What Happens When Irresponsible Scientists Scare Innumerate Policy Makers into Panic Actions

Germany’s much ballyhooed Energiewende (transition to renewable energy) was supposed to show the whole world how switching over to green energy sources could reduce CO2 emissions, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, provide cheap electricity to citizens, and heroically rescue the planet.

Ten years later, the very opposite has happened: Germany’s CO2 emissions have been increasing, electricity prices have skyrocketed, the green jobs bubble has popped, and tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared. Worse: tens of billions are being redistributed from the poor to the rich. 

P. Gosselin , at No Tricks Zone

Follow the link for more details of the German experience, and of how the Australian government is taking note of it.  I want to finish my post here though by making some more general points.

Teachers and students of the various climate scares of recent decades should note that lesson from Germany when people say 'Why, even if we are wrong about climate catastrophe being driven by our CO2, we are going to do good things in response to our fears.'

The basic answer to such sophistry  is 'Oh no, you are not. You have already caused a great deal of avoidable misery and starvation by increasing basic food prices thanks to diverting farmland to produce bio-fuels.  You have threatened the economic development of both rich and poor countries by seeking to ban coal-fired power stations.  You have despoiled beautiful countryside with your solar panels and windfarms, and each has harmed wildlife, increased energy costs, and polluted the environment during manufacturing. You have scared children, and other vulnerable groups, with your talk of doom and disaster.  You have dismissed and downgraded the wonderful achievements of industry, and have provided in your carbon-schemes new financial opportunities for those who seek profit without contributing anything useful to society.  You have empowered bureaucracies such as the EPA in the States and the EU Commission in Europe to pursue eco-regulations at the expense of humanity.  The damage caused by the recent floods in southern England being but a recent instance of the harm that can be caused when the supposed protection of the environment takes precedence over human welfare and opportunities for development.'  

Paying for the Davids tackling the Goliaths of CAGW

My previous post noted that sums in excess of $22 billion a year are being spent on climate matters by federal agencies and sub-agencies in the United States, and every single one liable to have a vested interest in continued widespread alarm, at the very least within politics and mass media circles.  Monster agencies.  Goliaths in the game.  But, as the legend goes, a Goliath can be brought down by a boy with a well-aimed catapult.  Some do not even need to be brought down, merely calmed down.  Outside of government, if not outside of government funding, can be found wealthy corporations such as the WWF with a clear financial interest in stirring up fear to maintain their high profile and encourage donations, or the British Broadcasting Corporation which has chosen to promote climate alarm and hinder criticism of it.  These too are Goliaths.

The Davids of resistance to these Goliaths can be found on the blogosphere, and many, possibly, all are operating on budgets in the range between zero through shoestring to relatively modest. What would happen if those of us who admire their work were to make a bigger effort to make regular payments for it?  £5 a month  subscription from a thousand people would surely make quite a difference to many a solitary blogger with a great deal to contribute but also with a need to take care of themselves and their families.   It would also help to encourage larger organisations by providing tangible evidence of support.

So, readers of this blog, what can you afford to spend, month after month in a reliable fashion, for what you admire and think important in the climate saga?  Not all of us have the time, nor feel we have the talent, to write, to analyse, and to study the science or the policies involved in climate alarmism, but we can surely name many people who can to good effect.  Maybe we can chip in from time to time with comments and the odd donation, but maybe we could also tax ourselves to make regular payments?  I’ve worked out a percentage of my quite modest retirement income to spend, and will be looking into the setting up of standing orders to get this established as a routine, regular event.  I hope tens of thousands of others will do the same.  See the links on the rhs of this page for possible beneficiaries. Beneficiaries in the sense that writers of books are beneficiaries of those who buy them, and journalists are beneficiaries of those who buy their newspapers.

Jo Nova, in a comment  in response to Bob Tisdale’s recent announcement of his temporary retirement from full-time blogging because of a shortage of money, has suggested a more organised approach which looks very promising if suitable expertise and administrators can be found.  Her idea is to set up a fund to which people could make tax-deductible contributions, and which would support independent researchers: 

‘Bob, no, you know, I’m not satisfied with this. Not at all! How much would it take to keep you going? If we got 10,000 people to donate $10 a year, would that be enough? What if we made it $1 a month?($120k pa) 

There must be a better way to do this, and we grown-ups need to get serious. It’s crazy that we rely on government-sausage-machine-science, and dutifully pay our taxes of thousands every year but we can’t independently create say 20 full time jobs for people checking and critiquing the government output.

