A note about this blog site: I am writing a new update on the latest global warming/climate change news these days as the new administration in Washington gives climate skeptics control of the Federal Government agencies.  I am putting the latest item at the top, dating for the day it is posted.  My essay follows.  You can scroll down to the essay at any time.

(Updated 7-13-2017)

It has happened again. A large iceberg has broken from the Antarctic Ice shelf and all the screaming about climate change has resulted in a barrage of headlines about the impending doom and gloom as Earth becomes uninhabitable. Wake up to reality, please, my friends. This iceberg is a normal event that occurs every decade or so and has absolutely nothing to do with the activities of man. It is not a result of man-made climate change. Al Gore’s pronouncement that this is a sign of the impending danger to our way of life, even our civilization, is nothing more than the usual unsubstantiated shouting for which he has become infamous. Most importantly, to me, there is absolutely no proof of a connection between an iceberg breaking off of the Southern Icecap and the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of our burning of fossil fuels. In fact there is substantial evidence of the disconnect between CO2 and climate.

This a massive iceberg. It is estimated to cover an area of roughly 2,400 square miles, an area roughly the size of the state of Delaware. But icebergs of this size range are not rare and it poses no threat to ships or land masses. It should drift and melt in the nearby waters south of New Zealand over the next few years. It will not result in any measurable rise in the oceans. It was essentially in the water not over a land mass before it broke away and its melting is similar to an ice cube melting in a glass of water. (It melts but the water does not rise as the resulting water is about the same volume as the ice was before.)

A US satellite observed the iceberg on Wednesday while passing over a region known as the Larsen C Ice Shelf.
Scientists were expecting it form. They’d been following the development of a large crack in Larsen’s ice for more than a decade.
The rift’s propagation had accelerated since 2014, making an imminent calving ever more likely.
This picture puts this event in perspective:

Some scientists think Larsen C is now at its smallest extent since the end of the last ice age some 11,700 years ago. The two nearby, smaller shelves, Larsen A and Larsen B, disintegrated around the turn of the century; and a naturally warming climate very probably had a role in their demise. A scientist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography is quoted to have said, “Most glaciologists are not particularly alarmed by what’s going on at Larsen C, yet. It’s business as usual.”

Yet the media has been loaded with reports of over recent months about this impending event and have published this picture of the crack in the ice over and over again.

This is very basic. The climate of Earth has been in constant change as long as we have any records (the oldest data is from Antarctic ice cores and goes back 400,000 years). Ice ages and warm spells come and go and the amount of ice on Earth, the level of the oceans, the temperatures, the number and strength of storms all constantly change. The understanding scientists have developed over the years connect these changes to natural events such as the tilt of the Earth on its poles, the shift of the poles, the drift of the distance between Earth and Sun and a long list of lesser items.

The media attracts readers, listeners and viewers with dramatic news. To report that an iceberg has developed but it is no big deal does not attract an audience. To say that climate change is going to flood our cities and produce huge storms does attract an audience. So the media covers the screams of Algorians and ignores people such as me. The best I can do is post this item on my blog. Such is life in 2017. Things will change in time (I keep telling myself).

 

(Updated 7-5-2017)

Where ever I go these days people stop me to say, “Hey Mr. Coleman, I saw you interviewed on CNN and it was great” or they make some similar remark. The first couple of times it happened, I was confused and wondered what the heck that person was talking about. I hadn’t been on CNN for a couple of years and as best I can remember that was the one and only time I was on that cable network. As the remarks continued, I realized that people were seeing the You Tube video of that interview. The interview had been posted on You Tube shortly after the live appearance. So it had been on the internet for a long time and as best I knew it had only garnered a few thousand views. Then I remembered that a few weeks ago, someone had put out a Tweet linking to that video and I had seen that the Tweet had been retweeted many times. So I checked You Tube. The video was getting a lot more hits. It was up to 170,000 hits. That is a long way short of viral by You Tube standards but indicated those tweets had stirred the pot. Today I realized what had happened that stirred the pot on this old video. Anything about CNN is now getting a lot a attention because of the Trump war on our country’s first cable news channel. Now it occurs to me you might be interested in the story behind that video, so here it is.

My appearance was from a private satellite/fiber feed studio in downtown San Diego (where I lived at the time). I have checked the records. It was Sunday morning, November 2, 2014. I had been invited to be interviewed on the CNN Media program

“Reliable Sources” hosted by Brian Stelter. This followed by only a few days an appearance on “The Kelly Files” with Megan Kelly on the Fox Cable News Channel. I thought they might be planning to use me somehow in an effort to discredit Ms. Kelly. I was certainly ready to defend her.  So I showed up on Sunday morning. I sat in front of the camera.

They gave me a small ear bud to stick in my ear. I heard conversation on the other end. Then the Producer at CNN in Atlanta said, “John Coleman in San Diego, can you hear me?” I answered, “Sure can, ready to go. What’s the plan?” “Let me put Mr. Stelter on with you”, replied the Producer. “Brian, John Coleman is on the line”, finished the Producer.

“Hello, Mr. Coleman.” I recognized Stelter’s voice. “Hello, Brian, thanks for the invitation to be on your fine program” I replied, continuing, “We climate skeptics don’t get on the air too often. So what’s the plan this morning?” Stelter replied, “We thought it would be interesting to have the first President of “The Weather Channel” on the air with the

current President David Kenny. We might have a bit of a friendly debate.” That was all news to me, but I replied, “Fine and dandy, how long will I be on?” “About five minutes. Stand by. We will be on the air shortly” Stelter replied. Then I heard some mumbling for a few seconds followed by, “Mr. Kenny are you ready to go?” (I knew that a man with very impressive credentials named David Kenny was the current President of The Weather Company, the company that then owned The Weather Channel.) “Stelter, why the hell are having this Coleman on the program. He is no longer in our picture.” I assumed this was Kenny speaking and it was clear he was no more aware in advance that I was going to be on the program as I was expecting him to be on. “Mr. Kenny, Coleman was on Fox with that dumb Kelly woman this week and she let him spout off his stupid global warming denial stuff. The plan is that you and I are going to put him in his place. Are you ready to destroy this turkey?“ said Stelter. “Hmmmm” said Kenny. “Don’t worry Mr. Kenny, I am putting him on first and I will destroy him before you talk and then you can simply stomp on the remains” laughed Stelter. By this point, I was beginning to boil. I was certain Stelter didn’t realize I had heard all that and I was ready for warfare. “Stand by” yelled the Producer. The program began. With that explanation you will probably understand by I conducted myself the way I did. Here is how is looked:

So after all this time, who was it that tweeted the link to that video? The tweet reads:

This person’s  Tweet page reads:

Trumpism 3.0™
@Team_Trump45
Tweets, 32.5K Following 142K Followers 136K Likes 10.2K
Trumpism epitomizes Conservatism, Capitalism, patriotism, & respect for the Constitution. #MAGA

Please help Nicky https://gofundme.com/HelpNickyFightCancer …

 

Here is his picture:

So here you have another insight into the way CNN conducts business and its agenda. I don’t think I will be invited back.

LOL

(Updated 6-28-2017)

The media is now the biggest problem. We climate change skeptics are excited that we now have a

President of the United States who is basically a climate change skeptic. He has appointed climate change skeptics to key cabinet positions.

While the Republican congress is rather wimp-ish on most issues including climate change, it is not going to continue the Algorian policies of the last eight years. The Courts tend to stand down on scientific issues. So that leaves just one big problem for those of us who are devoting out lives to the effort to correct the bad science behind the climate change frenzy: The media.

The Fox News Channel is not strongly opposed to we skeptics and gives us occasional opportunities on the evening opinion programs and gives the President and his cabinet reasonable coverage on the topic.
But otherwise the media seems to regard we skeptics as low-life deniers who are endangering the future habitability of planet Earth.

 

CNN and particularly MSNBC are straight out hostile to us. CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS all regard us as wrong, a minor fringe group and not worth covering. The newspapers are some-what less hostile but on the whole not friendly to we skeptics.

The Heartland Institute, the Chicago based think tank that has been friends of we skeptics and employs several very strong skeptical experts has conducted a dozen International Conferences on Climate Change featuring outstanding skeptical scientists from around the world.

It also employs a friend of mine, James Lakely, as it media relations expert. He is excellent and works very diligently. However, (though he and Joe Bast the great head of Heartland point out the coverage they have obtained for we skeptics with pride.) the truth is, those huge events and the strong collection of experts they feature gain almost no coverage. It drives me nuts. And, all other Heartland efforts result in mostly minor coverage on local conservative radio talk shows and an occasional opinion piece in a newspaper.

This year’s survey of television Meteorologist found that nearly half (49%) are convinced that the climate change over the past 50 years has been mostly or entirely due to human activity, and an additional two in ten (21%) think it is more-or-less equally caused by human activity and natural events. About two in ten (21%) think the change has been primarily or entirely due to natural events. This is an increase in Algorian attitude by the TV station’s experts and many of them cover the climate change topic on the air with an Algorian approach.

Any time climate change comes up at any events where reporters are able to ask questions, they challenge any skeptical views. In contrast if someone says the oceans are rising, polar bears are dying, storms are getting worse, heat waves will kill millions, etc the reporters cover every claim without question.
Almost every reporter, news writer, editor and producer has a college degree in Journalism.

That four years under the control of far left, Democrat, Socialist and Communist college professors has a strong impact on the young minds. As the son of Communist college professor I know how strong and unrelenting they are and that they are totally unwilling to leave any room for opposing views.
So here we skeptics are trying to reach millions of Americans and give them our skeptical view of climate change and explain that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is not going to create uncontrollable climate change. We just want our science back; that is all we want.

I was a Journalist and a television Meteorologist for 61 years. I worked among the media crowd. All of my colleagues were died in the wool Algorians everywhere I worked including ABC, CBS and NBC in New York and Chicago.

Only at my last TV station (KUSI-TV in San Diego) did I find a comfortable home for a climate change skeptic. The owner of the independent TV station was a true climate change skeptic like me and we did lots of programs and news reports from the skeptical point of view. It was so positive for me I worked far longer than I should have, not retiring until I was 79. But that was a one of kind TV situation with little national impact (except that the videos of my work there was posted on You Tube).

Now I look at the national media and wonder what to do next. How are we ever going to overcome this situation? The answer, I am told, is social media. I have what you may regard as a strange attitude about that.

I have made a personal rule of no climate change or politics on Facebook. I have even taken on an altered name and limit my Facebook “Friends” to personal friends, former work colleagues, relatives and the like. I try to keep Facebook as a place to escape from the rest of the world and keep track of my daughter and son and their families, etc.

I do use Twitter for climate change but how far that reaches I cannot know for sure. Meanwhile, my videos on You Tube are getting lots of plays. I also maintain this blog and essay website. Many of my fellow skeptics also have websites and blogs. Some of them are excellent and get thousands of views everyday. You will enjoy and learn from them if you do some searching. Others also tweet and do what else they can to reach the rest of the world via social media.

What a challenge. I don’t get a penny from anyone for my efforts. But, I will not quit until my last breath. I hope that is years away.

(Updated 6-26-2017)

The lengthy period between posting on May 9th and today is not because I died, or was ill, bored or distracted. It was all because of an update of Windows10 on my PC.  The troubles that followed are too complex to bother explaining. In any case that is at last behind.  There is much I could say about what has happened since, but I would rather like to start with the this post:

A very solid scientific article about the

withdrawal of the United States

from the

Paris Climate Accord

This was emailed to me by Dr. Willie Soon. It is the work of the impressive international individuals listed below:

Willie Soon, Researcher at the Smithsonian Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, B.Sc. University of Southern California, M.Sc. and Ph.D. Aerospace Engineering [with distinction]

Istvan Marko, Professor de chimie organique et médicinale, University catholique de Louvain

J. Scott Armstrong, author, forecasting and marketing expert and a professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

William M. Briggs, PhD in Mathematical Statistics, Data Philosopher, Epistemologist, Probability Puzzler, Bioethicist, MS in Atmospheric Physics, and Bachelors is in Meteorology & Math

Kesten Green, Senior research fellow at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia Business School, PhD candidate at Victoria Management School, Victoria University of Wellington

David R. Legates, Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware, former Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the same university, and a former Delaware State Climatologist

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, B.A. in Journalism Studies University College, Cardiff, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

This all began in June when the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a Letter critical of President Trump’s decision for the United States to withdraw from Paris Climate Accords. The authors of this article refute that letter and write this article to clarify the scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate and to dispel the expensively fostered popular delusion that man-made global warming will be dangerous and that the Paris Agreement would be beneficial. The President of MIT is Professor Rafael Reif.

Professor Reif wrote, “Yesterday, the White House took the position that the Paris climate agreement – a landmark effort to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions – was a bad deal for America.”

There is no science that unambiguously establishes that the greenhouse gas to which he refers, carbon dioxide (CO2), is the chief cause of the warming of Earth’s atmosphere observed since the end of the Little Ice Age. The opposite has been repeatedly demonstrated.

Ice cores have revealed that changes in CO2 concentration follow, rather than precede, changes in temperature. During the last deglaciation, the latest high-resolution records show atmospheric CO2 lagging temperature by 50 to 500 years. Our enterprises and industries return to the air some of the CO2 that was formerly present there, and some warming may be expected. That warming is small and beneficial.

Professor Humlum and colleagues have demonstrated that changes in CO2 concentration follow changes in temperature after about 8-11 months. The time-lag between changes in temperature and consequent changes in CO2 concentration are caused by outgassing of CO2 from the oceans when they warm and uptake by the oceans as they cool. In addition, the growth rate of the atmospheric CO2 has been slowing recently, linked to an enhanced terrestrial biosphere uptake. Our industrialized civilization’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 adds to the effect of these fluctuations, but it does not add much.

Another member of the group of authors (Harde 2017) has done studies that reached similar conclusions.

Professor Reif’s assertion that global temperatures can be regulated by an international agreement to atone for “our sins of emission” is, therefore, at odds with scientific knowledge regarding cause and effect.

King Canute’s warning to his English courtiers in 1032 A.D. that even the divinely anointed monarch could not command sea level should be heeded by bombastic intergovernmental agencies a millennium later. The professor’s assertion is, moreover, logically invalid, since the Paris agreement permits China and India to industrialize without limit on their emissions.

