May the Right Climate Stuff Team Drive the Wrong Climate Stuff from our Schools

The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) research team is a volunteer group of more than 20 scientists and engineers who are primarily retired veterans of NASA's manned space programme.  Here is an interim report from their ongoing study into climate:.

1. The science that predicts the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming is not settled science.

 2. There is no convincing physical evidence of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Most of the alarm regarding AGW results from output of unvalidated computer models. We understand scientific arguments regarding how doubling CO2 in the atmosphere over a hundred years or more (if possible) can have a small direct warming effect, but we question the accuracy of feedback simulations in current models computing climate system responses that amplify CO2 effects. Efforts to estimate climate sensitivity to CO2 based solely on physical data have large uncertainties because many factors affect global temperatures, and CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere after the earth warms due to other factors. While paleoclimate data clearly show CO2 levels rise and fall in the atmosphere hundreds of years after temperature rises and falls due to other causes, the evidence is very weak to support claims of a catastrophic rise in global temperatures caused by CO2 emissions related to human activity.

 3. Computer models need to be validated before being used in critical decision-making.

Our manned aerospace backgrounds in dealing with models of complex phenomena have convinced us that this rule must be followed to avoid decisions with serious unintended consequences.

 4. Because there is no immediate threat of global warming requiring swift corrective action, we have time to study global climate changes and improve our prediction accuracy.

While there are many benefits due to some global warming, the major threats appear to be associated with a net loss of Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet mass that would contribute to a gradual sea-level rise. The history, current trends, and specific causes of ice sheet melting and ice accumulation by precipitation must be better understood before determining how best to respond to threats of accelerated sea-level rise.

 5. Our US government is over-reacting to concerns about Anthropogenic Global Warming.

More CO2 in the atmosphere would be beneficial for forest and crop growth to support the earth's growing population, so control of CO2 emissions is not an obvious best solution to hyped-up concerns regarding AGW. Eventually the earth will run out of fossil fuels and alternative energy sources will be required. Market forces will (and should) play a big role in this transition to alternative energy sources. Government funding of promising research and development objectives for alternative fuels appears to be a better option at this time than expenditures of enormous resources to limit CO2 emissions.

 6. A wider range of solution options should be studied for global warming or cooling threats from any credible cause.

CO2 effectiveness in controlling global average temperatures or sea levels has not been established. More reliable and greater control authority may be available from engineering solutions that would accommodate the beneficial aspects of more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Source:  http://www.therightclimatestuff.com/SummaryPrelimReport.html

Hat-tip: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/23/team-of-ex-nasa-scientists-concludes-no-imminent-threat-from-man-made-co2/ 

 

These are the words of level-headed adults working with no ulterior motives to critically review the shoddy structures and ill-founded strictures of CO2 alarmism.  That same alarmism promoted for decades by a mix of decidedly un-level-headed adults and also sundry schemers with ulterior motives.  They have also promoted it to children, often with the use of scare-stories.  It will take a while to clear up the worst of that mess, but these ex-NASA folks are doing their bit to help.  Well done them!

 

Background: The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) research team is a volunteer group of more than 20 scientists and engineers who are primarily retired veterans of our manned space program. We began our investigation into the controversial issue of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in February 2012. We have reviewed, studied and debated available data and scientific reports regarding many factors that affect temperature variations of the earth's surface and atmosphere. We have also studied the well-documented beneficial, as well as potentially detrimental effects, of more CO2 in our atmosphere. This report provides a summary of findings that we have reached at this point into our investigation.

Note added 5 February 2013. An anonymous commenter (oh the irony) below has pointed out that most of the people involved in the Right Climate Stuff venture have not been named.  I can find only three names: Jim Peacock (Webmaster, NASA retired aerospace engineer),James Visentine (NASA Alumni League, Curator and Webmaster, TRCD Database), and Thomas Wysmuller (Meteorologist, former NASA employee).  It still looks plausibly genuine, especially given those three people were signatories of the open letters about climate by 49/50 ex NASA people last year, but readers may want to be careful about taking Right Climate Stuff too seriously until more becomes known about them.

Note added 12 March 2012.  More background on the Right Climate Stuff group here:  http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2013/03/12/retired-nasa-scientists-enter-climate-change-fray/

More of this please: helping children escape from climate scaremongering

Seen in a post by Ian Johnson at Climate Change Dispatch .

More Blunt cartoons linked to climate here: http://bluntbyknutz.wordpress.com/blunt-weather/

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers!

