but claimed they weren’t soft on crime even as crime goes up.

They lied continuously to destroy Trump without evidence and refused to support his policies which were lifting all races.

They lied to get the corrupt, incompetent Biden into office.

The problem is not Biden’s age. It is his incompetence, ignorance, and dishonesty as he forces America to adapt to the radical, leftist agenda.

We should recognize the media, Biden, and other Democrats with the appropriate slogan abbreviated with MAPA. “Make America Poor Again."

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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MARCH 2022

THE GLOBAL WARMING QUESTION THAT CAN CHANGE PEOPLE'S MINDS
By Selwyn Duke, January 21, 2022

Late last year, I got into a discussion with a fellow who was quite sold on the idea that man’s activities were warming the Earth. While not a hardcore ideologue, it was apparent the gentleman had accepted the climate change narrative presented by mainstream media and believed we truly were imperiling the planet. I didn’t say much to him initially, as we were engaged in some recreation, but later on I resurrected the topic and told him I just wanted to pose one question.

“What is the ideal average temperature of the Earth”? I asked.

It was clear he was without an answer, so I explained my rationale. “If we don’t know what the Earth’s ideal average temperature is,” I stated, “how can we know if a given type of climate change — whether naturally occurring or induced by man — is good or bad? After all, we can’t then know whether it’s bringing us closer to or moving us further away from that ideal temperature.”

It was as if a little light bulb had lit up in his head, and he said, “You know, that’s a good question!”

I haven’t seen the man since, as we were just two ships passing in the night, and I don’t know how his thinking has evolved (or regressed) between then and now. I do know, however, that someone who’d seemed so confident and perhaps even unbending in his position had his mind opened with one simple question and a 20-second explanation.

Of course, part of the question’s beauty is that no one can answer it. There is no “ideal” average Earth temperature, only a range within which it must remain for life as we know it to exist. At the spectrum’s lower end, polar creatures proliferate; at its higher end, tropical animals do (though warmer temperatures do breed more life, which is why the tropics boast 10 times as many species as does the Arctic. Moreover, crop yields increase when CO2 levels are higher).

This brings us to another important point: Apocalyptic warmist dogma is buttressed by the virtually unchallenged assumption that if man changes something “natural,” it is by definition bad. But this is prejudice. Most of us certainly don’t believe this, for instance, when humans cure disease and use science to preserve and extend human life (or that of our pets).

As for climate, there have been at least five major ice ages, and “the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!),” informs the Utah Geological Survey. Then there was the Cryogenian period, during which the Earth was completely, or almost completely, covered with snow and ice. If man had existed during that time, would it have been bad if his activities had raised the temperature a couple of degrees?

Within ice ages are shorter term cycles known as glacials (colder periods) and interglacials (warmer ones); glacials last approximately 100,000 years while interglacials last about 10,000 to 30,000 years. We’re currently in an interglacial called the Holocene Epoch, which began 11,500 to 12,000 years ago. This means that we could, conceivably, be poised to soon enter another more frigid glacial period.

Now, again, were this mitigated by a couple of degrees via man’s activities, would this be a bad thing?

In point of fact, warmists suggest this is the case. For example, citing research, science news magazine Eos wrote in 2016 that our Holocene Epoch “may last much longer because of the increased levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases resulting from human activity.”

Once more, would this be bad? Why? What’s that ideal average Earth temperature that this climate change would supposedly be moving us further away from? If you’re a member of one of the vast majority of Earth’s species, those prospering in (relative) warmth, it sounds like good news.

The question in question won’t cut any ice (pun intended) with those emotionally invested in the doom-and-gloom global warming thesis. After all, “You cannot reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into,” to paraphrase Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. But with the more open-minded majority, the question can turn down the heat on the fear.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

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DECEMBER 2019

WHO ARE THESE '11,000 CONCERNED SCIENTISTS'?
By Casey Plunkett, November 8, 2019

Academics and scientists are yet again issuing “consensus” statements on climate change. In 2017, we were warned by 16,000 scientists across 184 countries that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.” This past week, BioScience, an academic, peer-reviewed journal from Oxford University Press found 11,224 scientists, from 153 countries, who signed off on the latest climate change drivel. Citing a “moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is’,” they’ve published the paper “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” In dystopian tone, they’ve issued a demand for earth’s population to “be stabilized -- and, ideally, gradually reduced -- within a framework that ensures social integrity.”

With the disclaimer that I’m just a layman who resides in “flyover country”, who are these “11,000 Scientists,” and do they even have credibility to weigh in on this matter? Scientists, with few exceptions, are subject matter experts in specific fields -- their expertise isn’t inherently relevant and extensible across varying fields of science. For example, a physicist won’t teach a graduate-level course in Biology; a podiatrist won’t perform open heart surgery and a botanist has minimal insight on quantum computing. How many of these 11,000 scientists possess germane degrees in meteorology, climatology or atmospheric science? Lo and behold, BioScience actually published a list of these scientific signatories in the attached link -- so I looked.

In keyword searches across 324 pages of signing signatories, spanning 11,224 scientists, I found 240 (2%) individuals with professions that can be construed as bona fide meteorologists, climatologists, or atmospheric scientists. As a frame of reference, the Department of Labor reports there are 10,000 atmospheric scientists in the U.S. Conversely, this list contains plenty of “experts” who have zero credibility on the topic of climate change, coming from fields such as: infectious diseases, paleontology, ecology, zoology, epidemiology and nutrition, insect ecology, anthropology, computer science, OB-GYN and linguistics. Bluntly, and no offense intended, I could care less what a French professor or a zookeeper thinks about climate change -- let alone allow them to tell me how to live my life.