Besides, the authors point out that the Paris agreement is not binding. Under its terms, no nation is compelled to “sin no more”, and many – even including Germany and Denmark, the leaders in renewable energies – now appear unlikely to meet the agreement’s targets. The Paris agreement is, in practice, a political tool for suppressing growth and redistributing wealth.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, former chairman of the IPCC, said, in resigning in 2015, that the environment was his “religion,” and

Ms. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change until last year, openly stated in 2015 that the goal was to overturn capitalism — in her words, “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

Professor Reif writes, “The scientific consensus is overwhelming.”

The late author Michael Crichton, in his Caltech Michelin Lecture 2003, said, “In science consensus is irrelevant. … There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” Doubt is the seedcorn of science. Consensus is a political notion which, when pleaded, indicates that the pleader is totalitarian. As Abu Ali ibn al-Haytham said in the eleventh century:

The seeker after truth [his splendid definition of the scientist] does not place his faith in any mere consensus, however venerable or widespread. Instead, he subjects what he has learned of it to his hard-won scientific knowledge, and to investigation, inspection, inquiry, checking, checking and checking again. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.

The alleged “consensus” is nothing more than an agreement that the weather has warmed in the past 300 years. Yet the quantum and attribution (the reason) of warming are hotly debated among climatologists.

And we all must understand that even today measuring global temperature is subject to errors, biases, missing data, and subjective adjustments.

The estimation of global average temperature from satellite data is relatively new and employs a completely different temperature measurement method from the older methods. Nevertheless, the satellite data and data collected by the twice daily release of weather balloons have provided essentially identical estimates. Neither displays a worrying trend. These measurements are increasingly at odds not only with the surface temperature records that have been adjusted ex post facto so as to show more warming than the original raw data showed. On top of these measurements, scientists in recent years have regularly created alarm by publicizing the alarming projections of the serially unreliable computer models of climate.  These models provide the data on which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change profitably but misguidedly relies.

Scientists accept the large library of weather data that makes it very clear that climate constantly changes. It has done so since the first wisps of the Earth’s atmosphere formed.

However, scientists disagree on the causes of all these constant, long time climate changes, including the mild warming since the Little Ice Age. Legates et al. (2015), for example, found that only 0.3 percent of 11,944 peer-reviewed articles on climate and related topics, published during the 21 years of 1991 to 2011, had explicitly stated that recent warming was mostly man-made.

Professor Reif wrote, “As human activities emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the global average surface temperature will continue to rise, driving rising sea levels and extreme weather.”

In the last 20 years, our advanced, power hungry civilization has released more than a third of all the CO2 produced by humans since the beginning of the industrial period. Yet global mean surface temperature has remained essentially constant for those 20 years, a fact that has been acknowledged by the IPCC, whose models failed to predict it. NOAA’s State of the Climate report for 2008 said that periods of 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between prediction and observation – i.e., that the models were wrong. Just before the recent naturally occurring el Niño event raised global temperature, there had been 18 years and 9 months without any global warming at all.

The climate models predicted warming at about twice the rate observed during the past 27 years. During this period the Earth warmed 0.4 °C, about half of the 0.75 °C implicit in IPCC’s explicit 1990 prediction that there would be 1.0 °C warming from 1990-2025. (In Fahrenheit the actual increase has been .7 of one degree compared to a predicted warming of 1.35 degrees)

 Green and Armstrong (2014) conducted longer-term validation tests of the models and found that their forecasts were much less accurate than assuming there had been no global warming at all. The relative inaccuracy of the IPCC projections increased with longer (multi-decadal) horizons. Even forecasts of natural global cooling at a rate of 1 ºC per century were much more accurate over long periods than the IPCC’s projections of dangerous man-made global warming.

 Ten years ago, Al Gore asserted that global temperatures had reached a dangerous “tipping point,” with extreme warming imminent. Professor Scott Armstrong challenged Mr. Gore to a ten-year bet based on the Green-Armstrong-Soon (2009)) scientific no-change forecast of global mean temperatures.  Mr. Gore declined the bet, but theclimatebet.com website keeps track of how the bet would have turned out. With the ten-year life of the bet due to end at the end of this year, the cumulative monthly error in the IPCC’s business-as-usual 0.3 ºC per decade prediction is 22 percent larger than the error from the benchmark prediction of no warming at all.

 Why does Professor Reif continue to champion the notion of dangerous manmade global warming when it is so greatly at odds with observation?

Professor Reif wrote, As human activities emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the global average surface temperature will continue to rise, driving rising sea levels and extreme weather.”

The average sea level rise since 1870 has been 1.3-1.5 mm (about a twentieth of an inch) per year. Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, a renowned sea-level researcher who has published more than 500 peer-reviewed articles on this topic, has been unable to find observational evidence that supports the models’ predictions of dramatically accelerating sea level rise.

Professor Reif wrote, “As human activities emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the global average surface temperature will continue to rise, driving rising sea levels and extreme weather.”

Observations during the last few decades indicate that extreme events, including tornadoes and hurricanes, have been decreasing, rather than increasing, both in number and in intensity. Moreover, the total accumulated cyclonic energy has also been declining. As MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen has explained, the decline in storminess is a consequence of reduced temperature differentials between the tropics and exo-tropics that arise when global average temperatures are warmer.

Professor Reif wrote, “As the Pentagon describes it, climate change is a “threat multiplier” because its direct effects intensify other challenges, including mass migrations and zero-sum conflicts over existential resources like water and food.”

Milder temperatures and increased CO2 levels green the planet, instead of browning it. Deserts are retreating, and vegetation cover has increased throughout recent decades. The production of maize, wheat, rice, and soybeans is at a record high. More CO2 in the air helps plants by CO2 fertilization. Our planet has seen more than 20 percent greening during the past three decades, half of which is due to the action of CO2.

Professor Reif wrote, “The carbon dioxide our cars and power plants emit today will linger in the atmosphere for a thousand years.”

The average residence time of a CO2 molecule in the Earth’s atmosphere is about four to seven years. Taking into account multiple exchanges leads to an estimate of a mean lifespan of 40 years (Harde 2017). Rather than a problem, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the prime nutrient for plants. Indeed, plants grow more strongly when CO2 concentrations are much higher than they currently are, which is why commercial greenhouses add CO2 to the air. The current CO2 concentration is higher than for 800,000 years, but it is far lower than at almost any time in the previous history of our planet.

Nor is CO2 a pollutant. It is a colorless, odorless gas that is not toxic to humans and other animals even at concentrations much higher than we are currently experiencing. It is also one of the most important fuels for phytoplankton, which use carbon dioxide for energy and that release oxygen. Up to 75 percent of the oxygen present in the air originates in the phytoplankton photosynthetic water-splitting process.

Moreover, during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, there were long periods during which the levels of CO2 were much higher than today, but the temperatures were far colder. We are not aware of any explanation that squares the man-made global warming theory with that fact.

Forecasts of droughts are also not borne out by experience. For example, since the now-former Australian Chief Climate Commissioner Professor Tim Flannery warned that dams would no longer fill because of a lack of rain, Australia has been subjected to a series of dramatic floods and overflowing dams. Governments’ naïve belief in Professor Flannery’s warnings appear to have led to policy actions and omissions that exacerbated flooding and failed to take full advantage of the rainfall when it came. The most comprehensive recent study of the worldwide extent of droughts (Hao et al., 2014) found that for 30 years the percentage of the Earth’s land mass under drought or severe drought has been declining.

Though the U.N. Environment Program had published in 2005 a document predicting 50 million climate refugees by 2010, to date there have been no bona fide climate refugees. Nor has mass migration owing to global warming been observed. The one person recognized as a climate refugee had his demand rejected [CITE] by the Supreme Court of New Zealand. He has returned to his island home, where he remains safe from inundation

Professor Reif wrote, “In 2016 alone, solar industry employment grew by 25 percent, while wind jobs grew 32 percent.”

 Growing jobs by subsidy is easy, provided that one cares nothing for the far greater number of jobs destroyed by the additional taxation, energy price hikes, or public borrowing necessary to pay for the subsidy. Several studies have shown that the creation of one “green” job results in the loss of two jobs elsewhere in the economy. Despite all those subsidies, solar power accounts for 0.9 percent and wind generation for 5.6 percent of total U.S. electricity production. Electricity itself is a small fraction of total energy consumption, including transportation, industrial processes, and heating.

 The so-called alternative energy companies survive through heavy subsidies and supportive regulations. For example, SunEdison received $1.5 billion in subsidies and loan guarantees, and yet it was compelled to file for bankruptcy. Solyndra is another example. So-called “renewable” energy is cripplingly expensive to the customer but is often unprofitable even after massive subsidies from taxpayers.

 Europe is suffering from political rejection of fossil fuels: energy prices have soared, millions of poor people are unable to pay their energy bills, and energy-intensive businesses are relocating to where energy is cheaper. Theirs is not an example the U.S. should wish to follow.

 By withdrawing from the Paris agreement, President Trump did a wonderful thing for America and the world. He showed that advocacy masquerading as science should not be the basis for political decisions. He showed that to put America first is to put the planet first. And, by rejecting the non-problem of man-made global warming, he began the long and necessary process of waking up the likes of Professor Reif to the fact that the diversion of time, effort, and trillions of dollars away from real environmental problems and towards the bogus but (to MIT) profitable non-problem of supposedly catastrophic global warming is as bad for the planet as it is for true science.

Since Dr. Soon’s email containing this article (which I edited to make it more readable) my email has been alive with a follow-up discussion among these notable people about how the atmosphere actuals warms and cools.  As a result of reading and thinking about them, I feel I should have a new degree.  Wow.  This is great fun.

.Updated 5-9-2017)

This is an excellent article published today in the Washington Examiner

A fool’s errand: Al Gore’s $15 trillion carbon tax

by Fred Palmer | May 9, 2017, 5:00 AM

Al Gore wants to reverse modernity and save the world from itself through an elimination of its fossil-fuel-based energy system. During the final week of April, his newly created Energy Transitions Commission released a document setting forth a fool’s-errand pathway to “decarbonize” the world’s energy system.

 If this sounds familiar, it is. Gore’s plan features a new, sophisticated, and expensive public-relations campaign, but it’s all based on his views on carbon dioxide first broached in his

1992 book Earth in the Balance, which he reissued in 2000 for his failed presidential campaign. The subsequent efforts made by Gore during the past 25 years have transformed little from their genesis, and he remains as tragically wrong today as he was when he first surfaced as an opponent of everything linked to carbon-dioxide.

 If you scroll through the verbiage surrounding the document, you will find the core policy recommendation is a massive, punishing carbon tax.

Gore would start the tax at $50 per ton, which would increase to $100 per ton over time, essentially destroying the market for continued robust development of the world’s fossil-fuel base. Our economic growth and personal well-being depends on robust fossil-fuel use, so Gore’s plan would destroy these as well.

 But, don’t worry! The all-in estimated cost to re-engineer humanity is only a mere $15 trillion—enough money to give every man, woman, and child in the United States more than $46,000.

Al Gore has been demonizing fossil fuels and attempting to marginalize all those involved in the traditional energy sector since 1988, the year the climate-change movement was rolled out in Washington, D.C., which happened to correspond with a nationwide heatwave and with Yellowstone in flames. Ever since, Gore’s pathway to political power and personal riches has been a successful one, to be sure, but his multi-trillion-dollar effort today is his most sophisticated effort to date. Unfortunately for him, it will also fail, because what he’s selling in his “new” proposal is bad for the people being asked to embrace it.

 Over the years, Gore has emerged in many contexts in his effort to eradicate carbon-dioxide emissions, a benign gas required for all life to thrive on Earth—plant, animal, and human alike. It has never mattered to Gore that ordinary people everywhere have been hurt and will continue to be hurt by his continual efforts to make fossil-fuel energy expensive and that the poorest among us are harmed the most by the energy policies he supports.

The anti-humanity proposals in Gore’s latest initiative have as one of their chief goals the elimination of fossil fuels, full stop. Gore does allow for greater use of natural gas into the 2030s, but he eliminates coal right away. He also allows for oil use to grow into the mid-2020s, but “decarbonize” means just that; his plan inevitably ends with a phase-out of fossil-fuel use. Fortunately for us all—and make no mistake about it, the American people understand this—the fossil-fuel-free future Gore imagines is not supported by observation-based science, and it is contradicted by all the evidence we have gained from recorded human history.

April 22 was the 47th anniversary of the first Earth Day, which occurred in 1970. Since that day, the number of people on Earth has increased from 3.7 billion to 7.5 billion, and average life expectancy for all the world’s people has risen by 11 years, to 67 years old. Likewise, food production has soared and energy production and consumption, mostly thanks to fossil fuels, has increased by more than four times.

Since the first Earth Day, the natural environment has improved substantially, through urbanization, and the biosphere and agriculture are more robust. Earth is greener, because of the additional carbon dioxide in the air, as numerous studies now show.

Since the first Earth Day, the flawed computer models backed by radical environmentalists have failed continuously, and we now know they can never serve as a reliable tool to make policy judgements governing the future of human life on Earth.

And since the first Earth Day, we can now say with confidence that all these positive developments have resulted from, or are closely linked to, the robust use of fossil fuels, including oil, natural gas, and coal.

 The world is blessed with an abundance of fossil-fuel reserves, which allow the billions of people alive today and the billions yet to come to enjoy longer and better lives. They will continue to provide additional energy to grow food, resources to build cities, and by helping urbanization, they will allow the natural environment to improve, as it has for decades.

Gore’s $15 trillion carbon tax should and will be rejected for the phony, radical environmental vision it represents.

Fred Palmer (fpalmer@heartland.org) is a senior fellow for energy policy at The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank founded in 1984 and based in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

(Updated 5-8-2017)

This is one of those barely reported, seemingly unimportant developments which will have a huge impact in the years ahead. I am very excited about it. The tide is turning.  Yeah.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fired members of a scientific advisory board  on Friday, May 5th. This a key step in eliminating the bias toward Climate Change that has dominated the EPA for over a decade.

