An intellectual heavyweight outside of the “99%” scientific agreement on global warming
NYT
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him.
There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.”
Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.
IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.”
Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
With the unique ability to cut through all the politically correct courtesies, he says,
“The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”
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Global warming bait-and-switch
Global warming (aka climate change) has been “real” since time began. Witness the Ice Ages, interglacial periods, Medieval Warm Period (950-1350), Little Ice Age (1400-1850), Anesazi drought, Dust Bowl, and conversion of verdant river valleys into the Sahara Desert some 4,000 years ago.
No one yet knows what solar energy fluctuations, planetary orbit shifts, recurrent oscillations in ocean currents, cloud cover variation and other natural forces combined to cause these potent climatic changes. But there is no evidence that they have suddenly been displaced by human CO2 emissions.
Growing numbers of scientists say the climate change debate is far from over, and global warming was never a crisis. Over 650 certified meteorologists and climate scientists are on a US Senate compilation of climate cataclysm skeptics – and 32,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Petition, saying they dispute claims that humans are causing climate change, and the changes will be disastrous.
Confessions of a (fictional) ‘consensus’ climate scientist
Hello. I am a “consensus” climate scientist, and I must confess that I and many of my fellow climate scientists haven’t been entirely honest with the public over the last 20 years or so on the issue of global warming, what causes it, and what damage it is likely to cause. Therefore, I have decided to come clean and tell the public honestly what “consensus” climate science is really all about.
I know we’ve told you that the science is “settled” and “certain” and that anyone who dares question it is either senile or crazy or in the pay of the oil companies. But it’s not true. There is only circumstantial evidence that human activities are the main cause of warming, and there’s no scientific evidence at all that warming will be disastrous. There is just speculation.
For one thing, the carbon cycle is just one of dozens, maybe hundreds of factors affecting the planet’s climate. It isn’t the “principal” driver of climate. And that means humans can’t be the “principal” driver of climate, either, as Al Gore charges, since our contribution to the carbon cycle is only 5 per cent a year; nature supplies 95 per cent.
The ‘100 per cent consensus’ is a myth.
Well, I’m exposing another lie: there is no “consensus.” There are thousands of scientists who don’t believe in the human-caused, catastrophic global warming theory. However, many are afraid to speak out because they will lose research grants -the U.S. alone spends an estimated $4 billion a year on climate research – and possibly have their careers ruined by their “consensus” colleagues.
My “consensus” colleagues accuse global warming skeptics of being in the pay of the oil companies. If so, they’re either highly principled or really dumb: the oil companies don’t pay nearly as well for skeptical research as governments do for research confirming global warming. Even if it’s not warming.
Whether the planet warms or cools, human activities are only a small part of the climate system. Cutting down on carbon emissions will only have a small effect on climate, so there’s no point in wrecking industrial civilization to prevent a fraction of a degree of warming. And increased carbon dioxide levels won’t cause “runaway” warming. How do we know? Because CO2 levels were much higher in the past and it didn’t happen.
Less Than Half of Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory
Consensus? What consensus?
A new survey about to be published by the journal Energy and Environment finds that less than 50 percent of the scientific papers written about climate change since 2004 have endorsed the view that man’s activities are causing global warming.
As reported by DailyTech Wednesday (emphasis added throughout):
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as [history professor Naomi] Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”
Think someone will be interviewing Al Gore in the next couple of days to get his view on this? Or James Hansen? Or any of the global warming alarmists?
But I digress:
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the “primary” cause of warming, but it doesn’t require any belief or support for “catastrophic” global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
Wind 101: Global Warming; Junk Science?
We know that atmospheric carbon is increasing. We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that started in 1850 at the end of what is called the Little Ice Age. It is scientifically impossible to prove whether the subsequent warming is natural or man-made.
Greens say, rightly, that the best scientific assessment today is that global warming is occurring. Yet never in history have scientists accurately predicted what will happen 100 years later. A century ago no scientists predicted the internet, microwave ovens, TV, nuclear explosions or antibiotics. It is impossible, even stupid, to predict the distant future.
That scientific truth is rarely mentioned. Why? Because the global warming movement has now become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with thousands of jobs and millions in funding for NGOs and think-tanks, top jobs and prizes for scientists, and huge media coverage for predictions of disaster.