This begs the question, “Why did so few meteorologists, climatologists, and atmospheric scientists sign off on this latest paper?” Perhaps they know this is faux science? The climate is a complex dynamic that science don’t fully understand, let alone predict. Nonetheless, radical, Statist elements of society continue to advocate economy-destroying actions -- taking lemmings over the cliff with them.

At family gatherings in the upcoming holiday season, when annoying in-laws cite “scientific consensus” on man’s effects on climate change, expose their ignorance and the irrelevance of these doomsday papers with an analogy. Advise them to seek out the consensus opinion of a group of chemists, linguists, and data scientists if they believe they tore a rotator cuff or have concerns with an asymmetrical mole they’ve discovered.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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NOVEMBER 2019

TOP-LEVEL CLIMATE MODELER GOES ROGUE, CRITICIZES 'NONSENSE' OF 'GLOBAL WARMING CRISIS'
By Thomas Lifson, September 24, 2019

A highly qualified and experienced climate modeler with impeccable credentials has rejected the unscientific bases of the doom-mongering over a purported climate crisis.  His work has not yet been picked up in this country, but that is about to change.  Writing at the Australian site Quadrant, Tony Thomas introduces the English-speaking world to the truth-telling of Dr. Mototaka Nakamura (hat tip: Andrew Bolt, John McMahon).

There's a top-level oceanographer and meteorologist who is  prepared to cry "Nonsense!"on the "global warming crisis" evident to climate modellers but not in the real world. He's as well or better qualified than the modellers he criticises — the ones whose Year 2100 forebodings of 4degC warming have set the world to spending $US1.5 trillion a year to combat CO2 emissions.

The iconoclast is Dr. Mototaka Nakamura. In June he put out a small book in Japanese on "the sorry state of climate science". It's titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis, and he is very much qualified to take a stand. From 1990 to 2014 he worked on cloud dynamics and forces mixing atmospheric and ocean flows on medium to planetary scales. His bases were MIT (for a Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He's published about 20 climate papers on fluid dynamics. 

Today's vast panoply of "global warming science" is like an upside down pyramid built on the work of a few score of serious climate modellers. They claim to have demonstrated human-derived CO2 emissions as the cause of recent global warming and project that warming forward. Every orthodox climate researcher takes such output from the modellers' black boxes as a given. 

Dr. Nakamura has just made his work available to the English-speaking world:

There was no English edition of his book in June and only a few bits were translated and circulated. But Dr Nakamura last week offered via a free Kindle version his own version [sic] in English. It's not a translation but a fresh essay leading back to his original conclusions.

And the critique he offers is comprehensive.  

Data integrity

(AT just published the story of Canada's Environment Agency discarding actual historical data and substituting its models of what the data should have been, for instance.)

Now Nakamura has found it again, further accusing the orthodox scientists of "data falsification" by adjusting previous temperature data to increase apparent warming "The global surface mean temperature-change data no longer have any scientific value and are nothing except a propaganda tool to the public," he writes.

The climate models are useful tools for academic studies, he says. However, "the models just become useless pieces of junk or worse (worse in a sense that they can produce gravely misleading output) when they are used for climate forecasting." The reason:

These models completely lack some critically important  climate processes and feedbacks, and represent some other critically important climate processes and feedbacks in grossly distorted manners to the extent that makes these models totally useless for any meaningful climate prediction.

I myself used to use climate simulation models for scientific studies, not for predictions, and learned about their problems and limitations in the process.

Ignoring non-CO2 climate determinants

Climate forecasting is simply impossible, if only because future changes in solar energy output are unknowable.  As to the impacts of human-caused CO2, they can't be judged "with the knowledge and technology we currently possess."
Other gross model simplifications include
# Ignorance about large and small-scale ocean dynamics
# A complete lack of meaningful representations of aerosol changes that generate clouds.
# Lack of understanding of drivers of ice-albedo (reflectivity) feedbacks: "Without a reasonably accurate representation, it is impossible to make any meaningful predictions of climate variations and changes in the middle and high latitudes and thus the entire planet."
# Inability to deal with water vapor elements
# Arbitrary "tunings" (fudges) of key parameters that are not understood
Concerning CO2 changes he says,

I want to point out a simple fact that it is impossible to correctly predict even the sense or direction of a change of a system when the prediction tool lacks and/or grossly distorts important non-linear processes, feedbacks in particular, that are present in the actual system …

… The real or realistically-simulated climate system is far more complex than an absurdly simple system simulated by the toys that have been used for climate predictions to date, and will be insurmountably difficult for those naïve climate researchers who have zero or very limited understanding of geophysical fluid dynamics. I understand geophysical fluid dynamics just a little, but enough to realize that the dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans are absolutely critical facets of the climate system if one hopes to ever make any meaningful prediction of climate variation.

Solar input, absurdly, is modelled as a "never changing quantity". He says, "It has only been several decades since we acquired  an ability to accurately monitor the incoming solar energy. In these several decades only, it has varied by one to two watts per square metre. Is it reasonable to assume that it will not vary any more than that in the next hundred years or longer for forecasting purposes? I would say, No."

There is much, much more. Read the whole thing.

But who are you going to believe: a superbly qualified Japanese scientist or a Swedish teenager with mental issues?

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

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JULY 2017

FOX NEWS' CHRIS WALLACE CONFRONTS AL GORE WITH HIS FAILED GLOBAL WARMING PREDICTIONS
 By Michael Bastasch 6/04/2017 - The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace confronted former Vice President Al Gore on his 2006 claim that unless drastic action was taken humanity would face a “true planetary emergency” in the next decade.