This board is a powerful voice in determining the agency’s future research grants.  For over ten years those funds have only gone to researchers who accept the failed Algorian theory that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant and a powerful greenhouse gas.  Their research projects have produced dozens of computer models that predict out of control warming, the melting the Antarctica ice cap producing flooding of all the coastal cities in the world, the death of polar bears and much more. In short they predict a climate catastrophe. All of these computer models have failed to verify and none of the other predicted events have come about.

 

Robert Richardson, an ecological economist at Michigan State University and one of the fired members of the board said Friday, “The role that science has played in the agency in the past, this step is a significant step in a different direction. Based on what we know about the administrator, I think it will be science that will appear to be friendlier to industry, the fossil fuel industry, the chemical industry, and I think it will be science that marginalizes climate change science.”   His remark dramatically illustrates the degree to which these insiders have truly believed that they are doing battle with industry not with we skeptical scientists who are trying to end the corruption of our science for political purposes.   

There are two main science advisory boards at EPA, both of which can hold significant sway over policy and regulation. The Trump administration has proposed a major weakening of both. Earlier this year, the White House proposed slashing funding for the Science Advisory Board by 84 percent. Such a cut would essentially cripple the work of the 47-member board of outside professors.

House Republicans have passed legislation to reform the Science Advisory Board, a move critics say is designed to increase the voice of industry in rulemaking. That bill is still awaiting Senate approval.

At an April meeting, the Board of Scientific Counselors discussed the importance of climate change research at EPA and “the growing need for information on, and understanding of, climate change and responses to its impacts,” according to an agenda. They also talked about the importance of considering climate change as a stressor in areas of non-climate research. All of this runs counter to position of the new Trump Administration.

(Updated 5-6-2017)

My hero and friend Joe Bast of Heartland Institute has written a letter to the President’s daughter that is worth reading.   I have edited it a bit but the essence of it follows:

Dear Ms. Trump,

 Recent news stories report your interest in the climate change issue. I share your deep concern over the future of our planet

— it’s an unbelievably beautiful and precious thing, something we must cherish and protect for all of Earth’s creatures and for future generations.

I am writing to urge you to proceed carefully as you explore this subject, because those who claim climate change requires “immediate action” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or even “transforming the world’s economic system,” have often misrepresented the science and economics of this issue.

….

Your father is right when he questions whether global warming is a genuine “crisis” or a product of hype and exaggeration by various interest groups. He is also right to suggest that the issue is being used to extort money from the United States, handicap American businesses, and undermine our economic growth and prosperity.

…

Politicians and celebrities sometimes travel to the Arctic and come back saying they have “seen global warming,” that “it is real and already happening.” But these images and claims are highly misleading. You can’t see man-made climate change. The popular “evidence” that man-made global warming is already happening consists mostly of images of

melting ice, heat waves, hurricanes, and rising tides. These images appeared in Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and more recently in Leonardo DiCaprio’s movie Before the Flood.

Simply put, there is no hard scientific evidence that potentially harmful warming is happening.

Dr. Benjamin Zycher, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in 2014 a short and accurate summary of research on long-term trends in extreme weather:

There has been no temperature trend over the last 15 years, notwithstanding the predictions of the models.

There is no long-term trend in sea-level increases.  (The oceans are not rising.)

The past two years have set a record for the fewest tornadoes ever in a similar period, and there has been no trend in the frequency of strong (F3 to F5) tornadoes in the United States since 1950.

The number of wildfires is in a long-term decline.

It has been eight years since a Category 3 or higher hurricane landed on a U.S. coast; that long a period devoid of an intense hurricane landfall has not been observed since 1900. The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season was the least active in 40 years, with zero major hurricanes.

 There has been no trend in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, and tropical cyclone energy is near its lowest level since reliable measurements began by satellite in the 1970s.

 The record of changes in the size of the Arctic ice cover is far more ambiguous than often asserted, because the satellite measurements began at the outset of the warming period from roughly 1980 through 1998.

The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. Flooding in the United States over the last century has not been correlatedwith increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.

This quick list is totally supported by the four volumes in the Climate Change Reconsidered series produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), published by The Heartland Institute. The NIPCC series is credible: It has been cited in more than 100 peer-reviewed articles.

So no, there simply is no hard evidence that man-made climate change is already occurring or that it is bad. You should immediately suspect the credibility (or sincerity) of anyone who claims otherwise. They are using scare tactics to get you to think a certain way.

Those who say global warming is a crisis ask you to believe the opinions of “experts” who, upon closer inspection, are unqualified, speaking outside their areas of expertise, or biased.

For example, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill McKibben, Bill Gates, and Naomi Orestes are not scientists. Senator Gore was flunking undergraduate physics at Harvard when he dropped out of that class.

President Obama’s claim in 2014 that “97% of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous” is not supported by any credible survey or science literature review. NASA, on its website, cites four sources for this claim: two are essays written by college students, one literature review by a socialist historian, and the fourth one a literature review by an Australian blogger.

Alarmists often cite the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IIPCC), but this is a political, not a scientific, organization. It conducts no original climate research. Its reports are not subject to traditional peer review, and they have become compilations of anecdotal evidence in support of a pre-ordained conclusion. That is not science.

Finally, those who say global warming is a crisis often claim that those who disagree with them are either “paid shills of the oil industry” or part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that puts economic growth and profits ahead of protecting the environment. Both claims are false.

Al Gore created the myth that global warming skeptics are paid by industry to “sow doubt,” although he falsely claims it was discovered by a former reporter named Ross Gelbspan. There is no evidence of any “skeptic” ever being paid to lie about climate science or its impacts. See Russell Cook’s excellent report on this myth titled Merchants of Smear.

Once you look at the underlying science — the same sort of number crunching you would perform for a complicated business transaction — you will discover there is no scientific case for reducing our use of fossil fuels.

Here are the key numbers you need to know to understand the climate change issue:

0.04% The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that’s about 400 parts per million. In the past century it has only gone up by 0.01 percentage point. Carbon dioxide concentrations have risen and fallen before, in pre-industrial eras, without causing climate to change.

1.0 — 1.5C Climate sensitivity, the change in global temperature likely to result from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from pre-industrial levels. We are already half-way to such a doubling, so the warming in the coming century even assuming the alarmists in the debate are right and are not exaggerating, is likely to be too small be to noticeable against natural climate cycles and variability.

1 — 2 mm The long-term annual rise in sea level, since the end of the last Ice Age, which has not increased in the 21st century. This is too small to merit efforts to slow or stop global warming. Claims that sea level is rising faster are based on cherry-picked data sets and fail to take into account land subsidence in some coastal areas.

0.06C  The reduction in global temperature that would be achieved by the year 2100 if the U.S. reduced its emissions by 40%, just six one-hundredths of one degree. This is too little to warrant the enormous cost — trillions of dollars — of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.

$3,900  The annual per-family cost of Obama’s global warming policies, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

$27 billon   How much federal agencies plan to spend on global warming-related programs in 2017.

 We should all do our share to protect the environment. But the campaign to reduce energy use or to switch from fossil fuels to solar and wind power is not about protecting the environment. It’s about something else.

 Since climate is always changing due to natural causes, we should invest in resiliency (hardening infrastructure) and adaptation. Trying to stop global warming from occurring is not necessary, nor is it the best way to protect the environment.

 Climate change is a small and remote threat, at best. We probably cannot slow or stop it even if we try. And the cost of ending our primary reliance on fossil fuels is astronomical.

 My organization, The Heartland Institute, recommends your father’s administration take the following steps regarding climate change:

 Create a President’s Council on Climate Change charged with cutting through the politics and bias that infected climate science and policymaking during the Obama administration and advising the President on what policies to repeal and what policies to pursue.

Withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the more recent Paris Accord and end funding for the United Nations’ biased climate change programs, in particular the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Green Climate Fund.

Replace EPA with a Committee of the Whole composed of the 50 state environmental quality agencies. Those agencies already have primary responsibility for implementing environmental laws passed by Congress and regulations written by EPA.

Withdraw and suspend implementation of the Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases and the Clean Power Plan.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. While not a scientist myself, I have had the privilege of working with the Nongovernmental  International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international team of independent climate scientists whose research supports the various statements made above, and who are willing to pitch in and help your father set a new course for climate policy in the years ahead.

My organization, The Heartland Institute, is a national nonprofit organization that has been making the case for conservative and libertarian ideas since its founding in 1984. Many members of the Trump transition team are familiar with our work on climate change and other topics.

The Heartland Institute is “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting skepticism of man-made climate change” (according to The Economist). We have published more books, policy studies, and commentaries on the topic than any other free-market think tank in the world (according to the scientific journal Global Environmental Change). We are one of the top ten free-market think tanks in the world (according to TheBestSchools.org).

Thank you for your concern and for your openness to differing opinions on this important issue.

Sincerely,

Joseph L. Bast

President

(UPDATED 4-22-2017)

One of my heroes, Marc Morano at Climate Depot posted this

AMAZING LIST OF THE 13 MOST RIDICULOUS PREDICTIONS

MADE ON EARTH DAY IN 1970.

1. Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald                                                               “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner                              “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
2.                                                      “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
3.                                                             “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
4. “It is already too late to avoid mass Starvation,”  
5.              Chief organizer for Earth Day“                                                    Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
6.                                                              “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
7. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” —
8. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
9.                                            “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
10.                                        “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
11. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

You can read this and a whole lot more every day on Marc’s website, CLIMATE DEPOT at http://www.climatedepot.com/

 

(UPDATED 4-20-2017)

The Ivanka bump is standing tall at the President decides whether to cancel our commitment to the Paris Climate Accords.  Read down a bit about the bump.

Meanwhile, those record high temps announced today.

It is phony as a 2 dollar bill.  Look at the video below about data manipulation. It will blow your mind. And there is more in my essay.  See this chart.

It tells a lot of the story. I am so tired of these hottest month, hottest year claims based on totally manipulated data. Darn it.

 

(Updated 4-14-2017)

The “failing” New York Times (as the President calls it) has just done something that has we climate skeptics cheering.  So stand by to let out a “Who-Wha” or two.

 

It is true that these are financially challenging times for the old fashioned ink or paper newspaper industry. Newspapers are attempting to find a profitable way to become digital/internet news sources.  The results are not very encouraging yet. But none-the-less the New York Times remains a vitally important source of news and opinion in the nation’s largest city and somewhat throughout the country.  It is regarded as a journalistic home base.

 So what has the Times done that is so important to me?  Just this:  The Times has hired an extreme climate skeptic (the alagorians call him a denier) as science columnist. 

Wow.  This is an amazing development.

For several years the Times was the home of

Andrew Revkin who wrote regularly about the dire consequences humanity faced as a result of Global Warming/Climate Change.  His attacks on we climate change “deniers” were frequent and his praise for Al Gore was never ending. In time he was among those credited with developing the idea that humans, through growing impacts on Earth’s climate and other critical systems, are creating a distinct geological epoch, the Anthropocene. After he left the Times he became a member of the “Anthropocene” Working Group from 2010 to 2016. The group is charged by a branch of the International Commission on Stratigraphy with gauging evidence that a formal change in the Geologic Time Scale is justified.

 

What a huge change this is. The Time new columnist is Bret Stephens who dismisses as “imaginary” the climate “reality” (as the algorians call it) routinely reported over the last 20 years by the Times. Other media is going nuts.  They write:

 “The New York Times — which advertises itself as a defender of truth in the Trump era — just hired an extreme denier of climate science as a columnist. Bret Stephens was most recently deputy editorial page editor for Rupert Murdoch’s deeply conservative and climate-denying Wall Street Journal, where, in 2015, he wrote that climate change….is an “imaginary enemy. The scientific findings that Stephens has repeatedly dismissed as “imaginary” are routinely published in the New York Times itself. And in an August job description, the New York Times called climate change “the most important story in the world.” Stephens calls it “hysteria.”

This hiring is “a very sad comment on the New York Times’ judgment,” Dr. Robert J. Brulle, a media expert at Drexel University, told ThinkProgress via email. Brulle, whom the Times itself has called “an expert on environmental communications,” said this hiring “contradicts their claim” in a new ad campaign that truth is “now more important than ever” to the Times.

 In a press release, the Times calls Stephens “a beautiful writer” who brings to the paper, “profound intellectual depth, honesty and bravery.”

The Times has routinely reported on vanishing polar ice and other “catastrophic impacts” we are facing. In a May 2014 story on new studies suggesting warming-driven collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Times concluded, “the heat-trapping gases could destabilize other parts of Antarctica as well as the Greenland ice sheet, potentially causing enough sea-level rise that many of the world’s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned.”

So this new columnist is a major journalist move for the Times.  It is clear people in leadership at the Times have come to realize that there are two sides to the climate change debate and we skeptics deserve to be acknowledged and our counter arguments debunking the Al Gore/UNIPCC climate change theory should be heard.

 

In the end it all comes down to this.  Is Carbon Dioxide released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels over powering natural forces and destined to destroy the climate of Earth. The Algorians have used this basic theory to create a long list of catastrophic events that will result from the melting of polar ice, the death of all polar bears, the flooding of coasts, horrid heatwaves to massive storms.  In the end they have yelled for years the Earth will be uninhabitable.  The Times has printed hundreds of columns detailing all of this for years.  We skeptics know that the basic carbon dioxide theory is wrong.  The result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere will actually to beneficial to the Earth greatly benefiting all growing things while only slightly warming the atmosphere. In the end we regard the natural forces that have constantly altered the climate of Earth far for powerful than the actions of our civilization.

What triggered the Times to make this change and hire a skeptical climate columnist?  I think I know.  After a life time of working in the media I know the sort of things that gets the attention of media managers.  I think it was the resignation of

Judith Curry from her Professorship at Georgia Tech.  When a respected female Professor could no longer live in the Algorian climate science world and spoke out so clearly and reasonably as she walked away from her position, media manager types would take notice and examine her position a bit.  The result, they discovered that climate change skeptics are not the same as flying saucer wackos and the chemtrails crowd.  We are scientists who know that our science has been greatly distorted and politicized. 

So now a skeptic is going to write a column for The New York Times.  It is my hope he will write reasonable, solid articles and avoid some of the extremes that have been in some of former pieces.        

By hiring Bret Stephens, the Times is making a move that will be strongly attacked by other media.

