The irresponsible hysteria (what other word would do?) of a handful of climate scientists and computer modellers, amplified ten-thousand fold by the slick PR of the IPCC, has been a degrading spectacle over the past 30 years or so. Their panic, whether it be real or pretended, has even penetrated into our schools, despite the duty of responsible adults to protect the young from such ugly, ignorant, and destructive scaremongering.
Yet there are many real scientists, real men, real women - people accustomed to thinking for themselves and seeking truth, not public acclaim, nor the safety and the luxury of the mass-bandwagon, who have been speaking out against the case for panic. One of the most distinguished of these is Professor Lindzen of MIT. He has just published a short piece on the GWPF website which deserves to be printed and displayed for discussion in every classroom, and in every staffroom, in the land. Here is an extract:
'The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century.'
Source: http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/2229-richard-lindzen-a-case-against-precipitous-climate-action.html
May I presume upon my readers, and ask them to help circulate this more widely?
Monday, 17 January 2011
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Climate Scaremongering Antidote: expose the media manipulation by pressure groups
Donna Laframboise has found a website masquerading as a source of science news when in fact it is merely a conduit for WWF press releases.
She writes:
'I recently stumbled across a website called ScienceCentric.com. It’s slick and professional-looking. If I were a high school student writing an essay I could be forgiven for thinking I had arrived at an authoritative and trustworthy source of information.
ScienceCentric.com claims to provide:
'The “article” that first rang my alarm bells is dated July 2007. It begins with:
Even worse, the third, fourth, and fifth sentence in the ScienceCentric “article” are all quotes from a World Wildlife Fund spokesperson. At the very bottom of the article, this line appears:
The website she discovered is apparently based in Bulgaria, and I presume it was deliberately set up as part of campaigning efforts to push the WWF line. UK newspapers such as The Scotsman are known for essentially re-printing WWF press releases, or quoting WWF 'soundbites' without challenge (try Googling 'WWF The Scotsman' to find, amidst the clutter, many examples), and there are no doubt many other victims of WWF PR success in the media all over the world.
The WWF was taken over long ago and diverted from caring about world wildlife into campaigning against the interests of humanity, an action which of course will also harm wildlife in due course since it is the industrialised nations who have done most to preserve and protect it. The UK Met Office is now led by the man who helped transform the WWF, a Robert Napier, and he is apparently hellbent on replicating that performance in his new post.
The Met Office is now something of a popular laughing-stock in the UK, but its ongoing contributions to fueling climate alarmism are no laughing matter. It incidently caused a great deal of loss in the UK and elsewhere by leaning on its computers for forecasts of volcanic dust movements which grounded commerciial aviation for days at a time. Subsequent observations taken by aircraft - real data, in other words - showed dramatically less cause for alarm, and in due course flights were resumed everywhere. This little cameo of computer-based alarmism leading to societal loss is a micro-version of what the same mentality is achieving on a much larger scale with announcements on climate.
Let me finish by repeating an earlier quote from the post which inspired this one:
'If I were a high school student writing an essay I could be forgiven for thinking I had arrived at an authoritative and trustworthy source of information.'
It thus becomes imperative that teachers urge their pupils to clearly identify their sources of information, and to encourage them to dig a little deeper in case they find powerful vested interests, such as those of wealthy multinational corporations like the WWF. They may still have to mouth their conclusions in order to pass exams, but they will at least not be fooled into actually believing them.
She writes:
'I recently stumbled across a website called ScienceCentric.com. It’s slick and professional-looking. If I were a high school student writing an essay I could be forgiven for thinking I had arrived at an authoritative and trustworthy source of information.
ScienceCentric.com claims to provide:
Breaking news about the latest scientific discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, geology and palaeontology, biology, environment, astronomy, health, and technology'She discovered:
'The “article” that first rang my alarm bells is dated July 2007. It begins with:
The world’s top experts have just confirmed that Arctic warming is continuing its ravages of polar bear populations. [bold added]In the very next sentence, however, it becomes clear that these supposed top experts are actually affiliated with an activist group, the International Union of the Conservation of Nature – which was founded in 1948 “as the world’s first global environmental organization.”
Even worse, the third, fourth, and fifth sentence in the ScienceCentric “article” are all quotes from a World Wildlife Fund spokesperson. At the very bottom of the article, this line appears:
Source: WWFClicking that link reveals that ScienceCentric.com has been representing World Wildlife Fund blog postings and press releases as bona fide science news stories since June 2007.'
The website she discovered is apparently based in Bulgaria, and I presume it was deliberately set up as part of campaigning efforts to push the WWF line. UK newspapers such as The Scotsman are known for essentially re-printing WWF press releases, or quoting WWF 'soundbites' without challenge (try Googling 'WWF The Scotsman' to find, amidst the clutter, many examples), and there are no doubt many other victims of WWF PR success in the media all over the world.