“Unless we take drastic measures the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years,” which Gore said would precipitate a “true planetary crisis” due to man-made global warming.

Wallace pointed out it’s been 11 years since Gore made the claim in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and there doesn’t seem to be a planetary emergency.

So did Gore admit he was wrong? Of course not!

Here’s how he answered:

Well we have seen a decline in emissions on a global basis. For the first time they’ve stabilized and started to decline. So some of the responses for the last 10 years have helped, but unfortunately and regrettably a lot of serious damage has been done.

Greenland, for example, has been losing one cubic kilometer of ice every single day. I went down to Miami and saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets on a sunny day. The same thing was true in Honolulu just two days ago, just from high tides because of the sea level rise now.

We are going to suffer some of these consequences, but we can limit and avoid the most catastrophic if we accelerate the pace of change that’s now beginning.

Gore also mentioned the directors of his upcoming sequel film “An Inconvenient Sequel” are adding a new segment at the end to account for President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change.

Gore’s first film “An Inconvenient Truth” has been credited with popularizing the global warming debate. The film emboldened environmentalists and probably played a role in the Obama administration’s failed effort to pass cap-and-trade legislation in 2009.

But many (if not all) the claims Gore made in his 2006 film never materialized. The Daily Caller News Foundation fact-checked Gore’s claims on his film’s ten-year anniversary. (After 10 Years Al Gore’s Film Is Still Alarmingly Inaccurate)

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

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MAY 2017

FORMER OBAMA OFFICIAL: BUREAUCRATS MANIPULATE CLIMATE STATS TO INFLUENCE POLICY
By Chris White 04/24/2017

A former member of the Obama administration claims Washington D.C. often uses “misleading” news releases about climate data to influence public opinion.

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion.

“What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data.

He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has increased from 1980 as an illustration of how federal agencies fudged climate data. Koonin said the NCA’s assessment was technically incorrect.

“What they forgot to tell you, and you don’t know until you read all the way into the fine print is that it actually decreased in the decades before that,” he said. The U.N. published reports in 2014 essentially mirroring Koonin’s argument.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century” and current data shows “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century.”

Press officers work with scientists within agencies like the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) and NASA and are responsible for crafting misleading press releases on climate, he added.

Koonin is not the only one claiming wrongdoing. House lawmakers with the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, for instance, recently jumpstarted an investigation into NOAA after a whistleblower said agency scientists rushed a landmark global warming study to influence policymakers.

Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, the committee’s chairman, will “move forward as soon as possible” in asking NOAA to hand over documents included in a 2015 subpoena on potential climate data tampering.

Koonin, who served under Obama from 2009 to 2011, went on to lament the politicization of science suggested that the ethos should be to “tell it like it is. You’re a scientist and it is your responsibility to put the facts on the table.”

NASA and NOAA’s actions, he said, are problematic, because “public opinion is formed by the data that is formed from those organizations and appears in newspapers.”

Neither agency responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

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MARCH 2017

GLOBAL WARMING AGENDA IS REALLY ABOUT DESTROYING CAPITALISM
By Martin Armstrong Feb 3, 2017 https://www.armstrongeconomics.com

A shocking statement was made by a United Nations official Christiana Figueres at a news conference in Brussels. Figueres admitted that the Global Warming conspiracy set by the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, of which she is the executive secretary, has a goal not of environmental activists to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy capitalism. She said very casually:

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

She even restated that goal ensuring it was not a mistake: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

I was invited to a major political dinner in Washington with the former Chairman of Temple University since I advised the University with respect to its portfolio. We were seated at one of those round tables with ten people. Because we were invited from a university, they placed us with the heads of the various environmental groups. They assumed they were in friendly company and began speaking freely. Dick Fox, my friend and Chairman of Temple, began to lead them on to get the truth behind their movement. Low and behold, they too admitted it was not about the environment, but to reduce population growth. Dick then asked them, “Whose grandchild are we trying to prevent from being born? Your’s or mine?”

All of these movements seem to have a hidden agenda that the press helps to misrepresent all the time. One must wonder, at what point will the press realize they are destroying their own future?

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SEPTEMBER 2015

GREAT LAKES WON'T COOPERATE WITH CLIMATE ALARMISTS
Rising Water Levels Confound Global Warming Claims
By Jack Spencer, Aug. 8, 2015

"Faster than ever before.” That’s how one headline from the Weather Channel described current changes in Great Lakes water levels. But the article itself acknowledged that Lakes Huron and Michigan, which come together in the Straits of Mackinac and so are considered one lake by hydrologists, actually rose faster 65 years ago. So why did the headline writer call the current rise “faster than ever before?"

For more than a decade, those who claim man-made global warming is "settled science" exploited below-average Great Lakes water levels to promote their hypothesis. Although the period from 1999 to 2013 set fewer records than previous low-water spells, it was repeatedly portrayed by environmentalists and their media allies as clear evidence of climate change.

This contention became untenable when water levels began increasing rapidly in the second half of 2013. Instead of accepting that their arguments were being washed away, those promoting man-made global warming latched on to the increase as evidence of an “extreme weather phenomenon” attributable to global warming.

Never mind that 65 years ago this body of water displayed an even faster rise.

“What we are saying is that the water level increase on Lake Michigan-Huron beginning January 2013 through 2014 is rivaled only by the increase that occurred between January 1950 and December 1951,” said Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit. “The criteria we’re using for comparison are increases over a 24-month period.”

The 1950-51 increase was slightly greater than the recent increase, yet media accounts create the impression that the latter was unique. Some articles that have since been removed from the Internet said precisely that. Others, like the one cited above, tried to have it both ways, suggesting the recent rise was unique while acknowledging the earlier rise was bigger.