The times has a new ad campaign on the importance of truth.  I think this move backs up that ad campaign.  Others will scream no, no no.  To them I say, it is your turn.  We have been screaming and crying for years.

OK.  All together. Whooo-Haaaa.

(Updated 4-12-2017)

I have just returned from Albuquerque, New Mexico where I attended a conference on the electrical connections between Earth and the Sun.  There were several Ph.D.  experts who presented at this conference.  Generally they feel the new sophisticated satellites measuring the currents reaching Earth from the Sun have determined this electrical connection has a significant  impact on our weather.  I am still giving lots of thought to this new, edge-of-our-science idea but I have not “climbed aboard that train” yet.  While the conference was very well attended and those present were extremely interested and dedicated to the electrical connections between Earth and Sun, they were private citizens, not the supportive professor of science that you might expect to find at a conference such as this one.  I love out-on-the-edge ideas and admire the people who are willing to go there. All in all it was a very interesting weekend away from all the political talk on the TV. Now back home I am catching up on real world developments.

While the media is totally absorbed with the brutal removal of a passenger on an airliner and Sean Spicer making a mistake about Hitler and deadly gases, there is real drama at the Environmental Protection Agency that is being generally ignored. There at the EPA, it seems, tension is so extreme that the agency’s head Scott Pruitt now has had to request extra protection personnel.  From who does he need protection?  His own employees.

 Last month, President Trump released a draft federal spending budget requesting $2.3 billion in cuts to the EPA. Under Trump’s budget, climate change research would be cut to the bone and 3,200 jobs would be eliminated. So now the agency has asked for 10 additional full-time staff members for a round-the-clock security detail for an E.P.A. chief.  According to E.E. News, former EPA head Gina McCarthy’s security detail normally consisted of six to eight personnel who assisted only during international travel and public appearances. But as Myron Ebell, who headed Trump’s transition team for the EPA, explained to E.E. News, Pruitt sees the extra protection as necessary not just because of protestors, but of his own staffers. 

 “I think it’s prudent given the continuing activities by the left to foment hatred, and the reported hostility within the agency from some unprofessional activists,” Ebell told the site.  Scientists with the EPA have written a series of open letters protesting Pruitt’s confirmation. When cuts do finally come down later this spring after a thorough congressional review, things within the massive EPA headquarters will be very tense and it seems possible that some of the highly politized, algorian extremist remaining on the staff might lose their heads.  Cleaning out the swamp is messy business.

Let us all thank Scott Pruitt for his work, wish him well and rejoice in his work.

Meanwhile the United States under President Trump has refused to sign onto a statement with other G7 countries to commit to the implementation of the Paris climate agreement.  This is one of the things the President had promised during the campaign.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said the U.S. “is in the process of reviewing many of its policies and reserves its position on this issue, which will be communicated at a future date.”

 Italy and other G7 members have “reaffirmed their commitment towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement to effectively limit the increase in global temperature well below 2°C above pre-industrial level.”

The media is having a bit of frenzy over this one.

(Updated 4-3-2017)

Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was interviewed by

Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday and he is being strongly criticized for the manner in which he conducted himself by some of the far right observers.  After all they say President Trump selected Pruitt to undo the climate change frenzy at the EPA and he seems to be uncertain how to proceed. They claim “he can’t even answer a few basic and obvious questions about why the job he is doing is necessary, important, and right.” Among the things Wallace asked about were the UN’s view that it was 95 percent likely that more than half the temperature increase since the mid-20th century is due to human activity and about NOAA’s claim that 2015 and 2016 are the hottest years on record.  They lament that Pruitt had no convincing comeback.  Then Wallace asked him “What if you’re wrong? What if CO2 is causing dramatic climate change and we as humans are responsible?”

Pruitt’s answer was a jumble.  It is true that any one of us on the skeptical side of the argument could have pointed him to dozens of leading scientists — and hundreds if not thousands of papers and articles — that could easily have enabled Pruitt to say what needed to be said. Next came that “What if you’re wrong?” question.  We also have a ready answer to that.  Critics say this ignites worrying signs that Scott Pruitt may not be up to the job of EPA Administrator.

 Now I rise to Mr. Pruitt’s defense.  He is a lawyer.  He knows that his actions at the EPA will be challenged to the Courts. He does not want to express personal opinions that will be used to attack the actions he takes.  He wants to build a strong scientific base and move to derail the climate change frenzy within the EPA in a LEGALLY defendable manner.  He is quite willing to suffer a bit of personal abuse by not showing a personal predetermined position before the scientific basis for action he working to establish is in place.  I don’t like lawyers.  I don’t like the legalize way of doing things.  But I know it necessary.  Remember that Courts and Judges do no rule of Scientific opinion, only in the manner it used.

This goes back to the frustrating time a decade ago when I tried to push the climate skeptics into taking the carbon dioxide global warming theory to Court.  The legal forces within the skeptical community stopped the action.  I regret to say they were wise and I was trying to bring action out of passion not legal judgement.  It is very clear to me this is exactly what is dictating to the lawyer Scott Pruitt how to proceed now.  Patience.  That is what we must have. Patience.

 Meanwhile, Judicial Watch today announced it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia asking the court to compel the U.S. Department of Commerce to turn over all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement (Judicial Watch v. Department of Commerce (No. 1:17-cv-00541)).

The suit was filed after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”), a component of the Department of Commerce, failed to respond to a February 6 FOIA request seeking

All records of communications between

NOAA scientist Thomas Karl and

Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren.

The FOIA request covers the timeframe of January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017.

Karl, who until last year was director of the NOAA section that produces climate data, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), was the lead author of a landmark paper that was reported to have heavily influenced the Paris Agreement.

Holdren, a former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and long-time proponent of strong measures to curb emissions.

 This is a solid legal step.  “This new lawsuit could result in the release of emails that will help Americans understand how Obama administration officials may have mishandled scientific data to advance the political agenda of global warming alarmism,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Separately, Judicial Watch is suing for records of communications from NOAA officials regarding methodology for collecting and interpreting data used in climate models to justify the controversial findings in the “Pausebuster” study. 

 Patience.  That is my word for today.

(Updated 3-28-2017)

The President has signed the Executive order to end the Environmental Protection Agency “Clean Energy Plan” , kicking off the process of rolling back former President Barack Obama‘s aggressive global warming agenda.

President Trump’s action sends a clear signal domestically and internationally that he does not believe climate change to be anywhere near the crisis that Obama identified.

Trump signed the order in a ceremony at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agency responsible for many of the major policies being targeted.

He said “I am taking an historic step to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations.”

You can watch the entire ceremony here:

 

 

 

(Updated 3-27-2017)

Stand by for a major move by President Trump to dismantle to the Obama administration’s climate change agenda.  The order will be signed Tuesday, March 28^th……tomorrow/today.  It will compel the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review the Obama administration’s chief climate rule for power plant emissions,

the 2015 Clean Power Plan, a White House official said on Monday night. The White House opposes that rule, signaling its eventual termination. 

 I would like a far more definite and complete action.  This one doesn’t end the EPA ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  And it doesn’t dismantle the EPA position that our CO2 emissions cause global warming. 

But it is another step in the right direction and I think I shouldn’t complain.  Lol

(Updated 3-26-2017)

The Heartland Institute just completed holding its 12^th International Conference on Climate Change in Washington D.C. featuring an amazing array of climate change skeptics from all over the world.  As usual the media totally ignored the conference, so I have not found a single report on it anywhere on-line. Most people are very busy and can’t take the time to go to one of these conferences, nor can they spend the money for a trip to Washington, conference registration, meals and all the rest.  So Heartland live streamed the video of the presentations on the internet to all to see.  When you get an hour or so to devote to hearing the latest from experts on the topic I recommend you watch the video of a bit of the live stream now archived on You Tube.  The two most impressive speeches from my point of view are on one long video.

 

The first item is a rather long talk by Lord Christopher Monckton.  

Next watch the speech of

Dr. Will Happer, a man who visited Trump Tower during the transition and who I hope will be appointed as the President’s Science Advisor.

 I hope you appreciate this men.  They are heroes of mine.

(Updated 3-18-2017)

Wow.  Another big day in the battle to set aside the massive spending for Climate Change. In Germany, when the United States representatives met with other nations classified as the financial leaders of the world, one of the things they did was to “remove” from their joint statement the pledge to finance the fight against climate change.  This change was the outcome the United States had sought as a result of the election of  Donald Trump as President.  After all, during the campaign he called global warming a “hoax”.

Despite this change, the meeting was reported to have been friendly and non-confrontational.  But on many of the issues before the group, it was said to me 19 against one, the U.S. being the one.

 “This is my first G20, so what was in the past communiqué is not necessarily relevant from my standpoint,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the German resort town of Baden Baden. “I understand what the President’s desire is and his policies, and I negotiated them from here,” Mnuchin said. “I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.”

 The most important topic of the meeting wasn’t climate change but trade. Seeking to put “America first”, Trump has already pulled out of a key trade agreement and proposed a new tax on imports, arguing that certain trade relationships need to be reworked to make them fairer for U.S. workers. “We believe in free trade, we are in one of the largest markets in the world, we are one of the largest trading partners in the world, trade has been good for us, it has been good for other people,” Mnuchin said. The group meets again this Summer and spokespeople for the European nations hope to bring the United States more in line with their views then.

However, the communique for this meeting dropped a reference, used by the G20 last year, on the readiness to finance measures against climate change as agreed in Paris in 2015, because of opposition from the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Previously, on Thursday the Administration proposed a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget as the White House seeks to eliminate climate change programs and trim initiatives to protect air and water quality.

Day after day, we climate skeptics are getting good news. What a change to the day after day news we have endured for the last decade.  Wow.

(Updated 3-17-2017)

White House: Climate funding is ‘a waste of your money’

The Trump Administration just keeps on making this a year of our dreams for we climate skeptics. On Thursday, the White House  defended a proposal to slash federal funding for climate change programs, calling it “a waste of your money.” 

“I think the president was fairly straightforward on that: We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said at a White House briefing on Thursday.

“We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that. We consider that a basic tie to his campaign.”

 This came up when Mulvaney appeared before reports to answer questions about the President’s proposed budget. That “budget blueprint” proposes a 31 percent cut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including a $100 million cut to climate change programs under its purview. 

The budget proposal takes aim at climate change programming throughout the budget. It zeros out funding for State Department climate change programs, including American contributions to international climate change accounts, and the budget also reduces funding for advanced energy and renewable power research. 

 Environmentalists and greens have slammed the budget, saying lawmakers should not cut funding for climate change during a period of increasing global temperatures and the greenhouse gas emissions that cause that.

 Congress will ultimately write the appropriations bills that fund the government. Members of both parties have raised concerns about the level of EPA spending cuts in President Trump’s proposal, though many in the GOP support reducing funding for the agency’s regulatory effort on climate change. 

The President— who doubts what the media constantly refers to as “the scientific consensus on climate change” — often said in his presidential campaign that he would roll back much of the climate work advanced by President Obama. Beyond its budget request, the White House is still working on an executive order to undo several key climate rules from the previous administration.

 Each day is a great day for we scientists who know that the theory that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels will cause uncontrollable climate change has failed to verify in every computer model.  Carbon Dioxide is actually an essential gas for life on Earth and as in increases slightly it is making Earth greener while not having any significant impact on climate. Carbon Dioxide is actually less than one half of one percent of the atmosphere.  It has been much higher in the past long before man-kind burned fossil fuels.

(Updated 3-15-2017)

Bloomberg Politics has just posted an article on article about global warming/climate change in the new Federal Budget.  I have used it to write the following update.

It seems that President Obama knew the next Administration might want to cut the huge Federal Government’s spending on Global Warming/Climate Change so his aides spread the money throughout a wide list of government agencies and gave the programs hard to recognize names. How much money is involved? Well, the most recent estimate puts tab at $77 billion from 2008-2013. The idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.  So President Donald Trump’s team will have to do a lot of digging into the details of each Departments budget categories to find the hidden climate change funding.

It seems President Obama’s goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle.  All of this information comes from former members of the administration. In some cases, “Much of the effort in the Obama administration was to mainstream climate change,” said Jesse Keenan, who worked on climate issues with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and now teaches at Harvard University. He said all federal agencies were required to incorporate climate-change plans into their operations.

The Obama administration’s approach will be tested by Trump’s first budget request to Congress, an outline of which has just been released.  But because all the programs were disguised by name it is impossible for us to determine how many have been identified and cut.

Last November President Trump promised to save $100 billion over eight years by cutting all federal climate spending. His budget will offer an early indication of the seriousness of that pledge — and whether his administration is able to identify programs that may have intentionally been called anything but climate-related.

The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone. But that figure could well be too low. The Obama administration didn’t always include “climate” in program names, said Alice Hill, director for resilience policy on Obama’s National Security Council.

“Given the relationship that existed with Congress on the issue of climate change, you will not readily find many programs that are entitled ‘climate change,’” Hill, who is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said in an interview. At the Department of Defense, for example, anything with the word climate would have been “a target in the budget process,” she said.

 The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government.

The Department of Agriculture created “climate hubs” to help farmers and ranchers cope with extreme weather. The Department of Health and Human Services began analyzing the effects of climate change on occupational safety. The Bureau of Reclamation started a program called “West-Wide Climate Risk Assessments,” measuring changes to water supply and demand. The Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Tribal Climate Resilience Program. The Agency for International Development created a program to help “glacier-dependent mountain areas” deal with the risk of those glaciers melting.

In other cases, agencies expanded existing programs to account for global warming. In 2012, the Federal Highway Administration made climate-adaptation projects eligible for federal aid. Last year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded $1 billion through its Community Development Block Grant program to projects protecting against climate change-related natural disasters.

Meanwhile, a handful of lesser-known offices saw their funding increase while Obama was in office. The budget for NASA’s Earth Science program increased 50 percent, to $1.8 billion. Funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is mandated by Congress to report every four years on the state of climate change, rose 45 percent to $2.6 billion. At the National Science Foundation, the geosciences program almost doubled to $1.3 billion.

Republicans noticed, and tried to force the administration to offer a tally of climate funding. Last December, senior House Republicans sent a letter to Obama’s budget director, demanding that his office report how much federal money had gone toward climate programs in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.

