RUTHFULLY YOURS

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”

WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research—which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents.

I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.

More troubling is the degree to which journalists and other academics joined the campaign against me. What sort of responsibility do scientists and the media have to defend the ability to share research, on any subject, that might be inconvenient to political interests—even our own?

I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.

Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the groupthink at work.

Yet I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.

When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.

The IPCC never acknowledged the snafu, but subsequent reports got the science right: There is not a strong basis for connecting weather disasters with human-caused climate change. CONTINUE AT SITE

The problem with a giant con game like global warming hysteria is that the baseline dishonesty ends up corrupting other institutions. Academia is pre-eminent among the collateral corruptees, but even a Native American tribe in genuine peril is in on the game. Willis Eschenbach provides the ugly details at Watts Up With That?

He spotted news that a tribe on the seashore of Olympic Peninsula is being touted as the “first climate refugees.” He drily notes eight other separate claims of being the first climate refugees, so he dubs the Quinault Indian Nation the “ninth first climate refugees.”

But that is not the nub of the criticism. It is that the Quinaults are genuinely threatened by tsunamis and in all logic ought to evacuate their current settlement right on the shore, because a major fault is nearby and overdue.

But the money is not in tsunamis; it is in global warming. So, as NPR says:

In the U.S. Northwest, sea-level rise is forcing a Native American tribe to consider abandoning lands it has inhabited for thousands of years.

The Quinault Indian Nation, whose small village lies at the mouth of the Quinault River on the outer coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, now relies on a 2,000-foot-long sea wall to protect it from the encroaching Pacific Ocean. (snip)

The Quinault tribe has developed a $60 million plan to move the entire village of Taholah uphill and out of harm’s way. That will mean relocating the school, the courthouse, the police station and the homes of 700 tribal members a safer distance from the encroaching Pacific.

“It’s a heavy price tag,” Sharp acknowledged, adding that she and others with the Quinault will be turning to Congress, philanthropists and the tribe’s own financial resources to pay for the project.

NPR plays the usual sympathy game:

Let’s assume global warming is real. Correct or not, we will start today with that supposition. Assume with me that there is a problem for a moment so that we may discuss tangible solutions.

Let us start by defining our terminology, as the concept of “climate change” tends to drift to fit the data—the true hallmark of scientific rigor.

The argument at hand is that the earth is warming due to greenhouse gases which man is releasing into the atmosphere; most especially carbon dioxide. This has been culminating since around the time of the post-war industrial boom accompanying and following World War II. Since then, CO2 emissions have continued to expand at an alarming rate. Through this anthropomorphic, man-made increase in warmth the average surface temperature of the earth will continue to climb, the oceans will rise, polar bears will need to learn to surf, and all that jazz. Also, potentially, parts of coastal California will eventually fall into the ocean. This is apparently to be taken as a bad thing, but must depend on one’s perspective.

This is a real problem.

Even if it isn’t, there is the famous “play it safe” argument. If we can’t be positive either way in regards to climate warming, shouldn’t we work to reduce our greenhouse emissions just to be sure? Those that argue in this alternative and don’t take it to the logical extreme are not serious people.

The case for global warming, as straightforward as it is, should be equally easy to solve. We simply need to return to the carbon levels of 1940, the front end of our carbon production explosion, and all the anticipated pain will go away. Any other suggestion from trillion-dollar, jet-setting, pretend-you-aren’t-part-of-the-problem climate summits is a half-measure.

So, problem solved. In 2014 humans emitted 35.69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere . To solve climate change, we don’t have to take this down to zero; just back to 1940 levels. In that year, according to the Carbon Dioxide Emission Analysis Center, human emission was 1.299 million metric tons.

While we will go with it for today, admittedly this isn’t strictly “apples to apples” in its comparison; though it is also not too far off. Climate activists would, here, bring up solar and wind power, and such, as a key difference from 1940. And I would agree if those not-ready-for-primetime solutions were going to solve the carbon “problem” at any point in the conceivable future. If it were to be practical, I could buy the “play it safe” argument that we switch away from fossil fuels.

As an aside, in this regard I somewhat agree with so-called climate advocates. I have faith that technology will continue to improve on its own accord, fossil fuel use will eventually be replaced with more efficient solutions (a process which can be done without government coercion), and this whole thing will be rendered rather academic within a hundred years. Activists will probably claim a successful victory at this point; having done nothing but hold summits that agree to cripple economies.

But the argument—THE argument—is that this needs to be solved immediately; not that we have a couple hundred years of wiggle room. We are already past the date when New York was supposed to sink and landfall hurricanes would be an annual occurrence. Unless we can switch to solar and wind power tomorrow, an immediate reduction in emissions of 96% should just about suffice in their place.

Well, except for the pesky global population.