Yes, I’m as bonkers as you and none of us want to ask for money, but in the end we don’t survive on thanks and praise alone. It’s time to be smart. Science needs truly independent researchers. And those truly independent researchers deserve remuneration that means they can send their kids to decent schools, afford health care, fix the bathroom, and go on the odd holiday. At the moment, they’re self-funding — they raise the money through other work and shares

If anyone out there knows how to set up tax deductible non-profits (or understands the feasibility of it – is it worth doing?) you could make a big difference by pointing out where we ought to be aiming, and the short-cuts to get there… the independent real science sector would so appreciate legal and accounting advice.

Greenpeace and WWF can do it. Why are we willing to accept that sceptical scientists can’t?’

I hope something comes of that as well.  Jo Nova can be reached via her own blog:  http://joannenova.com.au/

Big Climate USA: a voracious monster scaring the children, and threatening the land and its people

 Monsters used to be part of mythology, but we can see them reappearing in modern forms to frighten children into conforming with the views and the demands of climate campaigners.  Where do they come from?  Who is paying for them?  Some answers for the States at least have surfaced recently.

A letter from the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives was sent in October 2013 to the director of the Office of Management and Budget to get an update ‘regarding climate change activities being carried out across the federal government’.  They appended a chart from 2011 listing ‘over 40 federal agencies and sub-agencies’ and asked if it was still accurate.  I daresay it may need enlarging now, but in the meantime here it is, a partial anatomy of a federal monster which is now gobbling up cash at the rate of at least $22 billion dollars per year:

The threat of man-made global warming is obviously quite expensive to study and promote, and it must seem even more so as record cold temperatures spread across the USA.  Record cold temperatures which of course were never part of the settled science of global warming, except of course in retrospect.

Modern Press Release

The latest wheeze of those promoting this scare in the States is to blame the cold spell on global warming via its presumed effect on a new piece of jargon for the general public, the polar vortex.  This is another sorry example of shoot-from-the-hip junk science designed to promote headlines and save face in the mass media.  It has already been discredited.  Like so many other examples of this in recent years, the speed of rebuttal is remarkable.  More and more informed people, I surmise, have lost patience with the charlatans who presume to speak in the name of Science when in fact they are merely crafters of press releases to suit the political needs of the moment.
See http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/record-cold-due-to-global-warming.html for a compilation of some relevant papers and articles on this particular piece of PR.
[P.S. Climate Depot has also assembled a  list of materials on the polar vortex spin]
[P.P.S Paul Homewood present more analysis in support of his concluding sentence 'More junk science from John Holdren. ']

But back to our monster.  Peter Wilson, writing in the American Thinker, published the above chart this month, and provides many interesting comments that are very relevant to the child-scaring propensities of the monster it reveals.  Namely the so-called educational initiatives (I have added the bolding):

 “A recent Wall Street Journal article expressed concern about low math and science standards in the Common Core curriculum, despite President Obama's frequent speechifying about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.

There are many possible explanations for this sorry state of affairs, but one factor that doesn't add anything positive is the politicization of education, a culmination of fifty years of a "long march through the institutions" by leftists. Humanities and social sciences have been most corrupted, but STEM disciplines are being assaulted by a new agenda promoting "climate education" or "climate literacy."

A report titled "Climate Literacy," signed by President Obama's science czar John Holdren, declares that "Climate Science Literacy is part of Science [STEM] Literacy." The usual arguments are presented: 1) recent global warming "represents an extraordinary rapid rate of change compared to changes in the previous 10,000 years." 2) Rising temperatures will lead to "rising global sea level and increasing frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts, and floods." 3) "human activities are now the primary cause of most of the ongoing increase in Earth's globally averaged surface temperature."

Many climate scientists disagree with these three propositions; at very least, they are partisan viewpoints with political implications that have no place in public education.

This campaign is being advanced by local, state and federal governments, by universities and various non-profits, and is aimed at K-16 -- kindergarten through college.”

An Inflatable Monster

This is an image of an inflatable monster.  

You can inflate a lot of monsters with $22 billion a year. Here's one at NOAA for example.

An informed public will see them for what they are, and more and more are joining in the sport of pricking them.  

Every one they burst, is one less to scare the kids with.  

Go Citizens, Go!

Note added 31 January 2014.  Mark Morano has compiled some links to informative materials on 'Big Climate': http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/01/30/prof-roger-pielke-jr-rips-big-climate-for-having-similarities-with-big-tobacco-big-nfl-pielke-jr-specifically-linked-un-i/

Note added 07 February 2014.  WUWT has an amusing clip on the deviousness behind one of the charts used by Holdren in the above propaganda broadcast: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/07/friday-funny-two-guys-with-a-ruler-blow-up-the-white-house-global-warming-video-claims/

Scaring Children about Climate - some good news, and some bad news at the end of 2013.