Any cuts may face opposition in Congress, as Democrats and some Republicans support the spending, especially that to help communities withstand floods, hurricanes or droughts associated with climate change. Wednesday, a group of 17 Republicans announced their support for climate science — and policy measures to address it.

“Budget cuts to programs — or elimination of entire agencies — designed to help stem the costs of climate change will only hurt ranchers, agriculture producers, and coastal communities already experiencing the impacts of this global challenge,” Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the Council on Environmental Quality in Obama’s White House, said by email.

 Some in Trump’s party now urge him to use his authority to find those programs, and take them apart.

“The Trump Administration needs to defund the entire apparatus of the climate change federal funding gravy train,” said Marc Morano, a former Republican staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “In order to dismantle the climate establishment, agencies and programs throughout the federal government need to be targeted.”

“The climate funding has spread to almost every aspect of the federal government with sometimes wacky results,” said Morano, who doubts global warming and runs the website climatedepot.com. He cited one example of a Department of Transportation query about the link between climate change and fatal car crashes.

Others argue that the spread of climate programs throughout the federal government simply reflects the evolving nature of the risk.

“It is irresponsible not to examine the possibilities and understand our sensitivity to them,” said Ed Link, a former director of research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who led the forensic analysis of Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans. If federal agencies stop doing that work, he said by email, “shame on them.”

As you can see, the battle to correct the politicalization of Climate Change/Global warming science is going to be long and difficult.  But, at least, at last we have a President who is more-or-less on the side of we skeptics who know that the science is very clear: There is no significant man-made climate change now, has not been any in the past and no reason to fear any in the future.

Fight on.

(Updated 3-15-2017)

Every day is more exciting than the last for we climate change skeptics.  The Trump Administration is moving forward in one way and then another to end the climate change frenzy that has built up steadily over the last decade. For a Meteorologist who has studied the issue with great care for all these years and is absolutely certain there is no significant man-made global warming/climate change this is a time to rejoice. But, none the less, it is frustrating that each media report on the actions to bring the Environmental Protection Agency in line with the new Administration’s position reads as though Al Gore himself was the writer and editor.  All the stories include the phrase “scientific consensus that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas” and mentions that “97% of scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a major problem.” I know that neither of these assertions is factual. The so-called survey that came up with the consensus and 97% was contrived to produce the desired result and was a total shame when examined fairly.  There is no major support and no consensus.

Now it reported that the Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to release a wide-ranging executive order to reduce the role that climate change plays in policy decisions. This action will alter how U.S. agencies weigh regulations on a broad array of industries, including drilling, coal mining and auto manufacturing to name a few. Bloomberg News reports that the executive order will instruct the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies to overhaul their use of the “social cost of carbon,” an Obama-era policy that seeks to quantify potential economic damage from climate change for the purposes of drafting regulation. White House spokeswoman Kelly Love declined to discuss the timing of an executive order on energy. “We have nothing to announce at this time,” she said.

Former President Barack Obama set up the current rule that sets the current cost of carbon in policy decisions at $36 per ton with steady increases in each year until it hits $50 in 2030. The Trump order would direct regulators to use a “discount rate” that might actually eliminate that cost.

The E.P.A. under Mr. Obama took the position that the impact of emissions on the earth’s climate can take several years to appear. A White House source has told Bloomberg the order may be an initial step to ultimately phasing out the carbon evaluation entirely.  The executive order could be issued as soon as this week, the source said, and may include other energy-specific measures, like a requirement for the EPA to conduct a review of regulations that could harm energy production.

Reuters and others have reported previously that Trump planned to target Obama-era green regulations, including a federal coal mining ban and an initiative forcing states to cut carbon emissions.  The Department of Interior under Obama had issued a moratorium on coal leasing on federal land in 2015 as it sought to review the program and evaluate whether the government adequately priced the value of coal extracted from public lands on behalf of taxpayers. The Clean Power Plan was Obama’s centerpiece initiative to combat climate change, requiring states to slash emissions of carbon dioxide. But it was never implemented due to legal challenges launched by several Republican states.

The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, said last week he is not convinced that carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and said he wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 is a harmful pollutant that should be regulated.

Much of this information is from a news report by Bloomberg’s David Shepardson.

I am so excited I can hardly sleep.  That is an amazing turn of events for an old man.  Lol

(Updated 3-9-2017)

The situation is very exciting at the Environmental Protection Agency these days.

Scott Pruitt, the new Trump appointed Administrator of the E.P.A., has manned the top positions within the agency with skeptics of climate change who are intent on rolling back environmental regulations that are based on the battling Climate Change.  These rules are based on the failed scientific claim that mankind’s use of fossil fuels to power our civilization is releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which will lead to catastrophic climate change.

Mr. Pruitt has drawn heavily from the staff of his friend and fellow Oklahoma Republican,

Senator James Inhofe, long known as Congress’s most prominent skeptic of climate science. A former Inhofe chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, will be Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff. Another former Inhofe staff member, Byron Brown, will serve as Mr. Jackson’s deputy. Andrew Wheeler, a former Inhofe chief of staff, is a finalist to be Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, although he requires confirmation to the position by the Senate.

This sets up the E.P.A. as an agency where the leadership is fundamentally at odds with the career officials, staff scientists and employees who carry out the agency’s missions. “He’s the most different kind of E.P.A. administrator that’s ever been,” said

Steve J. Milloy, a member of the E.P.A. transition team who runs the website JunkScience.com, which debunks climate change. “He’s not coming in thinking E.P.A. is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Quite the opposite.” 

A pair of Trump campaigners from Washington State are also heading into senior positions at the E.P.A. Don Benton, a former Washington state senator who headed President Trump’s state campaign, will be the agency’s senior liaison with the White House. Douglas Ericksen, a current Washington state senator, is being considered as the regional administrator of the E.P.A.’s Pacific Northwest office. As a state senator, Mr. Ericksen has been active in opposing efforts to pass a state-level climate change law taxing carbon pollution. Last month, he invited

Tony Heller, a climate denialist who blogs under the pseudonym Steven Goddard, to address a Washington State Senate committee on the costs of climate change policy. Mr. Heller’s blog says “global warming is the biggest fraud in science history.”

 Another transition official under consideration by Mr. Pruitt for a permanent position is David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the conservative Heritage Foundation who has publicly praised the benefits of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That view directly challenges the Al Gore and cohort’s widely publicized and media accepted theory that increased carbon dioxide traps heat and contributes to the dangerous warming of the planet.

 This week, Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of unwinding Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations aimed at shutting down coal-fired power plants.

 Now, if only the President can manage to step aside from his daughter’s Algorian position and let Mr. Pruitt and his team of skeptics guide the agency on a 180 degree turn in basic position so that the bad science of climate change will eventually die away. Oh, what a wonderful time that will be for we scientists who know that there is no significant man-made climate change now, has not been any in the past and no reason to fear any in the future.

(Updated 2-24-2017)

There is a major bump in our road to Correctionville, the town where we will correct the bad science about increased carbon dioxide upsetting the climate of Earth. Darn, darn, darn. This is a tough one. It is a huge bump we will call Bump Ivanka.

Coming between and man and his daughter is a super tough event.  I am concerned this is where Fatherly love “Trumps” science.  Man, oh man, Boy of boy, OMG this is one huge bump.

It seems that President’s Trump’s daughter (and her husband) pushed the nation’s Chief Executive to get rid of a reference to the global climate change accord known as the Paris agreement in an executive order he intends to sign.  The Wall Street Journal reports that Ivanka Trump talked President Donald Trump out of mentioning the deal in directives that take aim at his predecessor’s environmental regulations. Trump and hubby Jerad Kushner moved to Washington from their liberal home state of New York to be close to Ivanka’s father.  Kushner took a job at the White House as a senior advisor, and Ivanka has been attending her father’s business roundtables. She reportedly has been positioning herself as a bridge between her father’s conservative administration and liberal elites, who’s circles she still runs in. Ivanka wants climate change to be another issue in HER White House portfolio, a source close to her told the website Politico in early December.

A couple of weeks after this election, she brought former Vice President Al Gore to Trump Tower to meet with her father. ‘It’s no secret that Ivanka Trump is very committed to having a climate policy that makes sense for our country and for our world,’ Gore told MSNBC after meeting with Ivanka and her father. ‘That was certainly evident in the conversation that I had with her before the conversation with the president-elect,’ Gore said. ‘I appreciate the fact that she’s very concerned about this.

Previously President Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax.

Now Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has said that the president still believes that ‘most of it is a bunch of bunk. Trump campaigned against the 2015 Paris climate accord that was backed by the governments of 200 nations, including the Obama administration. Since winning the presidential election, though, he’s said he has an ‘open mind’ to it.  Clearly his daughter has reached Dad.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested at his confirmation hearing last month that he doesn’t believe that the United States should immediately get out of it.

‘The president-elect, as part of his priority in campaigning, was “America First.” So there are important considerations as to when we commit to such accords,’ he said.

Continuing, Tillerson also stated, that ‘it’s important for America to remain engaged in those discussions so we are at the table, expressing a view and understanding what the impacts may be on the American people and American competitiveness.’

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declined to say at his press briefing Thursday if the president wants to pull out. ‘I think I will leave that to Secretary Tillerson. That’s a conversation that he’s having with him as far as where we are on that,’ Spicer said.

The Trump administration is expected to amend the Environmental Protection Agency order that brings the United States into alignment with the agreement.

The so-called carbon rule commits the US to a 32 percent cut in carbon emissions from 2005 emission levels by by 2030.  A Trump transition official whose expertise is in energy told reporters earlier this year, according to the Wall Street Journal, that Trump would withdraw from the deal for that reason.

‘How can you remain a member of the Paris treaty if your commitment isn’t even close to reaching it?’ Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said.

But now when it was time for the President to take a formal act to end the totally unscientifically justified Carbon Credits silliness and step away from the contrived carbon dioxide is a pollutant that will ruin the climate of Earth distortion of scientific facts, it appears it will be Daughter over scientific logic that rules the day. This is no speed bump, no little bouncy moment on the road to Correctionville.  This is trouble.  I am sitting here in the back seat yelling

“Help.”  

(Updated 2-20-2017)

A Miami News “paper” website published a new climate change scare article on February 19th.

The writer must really, really believe that Miami is going to be flooded by a rapidly rising Atlantic Ocean and millions of people there and elsewhere will have to evacuate to higher ground.  And, he clearly thinks that those of us who skeptical of this prediction are using dishonest scientific technics when we shot back that this ocean flood of coastal cities is not going to happen.  He begins his report with an admonition:

No cherry-picked scientific studies can refute this fact: If the world doesn’t reduce the carbon it’s dumping into the atmosphere, Miami will drown. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects the seas could rise more than five feet by the year 2100. The flood would force millions of South Floridians to flee their homes.

 

The stimulus behind his article is revealed in the next sentence:

 This past Friday, however, the U.S. Senate effectively announced it’s cool with Miami becoming a modern-day Atlantis. Senators — including Florida’s own “not a scientist” Marco Rubio — confirmed President Trump’s climate-change-bashing choice for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head, Scott Pruitt.

So this journalists position is very clear.  He does not want to hear from we skeptics because he has concluded we use cherry picked science and he is very upset with President Trump’s moves to reject the climate change frenzy. And when the Congress gave the President some support by approving his nomination for Administrator of the EPA the writer simply flipped out and wrote this one sided “news” story.  In his article he states the scientific view he accepts as valid and gets nasty about Scott Pruitt:

Let’s revisit just how bad a disaster this could be for South Florida.

At the moment, China and the United States emit the two greatest amounts of carbon into the air. Though China has increasingly warmed (no pun intended) to the idea of fighting climate change, Pruitt represents a step back into the climate-science Stone Age.

The media tends to understate how quickly humans might lock themselves into catastrophic levels of warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the United Nations body devoted to fighting global warming — has laid out exactly how much carbon dioxide humans could pump into the air before the world would permanently warm to nightmarish levels.

So you can tell by the above paragraph that this writer has totally accepted the theory that CO2 (carbon dioxide) is the culprit that will make Earth unlivable including the sea level rise that will flood Miami. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is the result of our breathing and use of fossil fuels to power our civilization by providing heating and air conditioning, power for our smart phones and computers, lights and cars and airplanes and all our food production and manufactured products to make our daily lives long, comfortable and happy.

He goes on the quote the dire predictions of the scientists who work for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though a two-degree rise in global temperatures sounds harmless, it isn’t: A two-degree rise could destroy food crops, wreck many animal and human habitats, and, most important for Miami, subject millions of people to increased coastal flooding and water shortages.  With Pruitt at the helm, Obama’s “Climate Action Plan” is almost certainly toast.

The writer goes on from there about the horrible consequences of having President Trump, Scott Pruitt at the EPA and a Republican Congress for the next four years.

He is named Jerry Iannelli who is listed as a Miami New Times’ daily-news reporter. He graduated with honors from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he developed a reputation for pestering college officials until they cursed at him. He then earned his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

 This article makes very clear to me that our battle to correct the bad science behind the climate change frenzy is a long way from over.

We have landed on the opponent’s beach but it will take months if not years of battle after battle to regain our homeland.  

 As for the coastal flooding matter, A recent study by scientists in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, that was published in “Nature Geoscience” concludes there is no “scientific consensus” to suggest the rate of the seas’ rise will accelerate dangerously. The notion of the seas rising, swamping coastal cities, and creating havoc is the stuff of science fiction, not science. This is why spending millions or billions on the assertions of some who have a real stake in keeping the public frightened is a very bad idea. At the center of the global warming scare campaign is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its most recent report said that “no long-term acceleration of sea level has been identified using 20th-century data alone” but that does not discourage the IPCC from forecasting an increase due to global warming.  

 

Who can you believe? One such person is Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, the former chair of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is the past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary Research Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution. He has been studying sea level and its effects on coastal areas for more than 35 years.  

Dr. Morner acknowledges that “sea level was indeed rising from, let us say, 1850 to 1930-40. And that rise had a rate in the order of 1 millimeter per year. (1 millimeter is about .04 of an inch).

