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The Stars Might Lie, But The Numbers Never Do (A Global Warming Review)

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As the House begins its final sprint to rush some sort of cap & trade (tax) legislation to a floor vote this coming week (HR 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill), it is worth taking stock of where things stand.  I received an email from an Obama supporter (who once confessed, in secret, that soon after his election they had the beginnings of “serious doubts” about his ability to do his job) that contained what I can only call a progressive’s campaign article from The Nation.  One statement summed up its whole, wordy call to arms to push forward with Obama’s fascist plans:

We also need to expand the agenda for reform. For example, if we are to make the investments vital to our future, as the president has called for, a sustained expansion of public investment is essential–and that will require a far bolder tax policy.

It goes on to blather with reassuring hubris about taxes on the “wealthy” and those evil businesses who dare provide people with private sector jobs, but because of its immediacy, this piece is going to focus on the problems with cap & trade.  And the root cause of cap & trade is the New Religion of global warming.  Now, as we’ve noted here before, the gist of implementing cap & trade as mitigation to global warming is intended to gain government and special interest control of natural resources and thereby gain power and control over American citizens once it is realized that the Earth may more likely be entering a serious cooling period.  Plainly put, it’s all about money, not science.  Science hasn’t been in this picture for decades. 

In response to my friend’s email, I sent back a link to an article that presents an overview of some initial reactions to Obama’s latest “climate report”.  A report that, it should be known, was produced by more than 30 scientists working across 13 government agencies.  A report that, according to a UK Guardian article, was:

 “finalized in late April, but Obama administration officials spent several weeks planning (its)  release, honing the language and graphics to make it accessible to non-scientists and to sharpen its core message:  America must take action on climate change.

As part of the PR surrounding the release of the report, the administration approached the San Francisco consulting firm, Resource Media, which specialises in environmental campaigning, to produce a shorter and more digestible brochure of today’s report for wider public distribution.”

Let’s pretend we have some common sense for a moment and consider this carefully.  If the report was so solid in its facts, why was there a need for the administration to spend “weeks” tweaking its message?  Why did the administration need to hire a PR firm whose sole reason d’etre is putting warm, fuzzy spins on the myth of global warming?

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and comes out of Chicago (or San Francisco), it ain’t worth the pot used to hold the water to cook it in, my friends.

The truth is that the “science” upon which the administration’s “report” is based is flawed.  As in skewed.  As in downright wacked.   And with its purpose being politically-motivated and, based on previous experience, very likely deliberately missing and/or excluding key points.  Another in a series of non-partisan scientific reports was released this month by the Nongovermental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).  Here are a few pertinent excerpts.  It is important to note these scientists didn’t need to use a PR firm to translate (spin) it for you so you can understand what they are saying (emphases mine).:

“The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors were appointed by governments, and its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) have been subject to approval by member governments of the UN. The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all supported by government contracts, which pay not only for their research but for their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds.”

“The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (IPCCSAR, 1995) was completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contained the memorable conclusion, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The SAR was again heavily criticized, this time for having undergone significant changes in the body of the report to make it ‘conform’ to the SPM—after it was finally approved by the scientists involved in writing the report. Not only was the report altered, but a key graph was also doctored to suggest a human influence. The evidence presented to support the SPM conclusion turned out to be completely spurious.

 There is voluminous materialavailable about these text changes, including a Wall StreetJournaleditorial article by Dr. Frederick Seitz (Seitz, 1996). This led to heated discussions between supporters of the IPCC and those who were aware of the altered text and graph, including an exchange of letters in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Singer et al., 1997).”

“The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-TAR 2001) was noteworthy for its use of spurious scientific papers to back up its SPM claim of “new and stronger evidence” of anthropogenic global warming. One of these was the so-called “hockeystick” paper, an analysis of proxy data, which claimed the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was later found to contain basic errors in its statistical analysis(McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005; Wegman et al., 2006). The IPCC also supported a paper that claimed pre-1940 warming was of human origin and caused by greenhouse gases. This work, too, contained fundamental errors in its statistical analysis. The SEPP response to TAR was a 2002 booklet, The Kyoto Protocol is Not Backed by Science (SEPP, 2002).”