Some who promote man-made global warming focus on what they refer to as the unprecedented 15-year period of lower-than-average Great Lakes water levels. First, the recent low levels prevailed for 14 years, not 15. More importantly, the “precedents” are all confined within the narrow 98-year period during which the Army Corps of Engineers has been taking measurements. This period includes just three distinct low-water-level episodes.

Of course, for most of the 4,000-plus years the Great Lakes have existed in their modern form (they first came into being around 10,000 years ago) no one was systematically tracking water levels. But the United States Geological Survey, which studies the geological evidence of water level changes going back millennia, says the swings were far more extreme in the distant past than in recent centuries.

USGS studies also indicate a roughly 400-year spell of near-drought conditions in the Great Plains and Great Lakes regions corresponding to the Medieval Warming Period. It is likely that the Great Lakes experienced frequent spells of low water levels while those conditions predominated, and some of those low level periods lasted longer than 14 years.

The 2013-2014 increase was the largest recorded for Lake Superior over a 24-month period — the largest during the 98 years for which records exist, that is. But Lake Superior water levels also recovered very quickly from the lowest recorded level in 1926, reaching above-average levels in 1927. But that increase does not qualify under the "within 24-months" criteria.

Permission to reprint this post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.

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AUGUST 2015

NOBEL LAUREATE'S 'EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES' SPEECH ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
By Howard Richman, July 9, 2015

At the July 3 Nobel laureates conference on Mainau Island, 30 of the 65 attendees signed a media reported letter urging action against global warming. Not reported by the media: the attendees listened to Norway's 1973 Nobel physics laureate, Ivar Giaever, give a truth­telling "Emperor's New Clothes" speech. Also, the majority of the Nobel laureates refused to sign the alarmist global­warming letter.

Giaever gave a great speech. His explanations were clear. His graphs were persuasive. He took the part of the boy in the Emperor's New Clothes folktale. The boy saw the emperor parading around naked and cried out, "The emperor has no clothes on!" Giaever was saying that the fraction-of-a-degree differences in temperature upon which global warming theory is based are as invisible as the Emperor's new clothes. He said:

To my surprise both "alarmist" and "deniers" (I guess that I'm quoted as a "denier") measure the average temperature for the whole earth for a whole year to a fraction of a degree, and that the result is significant. Of course it's not!

How can you possibly measure the average temperature for the whole earth and for the whole year and come up with a fraction of a degree? So, I have this cry here. I think the average temperature of the earth is equal to the Emperor's New Clothes. There was a boy who said, you know, who cried at might, "The Emperor has no clothes on," and I would cry out and say, "You can't measure the temperature for the whole earth with such accuracy!"

In The Emperor's New Clothes, the scam artists proclaim that those who can't see the pretend clothes are so incompetent that they should be fired. Today, similar insults are invoked in order to cower the opposition:

• The proponents of borders open to criminal immigrants proclaim that those who oppose them are "racists."

• The proponents of trade agreements with mercantilists proclaim that those who oppose them are "protectionists."

• The proponents of man­made global warming proclaim that those who oppose them are like "Holocaust deniers."

Donald Trump is currently telling the truth about illegal immigration and trade agreements and is refusing to be silenced by attacks. Ivar Giaever is telling the truth about global warming and is refusing to be silenced by insults.

There is a lot of truth in the Emperor's New Clothes folktale. Although attacks and insults can silence the truth, eventually a courageous truthteller speaks out. Then everyone looks around and sees that the emperor is parading around naked.

Howard Richman with his father and son co­authored the 2014 book Balanced Trade: Ending the Unbearable Costs of America’s Trade Deficits, published by Lexington Books, and the 2008 book Trading Away Our Future, published by Ideal Taxes Association.

Reprinted with permission from The American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/07/nobel_laureates_emperors_new_clothes_speech_about_global_warming.html

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JULY 2014

SCIENTISTS ADMIT POLAR BEAR NUMBERS WERE MADE
 UP TO 'SATISFY PUBLIC DEMAND'
Posted By Michael Bastasch  05/30/2014

This may come as a shocker to some, but scientists are not always right — especially when under intense public pressure for answers.

Researchers with the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) recently admitted to experienced zoologist and polar bear specialist Susan Crockford that the estimate given for the total number of polar bars in the Arctic was “simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.”

Crockford has been critical of official polar bear population estimates because they fail to include five large subpopulations of polar bears. Due to the uncertainty of the populations in these areas, PBSG did not include them in their official estimate — but the polar bear group did include other subpopulation estimates.

PBSG has for years said that global polar bear populations were between 20,000 and 25,000, but these estimates are likely much lower than how many polar bears are actually living in the world.

“Based on previous PBSG estimates and other research reports, it appears there are probably at least another 6,000 or so bears living in these regions and perhaps as many as 9,000 (or more) that are not included in any PBSG ‘global population estimate,’” Crockford wrote on her blog.

“These are guesses, to be sure, but they at least give a potential size,” Crockford added.

PBSG disclosed this information to Crockford ahead of the release of their Circumpolar Polar Bear Action Plan in which they intend to put a footnote explaining why their global population estimate is flawed.

“As part of past status reports, the PBSG has traditionally estimated a range for the total number of polar bears in the circumpolar Arctic,” PBSG says in its proposed footnote. “Since 2005, this range has been 20-25,000. It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.”

“It is also important to note that even though we have scientifically valid estimates for a majority of the subpopulations, some are dated,” PBSG continues. “Furthermore, there are no abundance estimates for the Arctic Basin, East Greenland, and the Russian subpopulations.”