The vested interests in the global warming theory are now as strong, rich and politically influential as the biggest multinationals. It is no co-incidence, says Crichton, that so many scientists sceptical of global warming are retired professors: they have no need to chase research grants and chairs.
Washington DC, Jan 27th 2009: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.
Climate Change: Hoax of the Century
The climate change hoax is based on faulty science from two things. First, hoaxers assume that ice layers give information on temperature like tree rings do with rainfall. Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, from thousands of years of deposits, are measured for CO2 content of the air at the time the snow layer was deposited and thickness of the ice layers. The thickness of these snow fall layers is then assumed to be an indication of global temperature. There are numerous errors in this assumption, which have been presented in a more technical analysis, but for now pretend that this evidence is true. The hoaxers then show graphs over time with a near perfect match of CO2 levels and snow thickness and by implication the earth’s temperature. The second bit of “proof” of human caused global warming is the Global Climate Model which is available to all at Wikipedia. By their own admission, this model was developed for SHORT RANGE weather forecasting and we all know how accurate that is. This formula, though not given on this web site, has a hundred parameters each with its own coefficient and exponent. By manipulating these numbers the hoaxers are able to “prove” that an increase of CO2 will raise world temperature.
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare.
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for “emissions trading”, “carbon capture”, building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to “biofuels”, are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Don’t listen to Gore. The sky is NOT falling!
Anyone who believes in global warming should at least watch this video.
I watched An Inconvenient Truth; I sat through the whole thing even though I think Gore can be a serious jerk. I even teared up when the polar bear couldn’t find any ice to climb on.
Unless you are a scientist out there collecting and analyzing atmospheric data yourself, then you need to listen to scientists. And if you’re only listening to one side of an argument, then you can’t say your opinion is informed or well-thought-out.
Global Warming Hoax Has Been Good to Al Gore
Though Al Gore failed as a presidential candidate, he has succeeded wildly as a con man, milking millions of dollars out of the global warming hoax:
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore left the White House seven years ago with less than $2 million in assets, including a Virginia home and the family farm in Tennessee. Now he’s making enough to put $35 million in hedge funds and other private partnerships.
Gore invested the money with Capricorn Investment Group LLC, a Palo Alto, California, firm that selects the private funds for clients and invests in makers of environmentally friendly products, according to a Feb. 1 securities filing. Capricorn was founded by billionaire Jeffrey Skoll, former president of EBay Inc. and an executive producer of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary film on global warming.
It looks like Gore stands to make $millions more — or even $billions, if the media can keep the hoax propped up long enough.
Thanks to global warming hysteria, the Goracle is able to charge a preposterously greedy $175,000 speaking fee. Already his net worth is well into nine figures. Not all of his riches come from the climate change hoax; he’s made a mint from his involvement with left-leaning Google and Apple, which are no doubt grateful to him for inventing the Internet. But if Gore surpasses Warren Buffett at the top of the limousine liberal list, it will be through the clever strategy of using Capricorn to invest in products that his own overblown propaganda will inspire our increasingly authoritarian government to impose.
No tags for this post.The Great Global Warming Swindle
Everything you’ve ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue. This film blows the whistle on the biggest swindle in modern history. We are told that ‘Man Made Global Warming’ is the biggest ever threat to mankind. There is no room for scientific doubt. Well, watch this film and make up your own mind.
One of the most curious aspects of the global warming alarm is the persistent reluctance of some climate scientists to consider the role of the sun. The idea that variations in solar activity, observable in the form of sun spots, influence the earth’s climate has a long, important history, stretching back to the astronomers Maunder, Herschel and beyond. It would be surprising, surely, if the sun did not have a major influence on the earth’s climate (why is summer warmer than winter?).
One central problem for those who promote the idea of man made global warming is the earth’s temperature record – on almost all time scales.
In the last decade, there has been no clear warming trend (as the UK Met Office and IPCC’s own figures demonstrate). In the last century, much of the warming occurred prior to 1940, when human emissions of CO2 were relatively small compared to today. During the post-war economic boom (when one would have expected the temperature to rise) the world cooled, from the 1940s till the mid-70s (again, this is evident from accepted data used by the IPCC).
There is no evidence that CO2 has ever ‘driven’ the climate in the past, nor is there any compelling evidence that it is doing so now.
Well, he’d be in more of a position to access the facts than most. I personally don’t care whether the facts say we are responsible for global warming or not. I just want to know what is happening and what we all can to to improve things.