“The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-AR4 2007) was published in 2007; the SPM of Working Group I was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was released in May—after it had been changed, once again, to “conform” to the Summary. It is  significant that AR4 no longer makes use of the hockey-stick paper or the paper claiming pre-1940 human-caused warming.  Once again  controversy ensued, however, this time when the IPCC refused to publicly share comments submitted by peer-reviewers, then sent all the reviewers’ comments in hard copy to a library that was closed for renovation, and then finally, but only under pressure, posted them online. Inspection of those comments revealed that the authors had rejected more than half of all the reviewers’ comments in the crucial chapter attributing recent warming to human activities.

AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original). However, as the present report will show, it ignored available evidence against a human contribution to current warming and the substantial research of the past few years on the effects of solar activity on climate change.

Why have IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason.

Another reason for the IPCC’s unreliability is the naive acceptance by policymakers of “peer-reviewed” literature as necessarily authoritative.It has become the case that refereeing standards for many climate change papers are inadequate, often because of the use of an “invisible college” of reviewers of like inclination to a paper’s authors (Wegman et al., 2006). Policy should be set upon a background of demonstrable science, not upon simple (and often mistaken) assertions that, because a paper was refereed, its conclusions must be accepted.”

Translation:  The IPCC is under pressure to conform to economically-motivated political interests.  In my neck of the woods, the conditions under which IPCC scientists “work” is called a conflict of interest.  Lots of folks call it the fox watching henhouse.  No matter what you call it, it is just flat-out wrong and those who would support and encourage any action taken on this kind of bad science must be viewed with nothing less than great suspicion.  For this kind of “science” is when you can rest assured that its supporters  have a vested interest in personal gain, not some lofty goal for the good of humankind. 

It was argued to me that it is merely a few rogue, “flat-earth” or “fringe”-type scientists who are running around trying to destroy Obama’s U.N.-backed (gods help us all) plans.  Nice try but, frankly, it’s as wrong as the early Darwinians believing in and perpetuating the “romantic” view of the Middle Ages being the time it became common knowledge the Earth is spherical, not flat, when they used the same “flat earth” slur against Christians.  The Darwinians gleefully stepped into a stinky “scientific belief” that was the unfortunate – and wrong – result of Washington Irving’s 1828 fictional account of Christopher Columbus’ attempt to sail to Japan in a ship too small to make such a journey.  Fact is that most of the educated world realized the Earth is a sphere by about 3 BCE and only China, despite her technological advancements, took until the 17th century to come to the same realization (and then only because of Jesuits holding high positions as astronomers at the Chinese court).

The bottom line of all this is that is is best argued that there does NOT exist a collective consensus among scientists about the effects of humans on global warming.  And because of that it is dangerous for people to rush to any actions that will have long-term soci-economic ramifications when such long-term socio-economic ramifications are harmful the the majority of Americans solely for the great gain of a few.  Some proof of the size of the disagreement about global warming that liberals simply cannot get their brain cell around can be found in “The Petition Project”.  As of the latest NIPCC report (see Appendix 4, that details the purpose and process by which signatures are collected), 31,478 American scientists have signed the following statement:

PetitionProjectForm-sm

The NIPCC report goes on to state that, “This is a remarkably strong statement of dissent from the perspective advanced by the IPCC, and it is similar to the perspective represented by the NIPCC and the current report. The fact that more than ten times as many scientists have signed it as are alleged to have “participated” in some way or another in the research, writing, and review of IPCC AR4 is very significant. These scientists, who include among their number 9,029 individuals with Ph.D.s, actually endorse the statement that appears above.”