“Consequently, there is either no, or only rudimentary, knowledge to support guesses about the possible abundance of polar bears in approximately half the areas they occupy,” says PBSG. “Thus, the range given for total global population should be viewed with great caution as it cannot be used to assess population trend over the long term.”

PBSG’s admission also comes after academics and government regulators have touted their polar bear population estimates to show that polar bear numbers have grown since the 1960s. PBSG estimates have also been used to show that polar bear populations have stabilized over the last 30 years.

Polar bear populations became the centerpiece of the effort to fight global warming due to claims that melting polar ice caps would cause the bears to become endangered in the near future. Years ago, some scientists predicted the Arctic would be virtually ice free by now.

Polar bears became the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act because they could potentially be harmed by global warming. But some recent studies have found that some polar bear subpopulations have actually flourished in recent years.

“So, the global estimates were… ‘simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand’ and according to this statement, were never meant to be considered scientific estimates, despite what they were called, the scientific group that issued them, and how they were used,” Crockford said.

“All this glosses over what I think is a critical point: none of these ‘global population estimates’ (from 2001 onward) came anywhere close to being estimates of the actual world population size of polar bears (regardless of how scientifically inaccurate they might have been) — rather, they were estimates of only the subpopulations that Arctic biologists have tried to count,” she added.

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URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/30/scientists-admit-polar-bear-numbers-were-made-up-to-satisfy-public-demand/

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MAY 2014

COMMON SENSE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
By Marc Hopin, April 18, 2014

Scientists believe that over the last two billion years or so, there have been as many as seventeen times that Earth has experienced an Ice Age. They suspect an Ice Age when they see shifts in geological formations that are so severe that the only explanation appears to be glaciers forming and moving large quantities of land from one part of the continent to another part.

Each Ice Age is estimated to have lasted for at least 100,000 years, with some lasting millions of years. Each was eventually followed by a period of gradual warming, resulting in the glaciers melting and retreating, and leaving behind the land that the glaciers had moved or carved. Contrary to anything being reported in the mainstream media, we are currently living in an Ice Age.

Man did not inhabit the planet during any of the Ice Ages, except the last one. For those Ice Ages that took place prior to man, the only inhabitants of the planet were animals and plants. They were also all that was left when the subsequent periods of warming began and ended. Nature, and nature alone, caused these periods of climate change.

The men and women who lived through their Ice Age, not knowing that there had been previous periods of global cooling, probably wondered what they did to cause the planet to become so cold. Did they burn too many fires, kill too many animals for food and clothing, or not kill enough animals, resulting in excessive animal flatulence? Or perhaps they did not wonder at all, knowing that acts of nature were beyond their control.

And herein is the problem for climate scientists. There is no "normal" temperature for Earth. What is normal is for the temperature, over hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of years, to vary greatly. The cycle of periods of extreme warmth and cold, and everything in between, is what is normal. Before man and after man, the Earth has experienced these huge swings in temperatures. Who are we to say that the climate for the last couple of hundred-thousand years is normal and that some deviation of a degree or two is abnormal? Who are we to say that the rising or falling of sea levels from recent levels is abnormal? To the contrary, variations in temperatures and in sea levels have been taking place for the 4.5 billion years of the Earth's existence. Change is what is normal.

The different Ice Ages have proven to be a reset button of sorts. Some of them have cleansed the planet of life that had previously dominated the surface and the seas. The glaciers destroyed that which was not wise enough or which was unable to get out of its path and then receded to leave behind a clean slate for nature to begin anew. Destruction and renewal is what is normal.

Short of a Star Wars-like planet-annihilating Death Star, Earth will survive any attempts by man to destroy the planet. We see the power of Earth with every hurricane, tsunami, tornado, earthquake, and volcano. Man has yet to defeat any of these singular events. Our batting average is .000. Earth is pitching a perfect game against us.

This is a commonsense analysis of climate change. It is based on the history of Earth’s climate, not on a computer model trying to predict the future. Climate-predicting computer models are man-made, and their outcomes are self-serving for the men who designed them, while actual changes to the climate are the result of natural, cyclical forces, far beyond the control of man.

Marc Hopin is the author of the children's book The Tooth Fairy Needs Your Teeth!

Page reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/common_sense_and_climate_change.html

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MARCH 2013

GLOBAL WARMING 'SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS' DEBUNKED
Thomas Lifson, February 13, 2013

A peer-reviewed survey of 1077 geoscientists and engineers finds that "only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis," according to James Taylor, writing at Forbes.com. As he points out, if there is a scientific consensus at all, it would have to be skepticism toward anthropogenic global warming. Yet President Obama in his State of the Union speech Tuesday cited the now-discredited notion of such a consensus as the foundation of his green agenda.

It is bunk.

... merely 36 percent of respondents fit the "Comply with Kyoto" model. The scientists in this group "express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause."

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

This is important evidence. The results cannot be ascribed to conservative skeptics (no doubt paid off by men in top hats with bundles of cash) ginning up a biased survey. Not only was it peer reviewed and published in an established journal, Organization Studies, Taylor notes:

One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as "denier" to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as "speaking against climate science" rather than "speaking against asserted climate projections." Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the 'vast right-wing climate denial machine.'

Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists.

Not only is global warming a fallacy and fraud, it is being sold by President Obama on the basis of a fallacy and fraud.

Hat tip: John Dunn

Page reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/02/global_warming_scientific_consensus_debunked.html

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AUGUST 2012

TWO MILLENNIA OF GLOBAL COOLING?
Andrew Bostom, July 11, 2012

Notwithstanding the latest hysterical claims from the sadly politicized climate scientologists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), insisting 2011 was somehow "a year of extreme weather," serious investigators at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have just published a sobering analysis in Nature Climate Change which reconstructs 2000 years of climate within northern Europe.