I have not been able to keep up a regular flow of posts here, and I want to apologise for that to any regular readers.  But I hope that the links I provide to more active, and more important, sites (on the right hand side of this screen) will be convenient.  I also hope that some of the posts already made will still be of value for a bit longer, and that also the reference 'pages' I provide will prove helpful from time to time.

I have been building up notes for a series of posts I plan to make next month on the ongoing targeting of children to create activists driven by climate alarm, or to get to their parents to help sustain that alarm.  While the scientific case for such alarm continues to be exposed more widely as being a weak one, and while more politicians seem to making tentative first steps away from domination by environmentalism, there is in the background so to speak, a relentless pushing of alarm or some version of responsibility for doing something about it on to school children.  I suppose that will take decades to reverse and to repair some of the harm caused, and so a delayed posting on a very minor blog will not make a noticeable difference to that.

I am signing off now for Christmas.  I do not have any religious faith, but I do admire the Christian religion for its high ideals, and its open compassion and generosity to all.  I am quite content that they have taken over the pagan festival of this time of year - their music, their sentiments, their actions all enhance it as far as I have found.  Merry Christmas!

Next post some time early in January.  A good deal of progress was made in 2012 on pushing against the promotion of belief in CAGW.  That alarmism is still the 'establishment' view, but surely there are signs that this particular 'tide in the affairs of man' is on the turn.  The 'catastrophism' at least may be being tempered.  Let us hope so.  Happy New Year!
  
Note added 26 December 2012.  Here is a timely illustration of Christian compassion applied to all those who have harmed the world for decades past and no doubt decades to come with their irresponsible and sometimes ugly scaremongering over carbon dioxide:
'However vicious and cruel the true-believers in the global-warming fantasy have been to those few of us who have dared publicly to question their credo that has now been so thoroughly discredited by events, we should make sure that the rat-hole we dig for their escape from their lavish folly is as commodious as possible.'  Christopher Monckton

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/25/bethlehem-and-the-rat-hole-problem/

The BBC - just another brick in the wall of trace gas alarmism

On the Bishop Hill blog today, Don Kieller provides this powerful indictment of the BBC's complicity in climate campaigning in a letter he has just sent to his MP and to the BBC Trust:
 [I have added all the text enlargement, the italics and the emboldening for presentation purposes here]:

I am writing to you about a serious concern regarding the BBC’s reporting of climate change science and associated issues. 

From the detail emerging in the aftermath of Mr. Tony Newbery’s F.O.I case (EA/2009/0118) it is absolutely clear that the BBC is in breach of its Charter, which requires it to be impartial.  Furthermore it knowingly and wilfully breached its Charter in this regard and has since tried to hide this fact from the Public and license fee payers, at the Publics’ expense.

In June, 2007, the BBC Trust published a report entitled “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st Century”. That report, which is fully endorsed by the BBC Trust, contains the following statement (page 40):

“The BBC has held a high‐level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus."

This statement forms the basis for the BBC’s decision to breach its Charter and abandon impartiality on the subject of climate change and instead provide a highly biased and alarmist presentation of the science of climate change, without any attempt at counterbalancing argument, let alone “equal space”.  Since then attempts have been made, via FOI requests, to find out the identities of the so-called “best scientific experts” who attended the “high level seminar” which thereby provided the justification for the BBC to abandon its principle of impartiality in this area. To my best knowledge, the BBC has not abandoned its impartiality in this way, even in wartime.

Tony Newbery, a pensioner, clearly felt the same way and has gone through a long series of FOI requests and processes, culminating, earlier this month, in a tribunal at the Central London Civil Justice Centre (case no. EA/2009/0118). The FOI request was for the identities of the “best scientific experts” who attended the seminar. In order to conceal this information, the BBC fielded a team of 6 lawyers, including barristers, at an estimated cost of £40,000 per day, to prevent the list of names from being published. Whilst they were successful, it was a pyrric victory, as it transpires that this information, that the BBC had tried so hard to conceal, had been in the Public domain for some time.

So who were these “best scientific experts”?

It turns out to be a motley collection of climate alarmists, activists, environmental advocates and those with vested financial interests:

Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia.

Not one of these could be described as “scientific”, let alone an expert.

The remainder:

Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

are scientists, but were misleadingly described in court by Helen Boaden (of Jimmy Saville infamy), as “scientists with contrasting views”. In fact all are unashamedly alarmist. Pointedly, not one of these scientists deals with attribution science, or the atmospheric physics of global warming. 