To quote the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “the stars might lie, but the numbers never do.”  Emails are too easy to ignore, calls and/or faxes to your House Representative (both Washington and local offices) must go out starting tomorrow to tell them that no matter what Nancy Pelosi or President Obama demand, they work for you, the American people, and must vote against H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill.  Congress must know – in no uncertain terms – that rushing to tax ALL Americans on the basis of bad science is not only stupid, but putting already struggling American lives on the line solely for the sake of a greedy few will be the final straw that will cost them their job.

The Secret Tax (Popping The Cap Off Global Warming)

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It’s fun to speculate sometimes.  It’s often called “dreaming”.  I’m sure that most every one of us has, at various times, fantasized about what we’d do if we won the lottery.

But in the world of science, speculation has only a very small place.  It is the spark, the germ, the seed that spurs action to collect actual data, evidence, by using rigorous control to avoid swaying results towards a specific conclusion.

Unfortunately, when money is in bed with science such objectivity too often goes flying out the window, almost as fast as Pelosi and Reid slam the door on Republicans when they schedule a budget planning meeting.  The evidence is gathered with a prevailing eye on what supports the initial speculation, since the spark, the germ, the seed was only about finding a way to make money.

That, boys and girls, is the story of global warming.  It is a tale filled with misadventures, missteps, and downright stupid mistakes, but all used to support only a way that someone can make lots and lots of money.  There isn’t anything the least bit altruistic about it.

In a minority report from the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, it is becoming more and more clear that the ideology of global warming is misguided at best, and at worst a means of global entrapment for the benefit of only a few.  That the United Nations remains a big proponent leads me to believe it is mostly the latter, for who has more vested interest in world domination than the U.N.?  And who has been Al Gore’s staunchest ally in leading the hue and cry against the dangers of global warming except the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

No one.  Until our President, Congress, and various members of the new administration bellied up to the old cap and trade bar and plunked down their money for a lottery ticket.  And though the numbers on their ticket don’t match the numbers displayed by those bouncing little ping-pong balls, they’re plotting and scheming to rig the machine to get the balls to drop in the order they desire.  They are, unfortunately, irritating our allies with their threats of economic penalties for those countries who won’t play along with their little get-rich scheme at the expense of the American taxpayers.  What it will also do is drive jobs overseas since the United States will no longer be competitive in the global market.  Something you might want to consider when you’re promising to “save or create 3.5 million jobs”, don’t you think?

It was a year ago that well-regarded scientists from around the world released what is called the “Manhattan Declaration”.  If you’ve never read it, it’s your lucky day for here it is in its entirety:

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change
“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently-observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change.  Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.

It’s pretty plain English to me.  And if you do some simple research, their case is well-documented and well-supported.  No one is saying that humans don’t need to start cleaning up their collective act, our trashing of Mother Earth can’t go on forever.  But to use “junk science” as a way to create a real climate change – a climate of fear – so that people willingly go along with the destruction of their economy is not only unfair, but as hypocritical as all the carbon disgorged by the jets that fly Al Gore and others to meet face-to-face (instead of using cost-effective internet live-meeting technology) to weep and wail about “global warming” aka “climate change” aka “climate extremes”.  Trust me, the latest round of nasty weather in the Midwest is perfectly normal and you don’t define warming by posting the last frost date for this year (used by gardeners) as coming later than the last frost date of last year.

The mainstream media isn’t thrilled about reporting this.  But just because the mainstream media thinks that supporting the administration in this lunatic delusion will somehow curry favor that will keep them operating doesn’t change the facts.  In the most simple of terms:  global warming is not a threat.  It does not need to be addressed at this time.  And it certainly doesn’t need to be addressed by the economic suicide of cap and trade.  Think about this:  Control carbon and you control the very air we breathe.

I’ll leave you with this sobering excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing “polluters,” not workers. Hardly. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity — in this case the right to emit carbon — and then mandates that businesses buy it, the costs would inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the form of higher prices. Stating the obvious, Peter Orszag — now Mr. Obama’s budget director — told Congress last year that “Those price increases are essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program.”

That ought to put the frost on your cornflakes.