Utilizing tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia, the investigators created a sequence dating back to 138 BC. The density measurements are closely correlated with the summer temperatures in a targeted region on the edge of the Nordic taiga, enabling them to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality. Their high-resolution representation confirmed temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also demonstrated the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age. (See image, below)

In addition to depicting these cold and warm phases which were not influenced at all by anthropogenic warming, but rather "by solar output and (grouped) volcanic activity changes" - the new climate reconstruction curve also reveals a striking if unexpected phenomenon. Professor Dr. Jan Esper of the investigative team provided this apt summary assessment of the main findings:

We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low. Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.

Page reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/two_millennia_of_global_cooling.html

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MAY 2012

TOO MANY POLAR BEARS
April 6, 2012 by Don Surber http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber

Al Gore is wrong. James Hansen is wrong. Michael Mann is wrong. Phil Jones is wrong. Andrew Revkin is wrong. All those smarmy, self-righteous, sanctimonious and insufferable jerks who use pseudo-science to push their stealth socialism to save the planet are dead wrong.

Global warming is not killing off polar bears.

“The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing,” the Globe and Mail in Toronto reported.

We have too many polar bears — 5 times the number estimated in the 1960s when hunting for polar bears was effectively banned.

From the Globe and Mail in Toronto:

“The debate over the polar-bear population has been raging for years, frequently pitting scientists against Inuit. In 2004, Environment Canada researchers concluded that the numbers in the region had dropped by 22 per cent since 1984, to 935. They also estimated that by 2011, the population would decrease to about 610. That sparked worldwide concern about the future of the bears and prompted the Canadian and American governments to introduce legislation to protect them.

“But many Inuit communities said the researchers were wrong. They said the bear population was increasing and they cited reports from hunters who kept seeing more bears. Mr. Gissing said that encouraged the government to conduct the recent study, which involved 8,000 kilometres of aerial surveying last August along the coast and offshore islands.

Mr. Gissing said he hopes the results lead to more research and a better understanding of polar bears. He said the media in southern Canada has led people to believe polar bears are endangered. “They are not.” He added that there are about 25,000 polar bears across Canada’s Arctic. “That’s likely the highest [population level] there has ever been.”

“There’s much at stake in the debate. Population figures are used to calculate quotas for hunting, a lucrative industry for many northern communities. Hunting polar bears is highly regulated but Inuit communities can sell their quota to sport hunters, who must hunt with Inuit guides. A polar-bear hunting trip can cost up to $50,000. Demand for polar-bear fur is also soaring in places like China and Russia and prices for some pelts have doubled in the past couple of years, reaching as high as $15,000.”

I know that readers are thinking, but Don, that is only one report. But the report confirms my suspicions. For years, polar bear experts have reported a growing number of underweight polar bears heading south for food. Far from being signs of an apocalyptic extinction, those are classic signs of overpopulation. The habitat is not shrinking; over-breeding that has the species overrunning the land (in this case the sea. We stopped hunting to beef up the herd, so to speak. Now the polar bears suffer as there are too many of them.

Happy hunting.

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MAY 2012

THE SCIENCE OF HALF-BAKED IDEAS
By Christopher Chantrill, March 28, 2012

The more we learn about climate science, the more we learn what a shabby, back-of-the-envelope business it is. Dr. Michael Mann, the climate science poster boy who simplified the global climate of the last millennium into a hockey stick, just came out with a book to remind us how anyone who disagrees with him is a shill for dark forces. He's a bully, and in the ClimateGate e-mails, he bullies even his colleagues.

It's déjà vu all over again, of course. Fifty years ago, another academic published a shabby little paper and then succeeded in bullying everyone into endorsing his view that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease. Gary Taubes describes this researcher's personality in Good Calories, Bad Calories:

Henry Blackburn, the long-time collaborator at [the University of] Minnesota, described him as "frank to the point of bluntness, and critical to the point of sharpness." David Kritchevsky, who studied cholesterol metabolism at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and was a competitor, described [him] as "pretty ruthless" and not a likely winner of any "Mr. Congeniality" awards.

This "frank ... critical ... ruthless" academic was Ancel Keys, inventor of the K-ration. He and his wife (an expert in measuring cholesterol) investigated several hundred people in the general population of Naples, Italy in the early 1950s and found that they measured low on cholesterol and had less heart disease than the fat-eating Neapolitan rich. Keys decided pretty quickly that dietary fat was the main cause of heart disease and spent the next couple of decades doing research to confirm his hypothesis.

The political situation back then was eerily familiar to our own time. In the early 1950s, the health establishment had just finished up the greatest public health success story of all time. With sanitation and vaccination, public heath had conquered the great scourges of infectious disease. So what could it do for an encore? It could solve the post-World War II heart-disease scare and apply the same epidemiological tools that had isolated the cause of cholera and typhoid. It was a no-brainer.

Fast-forward to climate science in the 1980s. The environmental establishment had just achieved the great goals of clean air and clean water and had transformed the U.S. metropolitan environment. What could it do for an encore? It could apply the same science, public relations, and regulatory tools used for the environmental success and save the planet from catastrophic global warming!

As we skeptics have seen, the global warming enthusiasts often had more enthusiasm than science. Climate science is a young science, and it doesn't know all that much about the climate. Not yet. The same was true back when heart disease became the number-one killer in the years immediately after World War II. What was killing all those middle-class Americans? Ancel Keys decided that it was the saturated fat in foods, and he couldn't wait for the results of his research -- people were dying. So he persuaded the government to fight cholesterol with low-fat diets right away. When the research results came in, they were close to the Folgers taste test: "no difference." But by then, big budgets and reputations were committed to the idea that a high-fat diet causes heart disease, and the government couldn't change its mind.