The WWF was taken over long ago and diverted from caring about world wildlife into campaigning against the interests of humanity, an action which of course will also harm wildlife in due course since it is the industrialised nations who have done most to preserve and protect it. The UK Met Office is now led by the man who helped transform the WWF, a Robert Napier, and he is apparently hellbent on replicating that performance in his new post.
The Met Office is now something of a popular laughing-stock in the UK, but its ongoing contributions to fueling climate alarmism are no laughing matter. It incidently caused a great deal of loss in the UK and elsewhere by leaning on its computers for forecasts of volcanic dust movements which grounded commerciial aviation for days at a time. Subsequent observations taken by aircraft - real data, in other words - showed dramatically less cause for alarm, and in due course flights were resumed everywhere. This little cameo of computer-based alarmism leading to societal loss is a micro-version of what the same mentality is achieving on a much larger scale with announcements on climate.
Let me finish by repeating an earlier quote from the post which inspired this one:
'If I were a high school student writing an essay I could be forgiven for thinking I had arrived at an authoritative and trustworthy source of information.'
It thus becomes imperative that teachers urge their pupils to clearly identify their sources of information, and to encourage them to dig a little deeper in case they find powerful vested interests, such as those of wealthy multinational corporations like the WWF. They may still have to mouth their conclusions in order to pass exams, but they will at least not be fooled into actually believing them.
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Another 30 years of climate scaremongering in our schools?
Many times over the past year or so it has seemed that the adoption and corruption of climate science by those intent on profiting politically and/or financially by the proliferation of scary headlines they could generate and exploit, was at last on the way out. But how long is the half-life of this astonishing, and dismaying, phenomenon as it goes into decay? (and how might that be measured?).
Tim Ball talks in a recent post of '30 lost years' in climate science, as it has been taken over by people who know relatively little about it:
'We now have a generation (30 years) of people teaching, researching, or running government that has little knowledge because of lack of fundamental education. Because of them, the public is[are] ill informed, don’t understand the problem, and don‘t know the questions to ask. Correcting the education process will take time because there are insufficient people with the knowledge or expertise. Correcting and widening the research functions will take longer because of removing or re-educating current personnel and a lack of qualified replacements. Even if achieved, success is unlikely.'
This is reinforced by the events such as the appointment of a Chris Mooney to the board of the American Geophysical Union(AGU). Here he is quoted as wanting scientists to be ninjas:
'Can scientists become "Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication"? That was proposed by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War Against Science," and a member of the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney advocated this idea in a presentation at the Union's December 13-17 fall meeting in San Francisco.
Roger Pielke Jr. comments on the appointment of Mooney as follows:
'One factor might be seen in a recent action of the American Geophysical Union -- another big US science association: AGU recently appointed Chris Mooney to its Board. I am sure that Chris is a fine fellow, but appointing an English major who has written divisively about the "Republican War on Science" to help AGU oversee "science communication" is more than a little ironic, and unlikely to attract many Republican scientists to the institution, perhaps even having the opposite effect. To the extent that AAAS and AGU endorse the Democratic policy agenda, or just appear to do so, it reflects their role not as arbiters of knowledge claims, but rather as political actors.'
and he expresses concern over the ability of scientific institutions to withstand such strong political engagement:
'Many observers are so wrapped up in their own partisan battles that they either don't care that science is being associated with one political party or they somehow think that through such politicization they will once and for all win the partisan battles. They won't. Political parties are far more robust than institutions of science. Institutions of science need help to survive intact partisan political battles. The blogosphere and activist scientists and journalists offer little help.'
A far more appropriately and well-qualified appointment has just been made to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research in the UK, where a Professor Corinne Le Quéré is to take over from Kevin Anderson. He had no background in climatology, nor in climate science (one site describes his background thus: 'Kevin is a qualified marine engineer and has 12 years industrial experience, principally in the petrochemical industry. He is currently a non-executive director of Greenstone Carbon Management – a London based company advising leading firms and public bodies on how to manage their carbon emissions and is commissioner on the Welsh Assembly Government’s ‘Climate Change Committee’.').
Will Professor Le Quéré be any better? She seems to have surfed on various IPCC waves to get to where she is today, and that is of course very discouraging for those of us who regard the IPCC as suspect, and not worthy of our trust:
'As UEA Chair of Climate Change Science and Policy, Corinne Le Quéré is a physicist by training, and conducts research on the interactions between climate change and the carbon cycle. She recently led a team that uncovered the weakening of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink in response to human-induced climate change. Professor Le Quéré lectures internationally, and supervises postgraduate students and researchers at UEA.