It is one thing to persuade gullible boy and girl reporters that climate change is sending the planet on a one-way trip to catastrophe, but average citizens are smarter than that. They notice this year’s other-than-predicted cold and their faith dies, one stupendous electricity bill at a time’
One thing that CAGW sceptics and alarmists seem to agree on is that, as both sides say, ‘weather is not climate’. Each camp trots out that line whenever the other cites a particularly hot or cold spell to support its position. And whilst the aphorism is true in general, its power in the hands of alarmists is waning — a case study in the law of diminishing. I’ll return to this point later.

At about this time last year and the year before, Gavin Schmidt, the soon to-be-redundant, number-crunching head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a catastropharian nonpareil, revealed his agency’s very elastic global surface temperature record. This is always accompanied by the gleefully morose warning ‘this year is likely to be the hottest ever recorded’. Under his watchful eye and, it must be said, his hand (or is it merely a thumb on the scale?), so it proven to be.

Here’s how it played out in 2014. On January 16, 2015, NASA GISS issued a statement jointly with NOAA NCDC announcing that 2014 was the ‘warmest year in the modern record’. As there is no shortage of scientifically semi-illiterate and terminally credulous reporters, this was trumpeted by the global media as yet further “proof” the planet was speeding toward its sweaty death throes. However, on closer examination, it turned out that 2014 beat the previous record (2010) by a mere 0.02C, well within the margin of error of 0.10C. Schmidt later conceded that they were only 38% certain that 2014 was, after all, a record. You can read all about this from a number of sources, but why not use the one least likely to call out any irregularities on the part of true ‘climate scientists’? That would be the ABC, in other words. the ABC.

Gavin must have learned his lesson because 2015 presented a different story. Here’s how this one was reported by Climate Central, benignly described described by Wikipedia as a “non-profit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science” but, as the casual visitor to its website will discern at a glance, a bottomless pit of warmist alarmism.

2015 Shatters Hottest Year Mark; 2016 Hot on its Heels?

It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year on record, beating out 2014 by the widest margin in 136 years of record keeping, U.S. government agencies announced Wednesday.

Bjorn Lomborg is president and founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School.

The election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both houses have terrified environmentalists and climate campaigners, who have declared that the next four years will be a “disaster.”

Fear is understandable. We have much to learn about the new administration’s plans. But perhaps surprisingly, what little we know offers some cause for hope.

It should not need to be restated in 2016 that climate change is real and mostly man-made. It is hard to know whether Trump will acknowledge this. He has called global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, but stated that this was a joke; he denied the existence of climate change during the campaign, but supported global warming action as recently as 2009.

What really matters is not rhetoric but policy. So far, we know that President Trump will drop the Paris climate change treaty. This is far from the world-ending event that some suggest and offers an opportunity for a smarter approach.
Even ardent supporters acknowledge that the Paris treaty by itself will do little to rein in global warming. The United Nations estimates that if every country were to make every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030 to the fullest extent and there was no cheating, carbon dioxide emissions would still only be cut by one-hundredth of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). The Paris treaty’s 2016-2030 pledges would reduce temperature rises around 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. If maintained throughout the rest of the century, temperature rises would be cut by 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit.

At the same time, these promises will be costly. Trying to cut carbon dioxide, even with an efficient tax, makes cheap energy more expensive — and this slows economic growth.

My calculations using the best peer-reviewed economic models show the cost of the Paris promises– through slower gross domestic product growth from higher energy costs — would reach $1 trillion to $2 trillion every year from 2030. U.S. vows alone — to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 — would reduce GDP by more than $150 billion annually.

So Trump’s promise to dump Paris will matter very little to temperature rises, and it will stop the pursuit of an expensive dead end.

Climate catastropharians’ effusive confidence in their cause demonstrates yet again that an unexamined belief is not worth holding. Pose a few simple questions, as Socrates might have done, and it won’t be long before someone is calling for the hemlock
Socrates sought truth by asking questions. He might have employed the following line of questioning to explore the subject of global warming.

Socrates Nice to meet you Mr Smith. I hear you are very concerned about dangerous global warming.

Smith Yes, we are facing the alarming prospect of a global-warming catastrophe.

Socrates What gives you such concern?

Mr Smith Emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.

Socrates How were these fossil fuels formed?

Mr Smith Plants grew, died and formed fossil fuels during the Carboniferous Period.

Socrates Was there dangerous global warming prior to the Carboniferous Period?

Mr Smith No. It was a very good time for life on earth.

Socrates So where did the carbon in fossil fuels originate?

Mr Smith Plants absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere prior to the formation of fossil fuels.

Socrates So the CO2 absorbed by plants at that time is now being released from burning fossil fuels.

Mr Smith It must be so.

Socrates You have observed there was no dangerous global warming prior to CO2 being absorbed to form fossil fuels, so how could the same CO2 now being released cause dangerous global warming?