People with half-baked ideas that are not ready for prime time instinctively grasp that they need the bludgeon of government force. There's a long and tragic history of half-baked ideas linked up to government, from Horace Mann's half-baked idea in the 1830s that government education would reduce crime, Marx's half-baked critique of capitalism, and on to Lysenko and "whole language" reading. It makes sense that Michael Mann's flawed Hockey Stick paper would be boosted at the dawn of climate science by the global-warming alarmists and given an authority it didn't deserve. So also did Ancel Keys' cholesterol theory get established into a huge government war on fat.

You can see how young folk get sucked into this. Young Karl Marx looked out at the world in the 1840s and saw an out-of-control industrial revolution. Something had to be done before the world ended! Same with Ancel Keys, when he had his Aha! moment about cholesterol at a conference on nutrition and disease in Naples in 1951. No doubt the young James Hansen and the young Michael Mann had their Aha! moments as well.

The separation of church and state is an attempt to keep religious enthusiasm at a distance from the temptations of government force. Only now we need a separation of secular church and state. That way we can keep secular-religious ideas on saving the planet at a distance from political power.

Then, when we've made progress on that front, we could try the separation of science and state, and even the separation of economy and state.

We've just got to save the planet from second-rate scientists and their half-baked ideas.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.

Page reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/03/the_science_of_half-baked_ideas.html

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APRIL 2012

MOST POLAR ICE EVER RECORDED
March 11, 2012 by Don Surber http://blogs.dailymail.com

So much for an ice-free Arctic. Henry Hudson’s long-ago dream of a Northwest Passage that would link England to the Orient by sea will have to wait another century as Mother Earth gives him the cold shoulder. Again.

From Real Science: “1979 was the peak year for Arctic ice, yet 2012 has more ice around Greenland and Alaska than 1979 did.”

Same date satellite data seems to show that Iceland and everywhere else is iced over this year when they were feeling a little green 33 years ago.

Of course, our moral and intellectual superiors elsewhere in the press keep banging the drums of Man Caused Global Warming.

From Medill Reports, which is written and produced by graduate journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill school:

Rising temperatures and more heat waves due to climate change can cause heat stroke, heart attacks, dehydration and even increased incidences of violent crime and suicide, said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, associate director of Harvard University’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. Bernstein kicked off a day of provocative presentations at Northwestern University’s third annual Climate Change Symposium, held Thursday. He showed how seemingly small changes in average temperatures translate into much longer cycles of very hot days and record hot days.

Rising sea levels and more extreme weather events can displace large numbers of people living in coastal cities or island nations, he said. “Weather refugees” have higher incidences of infectious diseases, he noted. Bernstein compared the lackluster political and social response regarding the climate change crisis to a scenario from emergency medicine.

“The situation is akin to showing up to the emergency room with some pain in your belly and it hurts on your right side and you feel nauseous. And the emergency room doctor says, ‘Boy that’s probably some indigestion. We are going to send you home.’ And you are thinking, ‘Could this be appendicitis?’ ”

Just how a temperature increase does all this is not explained. Not being a scientist, I would compare the crime and suicide rates in New Delhi — a warm place — to those of Detroit. But I don’t think the good doctor did so and I don’t think reporter Lisa Barbella asked.

It’s just another attention grabbing headline — “Harvard physician warns of climate change health hazards” — that shows the same scare tactics used by scam artists. I was watching an episode of “Family Guy” where a salesman tries to sell the gullible father “volcano insurance” in Rhode Island. That’s what all this nonsense reminds me of.

Anyway, the polar bears are safer today than they were 33 years ago.

And come to think of it, the rest of us are from “heat stroke, heart attacks, dehydration and even increased incidences of violent crime and suicide.” reports of seas rising from a melting polar icecap are greatly exaggerated.

Hat tip: Tom Nelson.

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APRIL 2012

BRITISH PARLIAMENT HEARD DEVASTATING TESTIMONY OVERTURNING THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX
Jerry Schmitt, February 24, 2012

James Delingpole of The Telegraph reports that the British Parliament heard devastating testimony overturning the global warming hoax from MIT's Richard Lindzen who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.  Prof. Lindzen sounded the alarm early over the systematic subversion of Climate Sciences in North America and Europe by a cabal centered around Al Gore and the UN's Maurice Strong.

The Telegraph  has published Prof. Lindzen's at http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_21 as the House of Commons undertakes to "Reconsider the Climate Change Act" -- the provisions of which have decimated the British economy.  America's hapless Republicans somehow are unable to organize an effective political debate over global warming hysteria that is affecting everything from Solyndra to the Keystone Pipeline-- even though I'm sure Prof. Lindzen is available to testify before Congress.  This renewed debate in Parliament represents a significant shift in the balance of power against the eco-fanatics.

Page reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/02/global_warming_skeptic_prof_lindzen_testifies_before_house_of_commons.html

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FEBRUARY 2012

TODAY'S PROOF OF GLOBAL WARMING
December 16, 2011 by Don Surber , See http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/

Beluga whales are up to 20 feet long and can weigh 2 tons. Polar bears love them because not only are they tasty, but each one has a million calories. Eat one and you don’t have to hunt for a month.

Well, polar bears, soup’s on because more than 100 of these million-calorie meals are stuck in the frozen food section of Chukotka, Russia. Vlad Putin may have to send in icebreakers because the White Sea and Barents Sea in the northwest of Russia are freezing fast.