Professor Le Quéré said of her appointment: “The Tyndall Centre is a young and vibrant institute with a highly respected international reputation. I look forward to maintaining and enhancing Tyndall’s renown and exploring new avenues of research.”
Other research achievements of Professor Le Quéré include her Lead Authorship of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
She co-chairs the Global Carbon Project, established in 2001 as a non-governmental organization that fosters International research on the carbon cycle and publishes annual updates of the global emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide.
Prof Le Quéré is originally from Canada. She completed a PhD in oceanography at the University Paris VI, an MS in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University and a BSc. in physics from the University of Montréal. She has conducted research at Princeton University in the United States and at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.'
So, will it take another 30 years or more for the tertiary institutions to get over the 'Great Climate Scare'? How does that place our primary and secondary schools? When will teachers appear who have not been exposed since their own schooldays to alarmist propaganda from their own teachers and mentors?
I find my optimism jolted a little by Tim Ball's article. If he is right, there is a long road ahead. How long did the relevant scientific institutions in the former Soviet Union take to recover from the Lysenko period? How much societal loss did it cause in the meantime? Perhaps the excursion of climate science into political alarmism is different? Perhaps the internet will help clear up the mess more quickly than otherwise by facilitating the exchange of deeper and clearer thinking?
Interesting times.
Note added 21 Jan 2011. The article by Tim Ball referenced above contains some errors which have been corrected or commented on here: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/32322 . They mostly concern comments on a Dr Weaver, none of which have been quoted in my post above.
Note added 18 May 2011. A new essay by Dr Ball entitled 'Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years' has been posted here: http://drtimball.com/2011/corruption-of-climate-science-has-created-30-lost-years/
Tim Ball talks in a recent post of '30 lost years' in climate science, as it has been taken over by people who know relatively little about it:
'We now have a generation (30 years) of people teaching, researching, or running government that has little knowledge because of lack of fundamental education. Because of them, the public is[are] ill informed, don’t understand the problem, and don‘t know the questions to ask. Correcting the education process will take time because there are insufficient people with the knowledge or expertise. Correcting and widening the research functions will take longer because of removing or re-educating current personnel and a lack of qualified replacements. Even if achieved, success is unlikely.'
This is reinforced by the events such as the appointment of a Chris Mooney to the board of the American Geophysical Union(AGU). Here he is quoted as wanting scientists to be ninjas:
'Can scientists become "Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication"? That was proposed by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War Against Science," and a member of the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney advocated this idea in a presentation at the Union's December 13-17 fall meeting in San Francisco.
Mooney is concerned that global warming skeptics are getting the upper hand in the ongoing debate. Mooney has an unquestioning belief that disaster will overtake the world if we don't mend our CO2-emitting ways. Many other speakers at the meeting, like Mooney, suggested that if scientists improved their communications skills, the skeptics could be defeated.
At the same fall meeting four years ago, Al Gore spoke to ten thousand assembled scientists. The scientists treated him like a rock star. Why would the scientists love Al Gore? His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was full of scientific errors. But this is about not biting the hand that feeds you. When Al Gore spreads global warming hysteria, financial and political support for climate science increases. Scientists become guests on TV shows instead of lab drones.'
Roger Pielke Jr. comments on the appointment of Mooney as follows:
'One factor might be seen in a recent action of the American Geophysical Union -- another big US science association: AGU recently appointed Chris Mooney to its Board. I am sure that Chris is a fine fellow, but appointing an English major who has written divisively about the "Republican War on Science" to help AGU oversee "science communication" is more than a little ironic, and unlikely to attract many Republican scientists to the institution, perhaps even having the opposite effect. To the extent that AAAS and AGU endorse the Democratic policy agenda, or just appear to do so, it reflects their role not as arbiters of knowledge claims, but rather as political actors.'
and he expresses concern over the ability of scientific institutions to withstand such strong political engagement:
'Many observers are so wrapped up in their own partisan battles that they either don't care that science is being associated with one political party or they somehow think that through such politicization they will once and for all win the partisan battles. They won't. Political parties are far more robust than institutions of science. Institutions of science need help to survive intact partisan political battles. The blogosphere and activist scientists and journalists offer little help.'
A far more appropriately and well-qualified appointment has just been made to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research in the UK, where a Professor Corinne Le Quéré is to take over from Kevin Anderson. He had no background in climatology, nor in climate science (one site describes his background thus: 'Kevin is a qualified marine engineer and has 12 years industrial experience, principally in the petrochemical industry. He is currently a non-executive director of Greenstone Carbon Management – a London based company advising leading firms and public bodies on how to manage their carbon emissions and is commissioner on the Welsh Assembly Government’s ‘Climate Change Committee’.').