It is tiny, tiny amount. Not surprisingly Dr. Morner is very critical of the IPCC and its headline-grabbing doomsday predictions. He scorns the IPCC’s claim to “know” that facts about sea level rise, noting that real scientists “are searching for the answer” by continuing to collect data “because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don’t find it!”

A recent paper reviewed by CO2 Science finds that sea levels have risen from 2002-2011 at a rate of only 1.7 millimeters per year over the past 110 years, the equivalent of 6.7 inches per century. This is close to Dr. Morner’s assertion that, at most, there has been a rate of increase that tops out at 1.1 millimeter per year. The review concluded that there is no evidence of any human influence on sea levels.

 My conclusion is that it’s not the sea level rise you should worry about. It is the rising national debt and the deficit, to name the worst two problems I feel the new President faces. 

(Updated 2-19-2017)

 

The new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt sat down Thursday with Kimberley A. Strassel of the Wall Street Journal for his first interview since his November nomination. She writes that he spent most of the time waxing enthusiastic about all the good his agency can accomplish once he refocuses it on its statutorily defined mission: working cooperatively with the states to improve water and air quality. Of course, I wanted him to say that the first thing he is going to do cut off the global warming frenzy and eliminate the carbon dioxide is a pollutant ruling.  But, he was a lot broader minded and far too clever to stir the pot with those statements.  If he had said what I wanted to hear the result would have been a torrent of media and political screaming.  While that would have been fine with me, I guess he is more clever and reserved. After all he is lawyer and former Attorney General of a state. 

Well, finally the interview got to the global warming topic and here is Ms. Strassel’s paragraph on that:

Will the EPA regulate carbon dioxide? Mr. Pruitt says he won’t prejudge the question. “There will be a rule-making process to withdraw those rules, and that will kick off a process,” he says. “And part of that process is a very careful review of a fundamental question: Does EPA even possess the tools, under the Clean Air Act, to address this? It’s a fair question to ask if we do, or whether there in fact needs to be a congressional response to the climate issue.” Some might remember that even President Obama believed the executive branch needed express congressional authorization to regulate CO 2 —that is, until Congress said “no” and Mr. Obama turbocharged the EPA.

Ms. Strassel also wrote: Mr. Pruitt defies the stereotype of the fierce conservative who wants to destroy the agency he runs. Nonetheless, he is likely to encounter considerable hostility. The union that represents the EPA’s 15,000-strong bureaucracy urged its members to besiege their senators with calls this week asking them to reject Mr. Pruitt’s appointment. (The effort didn’t have much effect: The vote was nearly along party lines, with only two Democrats and one Republican breaking ranks.) These bureaucrats have the ability to sabotage his leadership. That’s what happened to Mrs. Gorsuch. She went to war with the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy won. Mr. Pruitt plans to overhaul the agency’s procedure for producing scientific studies and cost-benefit analyses. “The citizens just don’t trust that EPA is honest with these numbers,” he says. “Let’s get real, objective data, not just do modeling. Let’s vigorously publish and peer-review science. Let’s do honest cost-benefit work. We need to restore the trust.”

Here is my assessment of this article:

This interview like everything else in the early weeks of the Trump administration illustrates how difficult it is going to be for the outsider President and his team to reform and in some cases dismantle the horrid, strongly entrenched Federal Government, it’s bought-and-paid-for politicians and the 100s of thousands of bureaucrats that support and work for them.  It is a huge challenge.  The election didn’t mean victory, it was simply an invasion of the government.

For the record Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column. 

(Updated 2-17-2017)

Scott Pruitt has be approved by a vote of the Senate and sworn in as the new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.  This is a major victory for we climate skeptics.  He is not outspoken in his manner, but I have no doubt he is a full-flegged skeptic of significant man-made climate change. I believe he will rather quickly clean out the climate change promoters within the EPA and that the President will direct him via Executive Order to end the EPA ruling that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant. There should be a series of important actions within the EPA to abolish the huge team that Al Gore build of the last 20 years.  The other side will be screaming, protesting and threatening reprisals and the media will be aflame for the next two or three weeks.  What a big time development.

Hooray

(Up dated February 16, 2017)

Wow.  A new Congressman from the Florida Panhandle has introduced rather powerful bill in Congress.  It is H.R.861 which terminates the Environmental Protection Agency.

He is Congressman Matt Gaetz and his idea is to leave environmental protection to the states. The new EPA abolition bill is at a very early stage, and has to cross a number of hurdles before making it to the desk of President Trump. But returning power and responsibility for clean air and water to the states, reducing federal interference in everyday affairs, is likely to be a very attractive proposition for President Trump and his supporters. One of the commenters on the website Watts Up With That, Pat Frank, gives some perspective to the issue when he writes: “The EPA has been enforcing the Clean Water Act to put unbearable regulatory and financial pressures on farmers and ranchers, and quite deliberately so. It’s ethically, though not legally, criminal. The regulations have, for decades, been the pry-bar of legal terrorism by green NGOs and their bureaucratic fellow-travelers to advance their plan to force people off their land, and return the countryside to a state of sacred green purity. Returning regulatory authority to the states will, in many cases, almost immediately remove those burdens. It will allow citizens of those states a chance to redress their injury, and to recover their rights through the vote and through legal challenge.” Another commenter says “It would put thousands of Democrats out of work.”  In any case, word is that President Trump will issue several Executive Orders overturning the extremely controversial climate change CO2 rulings of the EPA as soon as Scott Pruitt is sworn in as EPA Administrator which should happen Friday or Saturday. The battle continues.

(Updated Wednesday, February 15, 2017)

The battle to correct the bad science of Climate change is a long way from over.  A solid reminder of this hit me between the eyes when I watched the Tuesday evening Water’s World segment on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel.  Waters was in Central Park following the recent New York snow storm talking to people about global warming.  The primary, strong response he heard was that climate change is a major issue, particularly that rising ocean levels are going to flood New York City.  The people he talked with seemed to genuinely believe the threat is serious. I know the main stream media has carried many reports on this issue but I somehow thought that people did not take it too seriously.  Well, I was wrong.

First of all, let me correct the oft reported “fake news” about ocean water levels rising.  Essentially they are rising now less than in previous decades and the rate of rise is so slight it would take hundreds of years to create any significant flooding.  Of course the oceans have been gradually rising ever since the Ice Age ended 18 thousand years ago as the melting of the giant ice sheets that covered much of Earth slowly melted.  Now we have some glaciers remaining and ice at the poles and on Iceland and Greenland.  Since the North Pole Ice is in water, any melting there does not cause rising.  The remaining glaciers do not include enough ice to create a problem if they all melt.  The alarmist climate change crowd are more or less constantly reporting melting at the South Pole.  The truth is, however, the ice extent and thickness there is near record high for the hundred years or so we have any meaningful records. There are reports every month or two about Greenland ice melting, but the truth is our records are not very long and our measurements are not very accurate.  New studies are beginning to get a good handle on Greenland ice, but the stories are all topped with scare headlines and structured as though “the sky is falling”.  The truth is, while there is seasonal melting and refreezing, and snowpack changing to ice and eventually calving into the ocean there is no cause for alarm. 

The bottom line is this, sea level, according to world-wide measurements, has been rising at about 6 inches every hundred years.  But it is very difficult to measure accurately because of the tides and wave action and particularly because of settling land masses.  We tend to think of the continents and islands as being solid, firm, never-changing features of Earth.  Certainly they, for the most part, have not changed an iota in our lifetimes.  But when you consider the bigger picture you learned back in school that the continents once separated and moved and islands have formed from time to time.  Well the fact is that coastal areas are, at places, quit unstable, semi floating and prone to rising and sinking and being locally altered by the crashing storm waves.  And many of these islands are very unstable geologically and are sinking steadily into the ocean.  The scaremongering media tells us this is the result of sea level rise and global warming/climate change

Bottom line, the threat of coastal flooding caused by rising ocean water levels is not real.  It is “fake news”, to use the phrase of the day.

And, oh yes, the most important point, there is absolutely no proof of any theory about how the activities of mankind’s use of fossil fuels has anything to do with global warming.  This is the basic piece of bad science that I have spent years attempting to correct and I will not stop trying so long as I am vertical.

(New information as of February 9th)

When NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency) was preparing the datasets of World temperatures for the Obama Administration to present at the key UN Paris climate conference in 2016

Thomas Karl, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, constantly held his thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximized warming and minimized documentation. One result was that the datasets were probably not archived. Dr. John Bates who made this bombshell of a revelation from inside this key US Federal Agency recently retired from NOAA. He adds that he has not been able to confirm that the politically modified data was gone for good but says he learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure, leading to a tongue-in-cheek joke by some who had worked on it that the failure was deliberate to ensure the result could never be replicated. This amazing inside info-bomb was revealed by

Dr. Judith Curry when she was interviewed by a small British radio station in early February. She was discussing the revelations of a long time contact of hers, John Bates, who has revealed information we felt we knew before but never had confirmed.

She also spoke strongly about the politicalization of climate science. She said this has been driven by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process that has robbed scientists of the opportunity to openly explore the legitimate, extremely important and yet unaddressed issues of how natural climate change drivers impact the earth’s climate. She says the IPCC never bothered to do the “hard work” to determine how these natural climate variation affected the climate change but instead merely relied on “expert judgement thus neglecting any opportunity to advance climate science in this very important area. During the broadcast Dr. Curry noted that climate models such as those utilized by UN  IPCC which attempt to connect climate impacts of human action in many respects represent nothing more than “self fulfilling” prophecies from a politically driven agency that has “lost objectivity”.

Dr. Curry also discussed the recent data debacle at NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency) which is supposed to create and maintain the preeminent data base of the temperatures covering the entire world. She said that NOAA has been extremely careless and incompetent in handling it’s temperature data.

John Bates, who provided the information about data manipulation is a very solid climate scientist who received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1986. Post Ph.D., he spent his entire career at NOAA, until his retirement in 2016.  He spent the last 14 years of his career at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (now NCEI) as a Principal Scientist, where he served as a Supervisory Meteorologist until 2012. He received the NOAA Administrator’s Award 2004 for “outstanding administration and leadership in developing a new division to meet the challenges to NOAA in the area of climate applications related to remotely sensed data”. He was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs).  He is currently President of John Bates Consulting Inc.

This story confirms the report that I put on TV in a documentary I did in San Diego in 2012.  Here is the key segment from that TV report:

Meanwhile: Another great big step to the battle to end the “Climate Change is going to destroy our civilization” crisis finally happened the last week in January thanks to the Trump Administration.  The big step was headlined in the news reports this way:

(Posted February 4, 2017)

The future of NOAA, the world’s largest repository of climate data, is now in the hands of a climate-change denier

What that headline means is the National Weather Service and the National Climatic Data Center, both Departments within the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency of the United States, are now under the control of the new Administration.  And all of those units are part of the Commerce Department. The man who instituted the change is Kenneth Happala, who serves on the transition team for the US Department of Commerce.  Happala is a hero of mine, a genuine Climate Change Skeptic.  His presence has sent chills through the bodies of thousands of Climate Change promoters who work within the Departments he now controls.

He is the Executive Vice President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), regularly contributes to “The Week That Was,” a weekly SEPP update on climate news, and most importantly Mr. Happala is an endorser of the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change which declares, among other points, 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.”  Mr. Happala is also a Climate Expert for the Heartland Institute.

Mr. Happala has written: “Carbon dioxide is a necessary food for green plants, thus necessary for life on this planet as we generally recognize it. As discussed in the second report (of the IPCC of the UN) thousands of experiments and observations show that virtually all food crops and green plants thrive better in an atmosphere enriched in carbon dioxide and better resist stress such as draught, or insect attacks. Contrary to EPA claims, Carbon dioxide enrichment, condemned by these regulations, is a benefit to agriculture, humanity, and the planet.” “The EPA has failed to present any compelling physical evidence that man’s emissions of Greenhouse Gases caused the 20th Century warming. Instead, it has relied on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its faulty computer models that are biased, obsolete, and wrong. [It’s] past time [to end the scare and] stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat.”  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is home to the world’s largest repository of climate data.

Haapala will help choose NOAA’s leadership once the Senate votes on billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, Trump’s choice for secretary of commerce.

Now both the EPA and NOAA are under the control of Climate Change Skeptics.  The skeptics offense is on the attack.  Yeah.

Of course all of this is the result of electing Donald Trump as our new President.  He is roaring into action.

(Posted first December 10, 2010, but updated frequently since)

By John Coleman

“Climate Change is happening.” You bet it is. The climate of planet  Earth has been constantly changing for as long as we have any records. Look at the chart below.

ANCIENT CO2 AND TEMPS

This chart of data obtained from Ice Cores collected near the South Pole displays the longest known record of the climate of Earth. It goes back 400,000 years. Just look as the constant changes in temperature and atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. The changes range from very large to rather small. The four big dips are Ice Ages and the four big peaks are what we know as Interglacial Periods. The ice ages are very hostile to human life. It is during the warm periods that life flourishes. We are very lucky to be living our lives during one of the warmer periods of Earth’s history. Clearly the civilized activities of mankind including the burning of fossil fuels had nothing to do with these historic changes, large and small. After all, our modern times are covered by only the last little squiggle on the right hand side of the chart. Can you look at this chart and identify Earth’s normal climate? Certainly we can compute the average, but is average the same as normal? I don’t think so.

Now let’s look at a chart of the last 11,000 years since the last Ice Age ended and we moved into this Interglacial Period. This is the period in which civilization has developed and flourished. The most difficult time was the little Ice Age from about 1550 to about 1800. Look at the tiny, little warm period on the extreme right hand side of the chart. It is during this period that our civilization began to make extensive use of fossil fuels for heating, cooling, electrical generation and to power internal combustion and eventually jet engines. Please note that this current warm spell looks no different than the others during the last 11,000 years.

Now let’s look at a chart of the last 1,000 years.

The Medieval Optimum was the period in which the nations of Europe grew and prospered and many of the great European cities were founded and flourished. It is important to note that it was much warmer back then than it is now. There is nothing exceptional about the current warm period. Note that changes such as the Medieval Warm Spell and the Little Ice Age come fairly often and still smaller swings in climate are constantly occurring.

Now a chart of the modern times.