So where are the real experts? Scientists from the Met Office, or the Hadley Centre, one of the foremost climate research centres in the world? Where are the names of Dr.Chris Landsea, World expert on hurricanes, or Dr. Nils‐Axel Mörner, World authority on sea level rises? Or Professors Richard Lindzen, or Murry Salby, World experts on atmospheric physics? Why are there no experts from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia?

It now crystal clear why the BBC went to such great lengths and expense to withhold the names of those attending. They are not the “best scientific experts” but rather a group overwhelmingly comprised of environmental activists and NGO’s, with no scientific training, whatsoever, or those with a vested interest, often financial, in keeping climate change alarmism firmly in the Public eye.

In conclusion I put it to the BBC Trust that:

1. The BBC and, by endorsing the report, the BBC Trust, have lied to the public that they organised and/or attended a seminar at BBC Television Centre involving the “best scientific experts” on climate change.
2. That its change of policy to no longer be impartial on the subject of climate change was not based on scientific evidence, or the views of the “best scientific experts”, but in fact was as a result of listening to the views, advice and lobbying from inappropriate and biased individuals, groups and organisations including Greenpeace, Tearfund, US Embassy, BP, IIED, IBT, AsRia, E3G etc.
3. That the BBC and the BBC Trust are in breach of the charter and acting unlawfully. The following quotations are taken from the website http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/page/guidelines-editorial-values-editorial-values/ :

1.2.1 Trust
Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest. We are committed to achieving the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality and strive to avoid knowingly and materially misleading our audiences.
1.2.2 Truth and Accuracy
We seek to establish the truth of what has happened and are committed to achieving due accuracy in all our output. Accuracy is not simply a matter of getting facts right; when necessary, we will weigh relevant facts and information to get at the truth. Our output, as appropriate to its subject and nature, will be well sourced, based on sound evidence, thoroughly tested and presented in clear, precise language. We will strive to be honest and open about what we don't know and avoid unfounded speculation.
1.2.3 Impartiality
Impartiality lies at the core of the BBC's commitment to its audiences. We will apply due impartiality to all our subject matter and will reflect a breadth and diversity of opinion across our output as a whole, over an appropriate period, so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented. We will be fair and open-minded when examining evidence and weighing material facts.
1.2.4 Editorial Integrity and Independence
The BBC is independent of outside interests and arrangements that could undermine our editorial integrity. Our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures, or any personal interests. 

Each and every one of these guidelines has been knowingly breached.

This is a scandal that is, in its own way, more disturbing than the one over the Jimmy Savile affair, as it has implications for the whole population. Interestingly the key players in this scandal, George Entwistle, Helen Boaden, Peter Rippon and Steve Mitchell, are also key players in the Savile affair. However whilst the Savile scandal is being looked into by a series of inquiries, this has been ignored.

I look forward to hearing from you in due course on this matter. Please also be advised that I have sent a copy of this letter to the Director of the BBC Trust.

Nov 21, 2012 at 12:41 PM | Don Keiller 

The BBC produces a lot of educational materials, and may even have deliberately injected climate perspectives into children's etnertainment programmes, and may well be seen as an authoritative source, along with such as the Royal Society and the IPCC, on matters to do with climate change.  Teachers should be on their guard about the outputs of each and every one of them on climate.

For more background.
A recent newspaper article on this topic has been published in the Daily Telegraph by Christopher Booker, and Andrew Orlowski has written a detailed overview in The Register.

Note added 3 December 2012: Further analysis of the supine behaviour of the BBC on climate, with chapter and verse on how they surrendered their souls to a handful of eco-activists:  http://biased-bbc.com/2012/12/carbon-footprints-and-dr-joe-smiths-fingerprints.html

Note added 7 December 2012.  An updated essay around this BBC seminar called 'The Propaganda Bureau' is available at Bishop Hill .  A few posts earlier, Don Keiller shares some correspondence with his MP on the topic of the BBC breaching its charter over climate matters.

A 28Gate Climate Crusader Coaching Children for The Cause.

One of the many somewhat curious choices of participant in the infamous climate-alarm lobbying seminar held by the BBC in January 2006 is 'Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University'.  She has since helped launch a programme aimed at turning children into political activists, driven presumably at least in part by her being seized with fear about the future thanks to rising CO2 levels. 