Will Professor Le Quéré be any better? She seems to have surfed on various IPCC waves to get to where she is today, and that is of course very discouraging for those of us who regard the IPCC as suspect, and not worthy of our trust:
'As UEA Chair of Climate Change Science and Policy, Corinne Le Quéré is a physicist by training, and conducts research on the interactions between climate change and the carbon cycle. She recently led a team that uncovered the weakening of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink in response to human-induced climate change. Professor Le Quéré lectures internationally, and supervises postgraduate students and researchers at UEA.
Professor Le Quéré said of her appointment: “The Tyndall Centre is a young and vibrant institute with a highly respected international reputation. I look forward to maintaining and enhancing Tyndall’s renown and exploring new avenues of research.”
Other research achievements of Professor Le Quéré include her Lead Authorship of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
She co-chairs the Global Carbon Project, established in 2001 as a non-governmental organization that fosters International research on the carbon cycle and publishes annual updates of the global emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide.
Prof Le Quéré is originally from Canada. She completed a PhD in oceanography at the University Paris VI, an MS in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University and a BSc. in physics from the University of Montréal. She has conducted research at Princeton University in the United States and at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.'
So, will it take another 30 years or more for the tertiary institutions to get over the 'Great Climate Scare'? How does that place our primary and secondary schools? When will teachers appear who have not been exposed since their own schooldays to alarmist propaganda from their own teachers and mentors?
I find my optimism jolted a little by Tim Ball's article. If he is right, there is a long road ahead. How long did the relevant scientific institutions in the former Soviet Union take to recover from the Lysenko period? How much societal loss did it cause in the meantime? Perhaps the excursion of climate science into political alarmism is different? Perhaps the internet will help clear up the mess more quickly than otherwise by facilitating the exchange of deeper and clearer thinking?
Interesting times.
Note added 21 Jan 2011. The article by Tim Ball referenced above contains some errors which have been corrected or commented on here: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/32322 . They mostly concern comments on a Dr Weaver, none of which have been quoted in my post above.
Note added 18 May 2011. A new essay by Dr Ball entitled 'Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years' has been posted here: http://drtimball.com/2011/corruption-of-climate-science-has-created-30-lost-years/
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Climate Scaremongering Antidote: dry humour, perceptive cartoons
(1) Hat-tip: Lubos Motl (http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/01/global-warming-panic-explained.html)
This little cartoon is packed with insights and would make an excellent 'conversation piece' for senior pupils:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdxaxJNs15s&feature=player_embedded
This little cartoon is packed with insights and would make an excellent 'conversation piece' for senior pupils:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdxaxJNs15s&feature=player_embedded
(2) Here's another, a 'conversation between two environmentalists':
Also jam-packed with insights! Many of us will have had conversations of this kind.
Hat-tip: http://spielclimate.blogspot.com/
Monday, 10 January 2011
Misleading temperature graph (guess in which direction) used by UK Exam Board
'Britain’s largest exam board has been accused of “brainwashing” pupils by forcing them to use an inaccurate temperature graph that exaggerates the scale of global warming.'
An article published in The Telegraph today asserts that the Assessments and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), the UK largest exam board is guilty of the following:Ice core temperature reconstructions ignored.
Medieval Warm Period downplayed.
Current world average temperature exaggerated.
Most recent Ice Age ignored.
Children's extbook from 1990 used a source of temperature chart
Extract from article in the Daily Telegraph (UK) today:
'Kato Harris, head of Geography at South Hampstead High School in north London, has written to the exam board to highlight the errors.
He said: "It is demoralising and frustrating when we are trying to be accurate, rigorous teachers, imparting to our pupils the latest scientific knowledge, only for the exam board apparently to show ignorance of scientific developments in the last 15 years."
The graph published in the exam paper was titled ‘Timeline of the mean world temperatures over the last million years’, even though no such record exists.
Pupils were asked to mark with an X the “recent rapid rise in global temperatures”, as well as the coldest period.
AQA said the graph was simply meant to show “generalised trends” in global temperature and claimed that it displayed a "similar" pattern to the ice core reconstruction.
But Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, said the graph contained “shocking inaccuracies”.
“I have no idea where they have got their data from, but it’s completely wrong. The graph exaggerates the case of global warming and it shows scientific illiteracy.
“I think this is highly misleading and the fact that it was included in an exam papers just shows how suspicious we should be with a lot of the information presented to students.
“There is a lot of pressure on schools and exam boards from government to educate our children in this way, but if we want to have a well educated population children need to know how science works, and they shouldn’t be brainwashed with misleading information.”'
Link to the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8210501/Exam-board-accused-of-brainwashing-pupils-with-inaccurate-climate-graph.html
Hat-tip: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/
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