This chart is used these days by climate alarmist to show the warming and increase in carbon dioxide in the age of fossil fuels. When you haven’t seen the previous charts, this one looks rather ominous. However, when it is put in perspective by the previous charts, it does not constitute a dramatic departure from the natural pattern at all. And, when it is carefully examined, it is far short of alarming. First of all, the warming from 1880 to today is less than 1.5 degrees, hardly dramatic and very much in keeping with the gradual warming pattern since the end of the last Ice Age. Secondly, despite a continuous increase in the carbon dioxide, there was actually a forty year period of steady temperatures from 1940 to 1980. And the chart ends the same year the rise ends.

Now look at the chart of the last twenty years.

Temperatures are in another prolonged pause. There has been no warming for over 18 years. Now look at this chart:

TEMPS AND CO2 DISCONNECT

This chart clearly shows the disconnection between temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) since 1996. The temperatures stopped warming but the CO2 continues to rise. This lack of correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature is very significant. That’s because the entire global warming/climate change alarmist case is based on the theory that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas and will drive temperatures dramatically warmer. Let me emphasize this because it is the failed theory that is the basis of the entire global warming/climate change scare campaign. The alarmists say an increase in CO2 will cause a huge spike in temperatures and that will lead to all the other dire consequences they predict.

Over the last thirty years, dozens of climate scientists have worked at refining this CO2 greenhouse gas theory and have created climate models in computers to predict the rise in temperatures. They structured the models to match the previous temperature pattern starting back about 1975. But as time passed, and the models’ moved from the past to the future, the forecasts don’t go well, to put it mildly. Over time a significant disconnect between actual temperatures and the predictions develops. Couple the disconnection in the models’ predictions and the failure of the actual temperatures to react to a continuing CO2 build-up and you must conclude the CO2 greenhouse theory is not valid. It is a totally failed theory. And it seems to me that ought to be the end of the climate change alarmism campaign. But, alas it rolls on non-stop. Why is that?

Three reasons stand out: Stubbornness, politics and money.

It’s never easy to admit you are wrong. Your personal pride, how you are regarded by friends, colleagues and family and the setback in your professional status all contribute to stubbornness. In climate science, a scientist who admits his theory is wrong faces loose of funding, position and a professional future. It seems to me that at this point, dozens of climate scientists are just too stubborn to admit the CO2 greenhouse gas global warming theory has failed.

As for the political reason, it showed up dramatically in the New York Times exit poll following the November 2014 election.

My investigative Journalism uncovered the details of how global warming became a political issue. Here is that story.

A great scientist named Roger Revelle theorized about carbon dioxide being a significant greenhouse gas in a 1957 research paper. He then lectured about this paper to his class at Harvard University in 1962. A student in that class named Al Gore adopted the theory as his “cause”. He wrote a book about it and used it to win an election to become a United States Senator from Tennessee. In the Senate he helped to establish Federal Government funding for global warming research grants. Gore wrote a second book on the topic “An Inconvenient Truth” and worked with Hollywood supporters to turn that book into a movie.

The movie won an Oscar. The books, funding and movie caught the attention of a bureaucrat at the United Nations. That bureaucrat, named Maurice Strong, set out then to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As a result the number of research papers on global warming multiplied. News releases about the papers resulted in the media producing a continuing string of news reports about “the sky is falling” and global warming became a “cause celeb”.

It all peaked when Mr. Gore and the UNIPCC were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize. The U.N. continues to hold conferences and publish reports and the Democrat Party has adopted global warming as a platform issue. The science has been totally overwhelmed by politics and become a political issue.

Now, consider the biggest driving force of all behind the global warming/climate change frenzy: money. Never underestimate the power of money. The research funding for global warming from the United States Federal Government has built-up through the years. It is now nearly 5 billion dollars ($5,000,000,000) a year.

If you are a research scientist or manage a research institution/ organization or a department in a University or even if you manage an activist environmental group, you want and need some of that money to fund your career. The funds are only being granted to those who support the climate change theory. As a result global warming alarmism has become a well-funded industry. Not only are our tax dollars funding a mountain of research papers, but now the government funding to “solve” the climate crisis has spread out and now flows in many directions. There is funding for Ethanol gasoline and greatly increased corn production. And, there are tax breaks for solar and wind projects. And there are direct government subsidies and grants to pay for a multitude of projects to counteract the threat of CO2 induced warming. At this point all of those expenditure add up to an amazing 16 billion dollars ($16,000,000,000) a year of tax money. So while the science behind the climate change has failed, the government actions to counter it continue to grow.

It seems to me that while they have all been benefiting in many ways from the climate change frenzy, scientists, the media, environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians have all been thinking about climate in a wrong way. They seem to have been thinking that there is a normal climate and it is what the climate was when mankind began to use fossil fuels. They have been positioning the climate debate to tell us that it is our responsibility to return the climate to be exactly as it was then. But the climate at that point in history was no more stable or noteworthy or desirable than it was before or since. It seems to me that there is no such thing as the normal climate. There is no normal extent of ice at the poles. There is no normal amount ice in the mountain glaciers. There is no normal sea level height. There is no normal number of tornadoes or hurricanes. Droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, blizzards and ice storms increase and decrease irregularly over time. I feel it is wrong to set the parameters of the “normal climate”. It may blow your mind to learn that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency and its National Weather Service simply use the average of the last 30 years as “normal” climate. So what is being touted as normal climate now is no more than what it has been lately.

Next allow me to make an observation that will surprise most people, particularly those who have followed my climate comments in the past. I know that there several instances of man-made climate change. Some of these have been occurring for at least 200 years and are still occurring today. But here is where I see the situation far differently than the climate alarmists. The changes I see as a result of mankind’s activities are local and regional and not of global significance. They are not irreversible and have little to do with our use of fossil fuels and producing an exhaust of carbon dioxide (CO2). Here are some climate changes that are resulting from our civilization:

Urban Heat Islands: The heat released into the atmosphere by the cluster of concrete, asphalt and steel and thousands of heat emitting smokestacks and the clustering of hundreds of thousands or even millions of warm human beings does produce very significant localized warming of the atmosphere.  This is particularly obvious in major northern cities on winter nights. In Chicago, for example, the low temperatures on a winter night might range from 32 degrees in the heart of the city to 20 in the suburbs and 10 in the surrounding farm country.  That warming is localized, mostly seasonable and not a threat in any way to climate of Earth.  It is not a result of the CO2 in the air and will not be counteracted by carbon taxes or abatement.

Similarly there is increased humidity in irrigated areas cities where we import water and drier climate in the regions from which we are exporting the water to cities. These effects are real and measureable, but are not a threat to the climate of Earth and are in no way related to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

The Owens Valley in California, pictured above, is a prime example of this category of man-made climate change.  It once was a beautiful and bountiful green farming valley fed by a river of water that flowed off of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west.  But the city of Los Angles bought out the valley and exported all that water the nation’s second largest city. This is of no global significance and definitely unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

And here is one more man-made climate change: high cloudiness has increased significantly in the regions where there is an exceptional number of high flying jet aircraft on a continuous basis. Of all the man-made climate changes this may be the most significant. It is only recently been statistically proven.  It is somewhat regional in the plains states of the United States centered on Kansas.  The constant and increasing stream of high flying cross continental jet aircraft flights is filling the sky with contrails.  This pattern of high clouds is cooling temperatures a degree or two on average and probably reducing the number of showers and thunderstorms in the region.  All of this may have some impact on crop yields in the region. This is not a global weather crisis, not by a long shot.  It may not be a big deal.  But more study is merited.  And it is definitely not related to the burning of fossil fuels.

(I feel the need to add the point that contrails are a well understood, natural result of aircraft flying through a moist level in the upper atmosphere and are nothing more that clouds of water vapor.  The internet myth about Chemtrails is total folly. I am absolutely certain there is no such thing as Chemtrails.)

These and other minor climate changes resulting from mankind’s activities are well documented. However, none of these problems is devastating or a crisis. We are dealing with them and there is no need to become alarmed about them.

There is another aspect to the debate today. Al Gore lectures about how we human being are “spewing tons and tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day”. This is a totally irresponsible alarmist rant. In the United States we have utilized advanced science to refine our coal, oil and gas and the systems that burn it.  Our power plants, cars and aircraft produce a very limited amount of carbon particulates and ash. What is produced is a tiny amount compared to smog our furnaces powered by coal stokers and our old fashioned auto engines and primitive gasoline produced in the 1930’s and 40’s. And what reaches the air at this time, quickly falls to the ground.  Unfortunately, this is not true in China, India and elsewhere in the third world, where the advanced technology is ignored in the rush to produce desperately needed electricity and transportation.  However, on a worldwide basis, they are not producing a climate crisis.

What Al Gore is talking and greatly distorting in his holier-than-thou screaming is not carbon, even though that is the way he terms it to spread his alarmism.  What he is talking about is Carbon Dioxide.  Well is true that our burning of fossil fuels is sending millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air. But is not causing any problem at all and it fact is creating a great deal of good. But Gore’s pontification is usually accompanied by a picture of a smoke stack belching heavy, dark smoke into the sky.

That is not carbon dioxide you see rising from those smoke stacks. It is largely harmless water vapor. There are probably some tiny particles of carbon in the plume. They will settle to the surface shortly or become the nucleus of rain drops. There may be some ash in the smoke. It, too, is essentially harmless. Mostly when you see a picture of dark smoke rising from a smoke stack these days it is because the Sun is on the other side of the plume of water vapor and it is creating a dark shadow. With today’s clean fuels and smoke scrubbers in the smoke stacks, very little pollution is being emitted. And our car engines today are very different than the smog belching crude devises of the 1940s. In our cars, we have replaced carburetors and spark plugs and added catalytic converters and reformulated the gasoline and now very little comes out of the exhaust pipe but some CO2 and water vapor.

Further discussion of this issue must begin with a definition of carbon dioxide. It is invisible. It is odorless. It is tasteless. And CO2 is essential for life on Earth, since all plant life requires CO2 for photosynthesis, the process by which it lives and grows. No CO2 would mean the planet would be barren and brown. So all animal life would perish of starvation and so would we human beings. Carbon Dioxide has always existed naturally in the atmosphere. So I don’t see any reasonable way to conclude that carbon dioxide which is essential for life and not producing climate change, is a pollutant. It simply is not a significant “greenhouse gas”.  In fact, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere has essentially produced a fertilizing effect on all flora on the Earth.  Our planet is 20% greener than before we burned fossil fuels.  Crops are growing faster and producing more food.  The forests are bigger and healthier.  CO2 is good for our Earth.

But Al Gore, the Democrat Party and all of the professional societies and environmental groups are frantically trying to get us to stop producing it. This is the strangest distortion of science and reasonable judgment of my life time. And there seems to be no willingness to listen to opposing views. Never-the-less, I have dedicated the remaining years of my life to try to correct this horrible distortion of science.

Despite the reality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama years classified CO2 as a pollutant. And President Obama was setting out to authorize the EPA to start taxing our carbon footprints when his term in office stopped the process. So even if it is not causing climate change, we are told it is evil over and over again and soon may be forced to reduce our carbon footprints by phasing out our use of fossil fuels. And President Obama had committed to a National reduction of our so called “greenhouse emissions” by at least 20% within a decade.  All of this will be cancelled as the Trump Administration takes over the EPA.

Think about what we are doing with our fossil fuel burning civilization. We are lengthening the length of life of all us humans and animals by producing more plentiful food and for we human providing a far more wholesome civilized environment with better heating and air conditioning, better medical care and all the benefits of ample power and energy. In short, CO2 is making life good.

You should realize that the atmosphere of Earth is vast and amazingly self-cleansing. Earth’s atmosphere weighs about 11,700,000,000,000,000,000 pounds. So when our exhaust spews a few thousand tons of carbon dioxide into the air, it is a tiny contribution. After all these years of burning fossil fuels the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still less than one half of one percent.

Since the air is not warming as predicted, climate alarmists recently have shifted to raising alarm about how the oceans are absorbing the CO2. They say it is making the oceans acidic. That is a gross, alarmist claim that is not validated by the data. The measurements show that the oceans are still very alkaline. The miniscule amount of CO2 being absorbed is not creating any problem except in the imaginations of some agenda driven scientists and environmentalists. Their claims about damage to the ocean sound a lot like the claims they used to make about melting polar ice and dying polar bears.

The alarmists say that “science has spoken” and “the debate is over” and “the issue is settled”. Global Climate Change, a NASA website, reports 97% of climate scientists agree that warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities. That 97% figure has been widely used by various climate alarmists and widely reported in the media. But an examination of the process through which that figure was calculated makes it clear it is not a valid statistic, only a manufactured number. And, remember that most scientists have been under great money pressure to support the global warming/climate change alarmist position. Their income and professional standing have been totally dependent on it. The new Administration will trim and cut those research dollars as best the Congress will allow and allocate some research money to balanced science which will most likely end up debunking climate change, coastal flooding, droughts, storms and heatwaves. The 97 percent statistic never was valid and it will become toast in the months to come.

So the climate change alarmists have dismissed those of us who are skeptics as “wackos” and “deniers”. This is very insulting, and not just to me, because I am not alone; not the only climate skeptic. There are thousands of men and women who stand up to the climate change media and political barrage. Many of them are as dedicated as I am to correcting the runaway bad science about CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas.

Have you ever heard of the Oregon Petition? It debunks global warming/climate change with the following words “There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” Over 9,000 scientists holding Ph.D.’s and a total of over 31,000 scientists have signed that petition.

The Heartland Institute has brought climate skeptics together for Ten International Conferences on Climate Change. Great scientists from around the world gather for these occasions and present the results of their research that debunks the various aspects of the global warming. Heartland has placed videos of all those presentations on their website. I have been honored to speak at four of those conferences.  What a comfort it is to meet the Ph.D. scientists from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, UCLA, the Universities Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Washington and from great international Universities and a host of others who have developed new evidence that there is no climate change crisis.  Heartland has just announced a 2017 conference in Washington DC  March 23rd and 24th. For details and registration information go to

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/press-release-heartland-institute-to-host-climate-conference-in-washington-dc-march-23-24

Heartland Institute has also organized a Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  It has collected the papers from scientists from around the world and organized them into an impressive scientific book. The contents are also posted on the internet.