From Agence France Presse:

“A group of over 100 Beluga whales are cut off from the sea and are prisoners of ice floes in the Bering Sea,” the Chukotka region said in a statement on its website, saying the local governor Roman Kopin had requested an ice-breaker.

It said that the whales were trapped just 15 kilometres (10 miles) south of the village of Yanrakynot on the Bering Sea.
The statement said the Kopin had written a letter to Transport Minister Igor Levitin and Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu “to study the possibility of sending an ice-breaker to save the whales.”

It said that the whales risked becoming starved and the advance of the ice floes was reducing the space that they had to swim in.

“Given the lack of food and the speed at which the water is freezing, all the animals are threatened with exhaustion and death,” it added.

The AFP story went on to note: “The Beluga whale is a protected species in Russia and it is one of a handful of wild animals whose cause has been championed by Russian Prime Minister and nature lover Vladimir Putin.”

Now we know that because this event does not fit the global warming narrative, this is just weather. Or maybe global warming now causes ice.

The Associated Press report:

Russia scrambles to save some 100 trapped whales

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian agencies are scrambling to some 100 beluga whales — an endangered species — that are trapped among large chunks of polar ice floating in the frigid Bering Sea.

Russia’s nature protection watchdog says there is a chance that the whales might perish. Authorities say the ice is 10-15 centimeters (4-6 inches) thick and is preventing the whales from reaching the open sea where they can swim freely.

Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology said Thursday that it has asked the Transportation Ministry for help and that an inter-departmental group is working on how to save the whales.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the beluga whale as an endangered species in 2008.

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DECEMBER 2011

AP, THEY FOUND YOUR MISSING CARIBOU
November 22, 2011 by Don Surber

The story two Octobers ago by Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press was a sad one. Caribou were dwindling due to mankind’s global warming! A survey found that a quarter-million caribou had disappeared. Wrote Charles J. Handley: “Global warming has boosted temperatures in the Arctic twice as much as elsewhere, and Canadian researchers say the natural balance is suffering.”
Two years later, those missing caribou have been found. In Saskatchewan. From the Canadian Press:

A vast herd of northern caribou that scientists feared had vanished from the face of the Earth has been found, safe and sound — pretty much where aboriginal elders said it would be all along.

“The Beverly herd has not disappeared,” said John Nagy, lead author of a recently published study that has biologists across the North relieved.

Those scientists were shaken by a 2009 survey on the traditional calving grounds of the Beverly herd, which ranges over a huge swath of tundra from northern Saskatchewan to the Arctic coast. A herd that once numbered 276,000 animals seemed to have completely disappeared, the most dramatic and chilling example of a general decline in barren-ground caribou.

But Nagy’s research — and consultation with the communities that live with the animals — concludes differently.

His work springs from recent studies that question the long-held theory that caribou always return to the same calving ground. It holds that different herds use different grounds, and that’s what sets them apart.

“In the past, herds have been defined based on their calving grounds,” said Nagy. “However, it’s been shown that not all herds maintain fidelity to their calving grounds.”

Herds are now defined by which animals hang out together, not by where they give birth.

“It’s actually behavior that structures these herds, not calving grounds.”

It turns out that the Beverly herd has simply shifted its calving grounds north from the central barrens near Baker Lake, Nunavut, to the coastal regions around Queen Maud Gulf. Nagy’s analysis of radio-tracking data showed caribou in the region once thought to belong to the Ahiak herd are, in fact, Beverly animals.

So, it was a false alarm. The herd did not die out. It switched locations. I’m glad. As one scientist said: “Many of the community people reported that elders think this is nothing new. Caribou move.”

Once again, we learn that the Man-made Global Warming alarmists were wrong.

They stated something as fact.

It was a fallacy.

They leaped to a conclusion that just was not there.

Don’t expect a follow up from the Associated Press. the world suffering from the evils of greedy capitalists is a better story than scientists don’t know what they are talking about.

Caribou/climate expert Liv Solveig Vors told the Associated Press two years ago: “Climate change is changing the way they’re [caribou are] interacting with their food, directly and indirectly.” Charles J. Hadley also wrote, “Vors said caribou are unlikely to adjust.”

Apparently they do and they did.

Hat tip: Kate at Small Dead Animals.  See http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/

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OCTOBER 2011

GLOBAL WARMING WILL LEAD TO ALIEN INVASIONS?
By Russ Harding, Aug. 25, 2011

Climate change alarmists have been busy blaming every conceivable threat to mankind and the planet on global warming. The mainstream media eagerly report every new study that predicts the Armageddon-like consequences we can expect from defiling the planet by breathing and burning fossil fuels. If we did not have enough to fear from melting glaciers flooding our major cities to extensive droughts and the invasion of exotic diseases, we now have to worry about aliens invading the planet to punish us for our eco-sins.

A recent study, “Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis,” released by the Pennsylvania State University Geography Department, contemplates extraterrestrial revenge due to man-made global warming. According to the authors, “….ecosystem-valuing universalist ETI may observe humanity’s ecological destructive tendencies and wipe humanity out in order to preserve the Earth system as a whole.” It sounds like an idea for a new Al Gore film. The authors go on to say: “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.”

It’s not surprising that climate change alarmists would turn to science fiction to support their cause. They have found it increasingly difficult to get the American public to buy their doomsday scenarios, especially when the public considers that regulations designed to reduce CO2 emissions come with a lot of economic harm and little environmental gain.

Permission to reprint this article in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.  http://www.mackinac.org

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DECEMBER 2010

MONEY FOR NOTHIN'
Randy Fardal, November 08, 2010