Chillin' at the ice hotel

As serious scientists pull back from the alarmist predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from the extreme policy pronouncements of left-wing lobby groups, the complex reality of climate is starting to emerge.

AFP reports today, “Global warming rate less than feared: study”:

High levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have less of an impact on the rate of global warming than feared, a study said Thursday.

The authors of the study funded by the US National Science Foundation stressed that global warming is real, and that increases in atmospheric CO2, which has doubled from pre-industrial standards, will have multiple serious impacts.

But the more severe estimates, such as those put forth by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are unlikely, the researchers found in their study published in the journal Science…. (more…)

For nearly two decades now, people have been arguing about climate change and getting nowhere. Right-wingers argue that global warming is a hoax based on unsubstantiated science, while left-wingers insist that not only is it real but unless we spend everything we have and more trying to stop it, the world will end tomorrow.

To which I say, “Stop—you’re both wrong!”

This, in a nutshell, is the message of the new documentary about me and my work that opens nationwide on Nov. 12. It’s called “Cool It” and, yes, the title is meant to be clever. The idea is that we do need to cool down the planet, but in order to do it sensibly we first need to cool it ourselves. That is, we need to dispense with both the anti-scientific denialism and the Al Gore-ish fear-mongering. Instead, what we should be doing is facing facts—and responding to them not with rhetoric but with smarter, more rational policies.

The first fact we need to acknowledge is the reality of global warming. Like it or not, the data is abundantly clear that man-made greenhouse gases have been building up in the atmosphere for decades if not centuries, with the result that global temperatures are rising. Yes, the “Climate-gate” emails and the disclosure of funny business at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change exposed some deeply disturbing academic chicanery and prejudice at some supposedly prestigious institutions. However, these revelations did nothing to undermine the fundamental scientific basis of global warming. What they did call into question were many of the more extreme predictions about global warming’s likely impact—such as the idea that all the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear (they’re not) or that half the Amazon rain forest would soon be destroyed (not likely).

Of course, these extreme predictions are at the heart of the mainstream environmental movement’s position on climate policy. And this brings us to another set of facts we need to face: that while global warming is real, it is not quite the imminent catastrophe so many climate activists would have us believe.

There may be some truth to the notion that in order to get people to focus on a problem, you need to scare the pants off them. But while worst-case scenarios may be a great way to get the public’s attention, they are a terrible basis for making public policy. If you believe that the southwest U.S. is about to become another dustbowl (as Paul Krugman has insisted) or that Greenland and Antarctica are on the verge of becoming huge piles of slush (as Al Gore would have us believe), of course you’re going to argue that we should do everything we can to eliminate carbon emissions as quickly as possible—even if that means amazingly costly and ineffective government policies. (more…)

What is the most important issue facing the American people today? Until late last Fall, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, the presidents of our major universities, and the editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, WNBC, and the like –  not to mention the scientific establishment in the United States – were as one in telling us that global warming was a profound threat to our well-being and that of the rest of mankind. And John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and sadly, in the end, a hapless George W. Bush were willing to lend the hysterics a measure of aid and comfort.

In the United States Senate, the indomitable James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma was very nearly alone in standing up to denounce the whole enterprise as a hoax, and in turn he was himself denounced by all right-thinking people as a scoundrel and a fool. There were, of course, scientists proficient in meteorology who entertained grave doubts, and some of them made a great fuss, but they were soon denied federal funding for further research, and young entrants into the profession quickly learned that if they wished to have successful careers it was incumbent on them to join the chorus who denounced global-warming skeptics as lackeys of the fossil fuels industry. The global-warming cabal was to the liberal democracies of our time what  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his disciples were to biology in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.

When he became President, Barack Obama pledged to “roll back the specter of a warming planet” and “restore science to its rightful place,” implying – graceless as always – that the administration of George W. Bush had suppressed inconvenient scientific truths in the interests of ideology. In fact, Obama seems not to have understood what he was saying, for a specter is “an apparition inspiring dread,” and it is one of the principal functions of science to dispel illusions of this very sort; and, instead of debunking “the specter of a warming planet” and restoring “science to its rightful place” thereby, he embraced that specter and sought by way of inspiring dread in the American people to railroad his compatriots into subjecting the entire economy to the supervision of the administrative state.

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A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions”  during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.

McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns.

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To the credit of the New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post — reliable outlets for promoting global warming alarmism, protecting those who craft it and marginalizing those who point out its weaknesses and excesses — they all ran stories in the past 48 hours addressing the documents somehow obtained from the computers of a UK university serving as the warming movement and industry’s Mother Ship. My great surprise is even greater because these outlets have demonstrated a pattern of only giving ink to embarrassing controversies after a week or so, once it appears that damage control is needed and the alarmists have gotten their story straight.

I documented this pattern in a book published one year ago this month, subtly titled “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” The title says it all, including all that surely seems to have been affirmed by the documents posted, by “anonymous” on a Russian server and otherwise covering his tracks.

Since this affirms, not “reveals”, the scandal that so many have been explaining is the global warming industry, it also raises the issue of how can each of these media outlets still miss the plot? Well, they are doing so in a fashion so uniform, and in the face of such outrageous exposition of the scandal that is unfolding, that I conclude it is nonetheless yet another exercise in damage-control.

The emails, let alone the data still being combed over by the pointy-heads, plainly affirm everything I wrote, in detail, about the scams being run by the booming industry of Big Academia and Big Science suckling at the teat of the “global warming” panic they are also fostering.

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