So you can say “science has spoken” only if you are willing to discount, toss out, ignore and disrespect the thousands of scientist and their papers and articles, blogs and speeches that debunk the global warming theory.

More and more people, non-scientist citizens are understanding that there is no climate crisis. A survey by Pew Research showed that while 67 percent of Americans believed global warming is occurring and 44 percent said the earth is warming mostly because of human activity more than half of the people are not at all sure that mankind is producing climate change. But we skeptical spokespeople have to follow the media back roads of blog websites, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as conservative AM radio stations and occasional talks and speeches before community group meetings to get our story out. The mainstream media from the television networks and major stations and even most cable channels to most newspapers and magazines tend to give “the sky is falling” news releases by climate change alarmist major headline distribution but ignore the case set forth by the skeptics.

As for the movement to “break the addiction to burning oil, coal and gas” be very careful. If we cut off power generation by fossil fuels at this time, it will destroy our civilization and bankrupt us all. Many people say to me, perhaps you are correct about the science but the move to green energy is good thing. Why not let the government phase out our old fashioned fossil fuel power plants, heating systems and cars and trucks. I understand how they feel and I want them to understand that I am not against developing new fuels; not at all. But they must understand we are in no position to make that dramatic move at this time. The cost of pushing us faster than the scientists can come up with practical new power systems, is already damaging out way of life and threatens to bankrupt our civilization. We have to go slowly and since we are not harming our environment with our current fossil fuel power system, we should move ahead carefully.

The average American family of four is already paying an additional $1,200 a year for food, fuel and power as a result of the anti-fossil fuel initiatives. As the EPA carbon fees roll out and as coal powered electrical plants are shut down that cost per family is projected to increase to over $4.000 a year. That can be a very serious matter. For the poorer American families losing $4,000 a year would have a huge impact on their lives, healthcare for the, amount and quality of food, internet and smart phone access might be eliminated and in might cost the young people their higher education. All of this will a profound impact on the productivity of our nation. While the average person will not really understand what went wrong, everyone will suffer the consequences.

As an example consider this: the development of wind and solar (green energy) is costing us about 16 billion a year in subsidies and tax incentives and that is significantly harming our economy at this time. It would be very wise to drop or at least significantly trim back those subsidies and incentives and let our economy perk up.

But that doesn’t mean that fossil fuels will power our civilization forever. Remember that 90 percent of the scientist who ever lived are alive today. And many of them are probing every concept for a better way to power our civilization. One exciting new material that won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 is graphene.

In about 30 years graphene solar panels will be 1,000 times more effective, and graphene batteries will be 1,000 times stronger. This means we will be able to turn off the power plants and shut down the power grid. Each home and business will easily produce all the power it needs.  Graphene solar powered cars will be big, heavy and fast.  Graphene systems will be used to desalinate ocean water cheaply. You may find this hard to believe, but to an older person such as myself who has watched science produce a multitude of things that were unbelievable in my youth, this is not unreasonable at all.  It will happen.

To learn more about Graphene you may want to watch my news report on a new wonder material .

Now back to the issue of Climate change.

Please understand that my stand on the climate change issue and my confidence in science to provide solutions within a few decades, does not mean that I am not dedicated to protecting our environment. To the contrary, I regard leaving a pristine planet Earth to our children and succeeding generations as our number one responsibility. Clean air and clean water and are basic. But please understand that exhausting CO2 (invisible, odorless, tasteless, vital to life) gas into the atmosphere is in no way damaging our environment. But I do feel strongly that we have a lot to do the clean up the waters on Earth.  There is no question they have been to dispose of trash and waste. And we need to encourage emerging civilizations to utilize our advanced systems for the clean burning of fossil fuels.

The bottom line is simply this: Climate is changing as it always has, mostly from natural forces. Our civilization is also changing the climate but not very much and only in very minor way and only in a few localized and regional areas. We are dealing with these little climate changes in a reasonable scientific way. No crisis is occurring and there is no reason to fear any in the future.

But on the whole we are doing a better and better job of protecting our Earth while living healthier, longer and far more comfortable lives. Every civilized human being now has as small advanced computer in his/her pocket or purse.  Vast knowledge is at our instant access.  As a result we are smarter and safer than ever. But for at least the next 30 years, fossil fuels will be required to power the system that feeds data and videos to these devises and makes amazing instant communication possible. We are now so well educated, I think everyone now understands s how absolutely essential it is to protect and improve our wonderful blue and now greener than ever before little marble, Earth. Let’s all work at that.

But in the meantime, Life is good.  Don’t live in fear of “climate change”. Live a life of joy and love. Despite all issues we work to solve remember please that most important thing we will ever learn is to love and be loved in return.

MICHAEL CRICHTON WAS A GREAT HERO OF MINE

THERE IS A VIDEO OF HIS GLOBAL WARMING

SKEPTICAL POSITION

The great author Michael Crichton made a powerful analysis of the unfounded hysteria behind the man-made global warming frenzy on video before his untimely death from cancer in 2008.  His novel “State Of Fear” had presented the issue very well.  Hollywood which had turned several of his earlier works into hit movies (Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Jurassic Park) turned it’s back on this book.  After all Hollywood loved Al Gore and his silly, totally scientifically invalid movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.  It seems the movie studio liberals never even considered for “State of Fear” for a film.

My four most recent videos:

(Below is another version of this essay written earlier)

AN ESSAY ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

By John Coleman

Professional member of the American Meteorological Society for many years

Awarded the AMS Award as Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year

First Weathercaster on ABC’s “Good Morning, America”

Founder of The Weather Channel.

Weather forecaster for over 60 years

Our wonderful civilization will come to an end as the result of man-made climate change.

That is the ultimate prediction of the most extreme of climate change fanatics. They predict that uncontrolled warming will lead to killer heat waves and endless droughts, the melting of the polar ice caps and all glaciers resulting in flooding of the coastal cities. Millions will die along with all of the polar bears. We also experience massive tornadoes and hurricanes.

All of these predictions are based on a failed scientific theory that is being perpetuated by agenda driven politicians, environmental wackos and money hungry scientists. The purpose of this essay is to lay out the true facts and explain how the failed theory continues to dominate scientific research of climate related issues and also dominates the media and controls public opinion and political actions.

The issue behind all this is “the greenhouse effect” of our atmosphere. The key atmospheric element in question is carbon dioxide.  And the big question about carbon dioxide is how strong of a greenhouse effect does it create as it interacts with water vapor in our atmosphere.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases as a result of our burning of fossil fuels to power our civilization. When coal, oil, gasoline and natural gas are burned the primary exhaust gas is carbon dioxide (CO2). Since man-kind began to make significant use of fossil fuels 250 years ago the percentage of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide has increased from about 250 parts per million to about 500 parts per million. So it still only a trace gas in the atmosphere, about one-half of one percent of the total. Since it is odorless, tasteless and invisible it seems as though it should not be a big deal. More than all of that, it has always been in the atmosphere and is essential to life on Earth. Carbon dioxide is required by all plant life (from weeds and grass to trees and all vegetables, fruits and crops) for their very life because it is the element they “breath in” in to power photosynthesis. Therefore, it is difficult to think of carbon dioxide as a problem, much less a pollutant. However, that is exactly the situation today.

Several scientists throughout history have speculated that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to a warming problem. Even Alexander Graham Bell raised the issue. It wasn’t seriously considered, however, until the 1950’s when our cities and towns were entrapped in “smog” from the burning of dirty coal in our stokers to heat the homes and from dirty automobile exhaust from the old fashioned engines burning poorly refined fuel. The exhaust pipes spewed out ash and particles of carbon. So when scientists raised the issue then, there was more concern. This led to intense efforts to improve fuels and engines. Step by step the pollution level improved until today our exhaust pipes and chimneys produce almost no pollution at all. But the amount of the invisible CO2 exhaust has continued to increase as the civilization continues to expand.

But then it happened. In the late 1960s one of the scientists who had done research on the impact of CO2 on temperatures lectured about the possible global warming problem in a class at Harvard University. Sitting in the front row of that class was student Albert Gore. Gore became greatly concerned about the problem and adopted it as a primary focus of his life. He was elected to the United States Congress and then the U.S. Senate. He wrote a book “Earth in the Balance” and began to chair Congressional hearings on the global warming issue. This led to dramatic increases in Federal funding for research of the global warming problem. University research groups and research institutions rushed in to submit piles of research proposals with the Government. The global warming frenzy had begun. After all, money is a powerful force. And since the money was only available for those who would further the global warming concern only one side of the issue was being studied.

All of this fired up the scientists to further examine the interaction between CO2 and water vapor to create warming.  Eventually they developed a scheme of interactions that leads to a greatly enhanced greenhouse effect that drives up temperatures to record levels. They produced computer models to prove their theories. Then other scientists were awarded funding to study to impact of this warming on a wide range of plants, insects and animals. We were told the ice caps were melting and the Polar Bears were dying, that bees were in great jeopardy, that corn and wheat and soy bean crops would have to move northward into less fertile soil and food shortages would develop. Every research project was accompanied by numerous press releases, interviews and videos. The media loved it all because “the sky is falling” is their favorite headline of all time.

As a result of all of the grants and papers and resulting news releases the people of the United States have been bombarded with global warming/climate change alarmism news reports for decades. No wonder that now a majority are concerned about the repeatedly detailed cataclysmic consequences that they media tells them lie ahead.

This situation certainly got my attention. I was a TV Meteorologist with many years of daily involvement in the weather. I was a Professional Member of The American Meteorological Society. I had forecast the weather for the entire nation every day for years as the first Weathercaster on “Good Morning, America” on ABC and as founder of “The Weather Channel”. So when I began to read about all of this in my professional journals and hear global warming talk in the newsrooms where I worked I was very interested in understanding what was going on. I began to study the issue and talk with other Meteorologists. As Science Reporter for the ABC Network I had covered the “coming ice age” story in the mid-70’s. That proved to be totally baseless and I had reported it as a highly questionable theory to the distress of my superiors who wanted me build up “the sky is falling” aspect of the story. After that experience I was motivated to study this issue thoroughly,  I was careful to re-examine every claim with skepticism. And, the more I studied, the more skeptical I became; again somewhat to the objection of my bosses.

Here is what I had learned:

• There had been no direct measurement in the atmosphere that confirmed that carbon dioxide when interacting with water vapor becomes a significant greenhouse gas that produces unusual warming.

• The computer models that were designed to prove the theory were simply loaded with the assumed “super” greenhouse effect.

• The actual temperature measurement system had been adjusted three times by government agencies to make the past temperatures cooler and the recent temperatures warmer.

• The measured temperatures were not warming at the rate predicted by the computer models.

I felt rather lonely with my skeptical position at first. But when I moved to San Diego in 1994 and joined a local independent TV station I was suddenly in a different professional environment, different from any I had seen in the previous 40 years. My skeptical stance was welcomed. I could report on my position on the TV Newscasts and cover it on the station’s website. The station’s owner, News Director and news anchors supported me.

Then I discovered the Oregon Petition Project where other skeptical scientists were signing a petition confirming their skeptical position on global warming. Soon 31 thousand people, 9 thousand of them with Ph.D. after their names, had signed. I began to feel better. I established e-mail relationships with some of them.

Next my friends Joe D’Aleo (ICECAP)and Anthony Watts (WATTSUPWITHTHAT) launched skeptical websites. Others followed.

And, then The Heartland Institute, a Chicago based think tank, organized an International Conference on Climate Change to give a platform to skeptical scientists from around the world. When I attended the first of these conferences and met these super sharp scientists from M.I.T., Harvard, The University of Virginia, The University of Alabama, UCLA and dozens of other universities, I felt great.

My skeptical position was confirmed over and over again by the research reports they brought to the conference. There was no doubt left in my mind. The global warming/climate change theory had failed and been proven wrong.

Yet, as you know, the climate change frenzy continues. The reason why is clear as a bell: Money. The Federal government is now paying out about 4.5 billion dollars a year in research grants. The science departments and research organizations continue to clamor for the money. And it is only granted to those who support the climate change position. And, mostly because Al Gore was a powerful force in the Democrat Party for many years, the issue has also become part of that party’s platform. Politics and money; what a power combination. We skeptics have our hands full.

I have produced videos debunking climate change and posted them on You Tube. I write the essays, such as this one, and post them on my little website. I make speeches where ever and whenever I am invited. Hundreds of others do the same. Heartland continues to sponsor International Conference every year or two. But try as we do, our efforts are small compared to the 4.5 billion dollars, the Democrat Party and the media. It is David against Goliath.

“So Mr. Coleman, please explain to me how it is that you know for certain that this theory has failed. And even if there is some question about whether the theory is correct or not, isn’t it taking a big chance to not cut back on greenhouse gasses? Shouldn’t we do it, just in case? Why don’t we cut back on carbon dioxide emissions as sort of an insurance policy, just in case they are right and you are wrong.” Whenever I speak before college student groups about the climate change issue, the above is the essence of the first question I am usually asked and it is usually cheered.

I understand that after decades of media coverage of global warming and its successor climate change and constant lecturing about it and the showing of the Al Gore Documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” over and over again in schools, that there is plenty of discomfort about the debunking of climate change by skeptics such as me. Our detractors often toss us in with the advocates of a flat Earth, chem-trails, flying saucer ET story tellers and those who think the NASA Moon landing was all made up. All I can ask is that you try to think about this essay with an open mind, then do what additional checking you are motivated to do. I am certain that if you are open minded you will realize that based on everything we know right now there is no significant man-made climate change now and no reason to expect any in the future. Once you take that position, please join us in trying to change public opinion and government policies.

And please understand that cutting emissions “just in case as a sort of insurance policy” is not a good idea, either. For the next generation of youngsters, that could be a horribly expensive insurance policy. Our government’s global warming actions are already costing the average American family of four about $1,400 a year in increased costs for food and energy and taxes. For those kids that can mean less health care or healthy food, no internet connection or no computer. Or it might come out of their college funds. And the added cost of food and energy for those in the third world nations could actually lead to the death for untold millions. I don’t think we should “buy the insurance”.

Despite this issue, please never lose sight of this: The most important thing you will ever learn is to love and be loved in return.