I had noticed that an executive from Children’s BBC was amongst those revealed by 28Gate  (Anne Gilchrist, Executive Editor Indies & Events, CBBC), and I wondered if she had been taken in by the crusaders.  I don’t know if she was or not – a study of the subsequent programmes would be required.  I hoped that someone might have the resources to do that one day soon, and gave the list no more thought.

But then my attention was drawn yesterday (hat-tip M) to some further research by Maurizio Morabito which led him to this extract from a Linked-In entry by Andreadis :

 “Experience

• Member of the Board SANI SA January 2008 – Present (4 years 11 months)
• Founder/Director Planet Agents January 2008 – Present (4 years 11 months)

Education

• Harvard University Masters in Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Government Strategy, Media 2004 – 2006
• University of Bath BSc in Management, Business 1996 – 2000”

SANI is a company which owns or at least runs a luxury hotel resort, and very impressive it looks to be.  Too expensive for me I suspect, but it sure looks like they are doing a grand job there, and that it would be a very pleasant place to visit.

PlanetAgents, however, is another kettle of fish altogether.

In a comment on Maurizio’s recent post linked to above, ‘geoffchambers’ (who has his own blog here) notes that:

“Planet Agents’ site is in Greek, but there’s a PDF in English with a Mission Statement:

• To empower children aged 7-12 to take action on environmental issues.
To revolutionize the role children play in the environmental movement, empowering
them to become a real force for change in their home, school and community.
To achieve this by…
• By enabling children to harness their power in bringing about positive environmental action.
• By making saving the planet a game and social activity, offering kids the chance to take on the role of Planet Agents and undertake fun “Top Secret Missions” to green their home, school and wider community.

• By getting kids to educate and motivate their parents to change their behavior on ten key planet environmental threats.”

[I have added the bold and italics]

Planet Agents http://www.planetagents.org/

I have looked at the Planet Agents site using machine translations by Google .

It is all wrapped up in the honey of protecting the planet, and doing congenial things like having a vegetable garden, with talk of ‘freshness and humor’ in their approach.  But it is all so politicised.  The children are to take on the adults via 'missions' and to organise themselves to ‘get changes in their immediate environment’, e.g.

'Each individual mission supported by appropriate educational material to propose practical solutions to environmental management issues, such as a vegetable garden at the school, eliminating plastic in the school canteen or composting at home, where children enrich and apply. Apart from its training, each mission encourages children to take their future into their own hands, to propose their own solutions, as well as to communicate what they have learned to the rest of the school.'

Please leave them alone, Elena.  They have a childhood to enjoy and do not need to share your fears of the future, nor your ambitions to manipulate their parents.  Adults have done a pretty impressive job of improving living standards, improving health, improving the environment, and making use of cost-effective ways of mass-producing electricity.  They will continue to do so, and looking out for the wellbeing of their own and other people’s children will be an important part of it.  Perhaps if people like Elena, no doubt as well-intentioned as anyone could be in wanting to 'protect the planet', would engage more with adults and try to persuade them directly of her concerns it would be better than trying to do so via their children.

Why do they do it?
A pyschotherapist speculated  last year about reasons why people might target children in this way:
'But the deeper question is – why are adults so keen to focus on children? Why concentrate on the weakest, least influential members of society and ask them to act? The answer I think lies in the process psychoanalysis calls projection where unwanted feelings or parts of the self are split off and attributed to somebody else. “I’m not angry/selfish/mean/neglectful – you are/he is/she is/they are.”

Climate change makes most adults working on it feel powerless. We compare the actions we are capable of with the scale of the problem and feel weak. We look at the extent of our influence and feel helpless. We struggle to combat our contrary desires to consume and feel shame. We feel like children. Children – who are actually socially and politically powerless – are an ideal receptacle for the projection of these uncomfortable and unacceptable feelings.

By focusing on the weakest members of society and influencing them, the not-very-powerful adults make themselves feel better at the expense of the absolutely-not-powerful children. By making them act, we prove that we are not as powerless as we feel .’

Alternative explanations include 'noble cause corruption', or just the plain self-righteousness and arrogance of the zealot.  More research into this area of climate alarmism would be very welcome. 

Some other posts relevant to this:
(1) Creating 'little climate activists' in UK schools

http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/02/classroom-climate-conditioning-at-work.html     

(2) Something similar in Canada

http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/03/canadian-climate-campaigners-how-to.html 

(3) Why do they pick on children?  Some thoughts here:  

http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2011/04/not-just-another-brick-in-wall-hey.html