As can be seen in numerous posts and pages on this site, there are people willing to do horrible things in order to bolster their own political and/or financial prospects, or to flatter their egos as saviours of the world, or to damage industrialised economies or to suppress development opportunities in the less-industrialised ones.  I refer in particular to the deliberate intention of frightening children with horror stories about climate.  The frail notion that rising levels of CO2 are dominating the climate system to the imminent danger of life on Earth is the intellectual underpinning that seems to be required for such inhumane behaviour.  The good news is that there have been many scientific papers published in the past year which could help undermine the glib assurance of those who enjoy and benefit from standing on or around this dreadful platform.

The Good News

The good news which I want to feature here is the many setbacks this year in the scientific underpinnings for alarm over human impact on climate.  When the threadbare nature of the scientific case for such alarm, and the inevitable scaremongering which it encourages, are more widely exposed for what they are, the political support will surely weaken further, and then in due course our schools may become freer to concentrate on the education and on the pastoral care of their pupils and be less vulnerable to those who view them as potential recruits for sundry political causes such as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘carbon reduction’.  

There are a great many papers to choose from.  To provide an illustrative selection, I have chosen one for each month from just one blog, a blog which published dozens of reports every month, usually with a direct link to a scientific paper, or to a meta-analysis based on scientific papers.  Readers might like to take a look themselves by scrolling through the archives there:  THE HOCKEY SCHTICK             .

January: ‘Inconvenient truth: Sea level rise is decelerating’  

February: ‘Clouds/aerosols control the climate, not man-made CO2’   

March: ‘Analysis finds warming leads to less extreme storms’  

April: ‘New paper demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels, not man-made CO2’  

May: ‘Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, study says’  

June: ‘New paper predicts a decrease in tropical cyclones in the future’   

July: ‘New paper finds climate change over decades primarily determined by the oceans'  

August:  ‘The skeptics were right: Climate changes naturally & these natural changes outweigh any man-made influences’  

September:  ‘New paper finds another amplification mechanism by which the Sun controls climate’   

November: ’ New paper finds evidence of Svensmark's cosmic ray theory of climate on a regional scale’

December: ‘Observations show IPCC exaggerates anthropogenic global warming by a factor of 7’ 

 

These are a somewhat arbitrary selection from the dozens of relevant posts in each of these months at that blog.  I make no claims that this selection includes the best papers, nor even that the source blog is the best or only place to find such links.  It is an encouraging aspect of the disparate resistance to scaremongering over climate that there are a great many sites and blogs around which can provide entries into the scientific literature, and often helpful summaries and commentaries as well.  

A major contribution of the year was, in my view 'Climate Change Reconsidered II', and I will say a little more about it at the end of this post.  (I helped it along in one of the most modest of ways one can contribute to such a venture:  by reviewing one of the chapters ahead of publication.).

The Bad News

The bad news is, in essence, that the production of materials and the creation of initiatives to win children over to causes underpinned by climate-scaremongering continues  The pressure on children remains relentless and widespread.  Some may be due to hard-hearted activists, some may be due to decent people duped by the relentless propaganda they themselves have been subjected to, in some cases all their lives.  Here are a few recent examples:

UNICEF:  they have a new campaign, and a new catchphrase ‘A Climate Fit for Children’   In the UK, they run a schools network pushing children into political actions, and it wants to get into this new campaign as well:  ‘Children and young people have a powerful voice and it’s one our decision-makers should be listening to.’

University of Leeds (and others):  they think it a wheeze to rope children into preparing feel-good propaganda about a low-carbon future by getting them to work with deep greens such as Derrick Jensen to produce cartoons for the cause.  (I wonder how they cover the suffering and waste due that cause) 

The product of this cartooning is a graphic novel which ‘is being circulated to schools and museums throughout the UK, as well as selected comics shops.’

Greenpeace plays the Santa card.  Every year it seems some eco-loon or other spots this opportunity. Suzuki has tried it for example.  Now the bourgeois hooligans of Greenpeace have had a shot at it: Santa under threat from disappearing ice.  A miserable effort from miserable people determined to darken all our lives. It won them a Bah Humbug Award from ACM, but it really deserves deeper contempt than that conveys.

ColdPlay soundtrack for a junk video aimed at kids.  A video described on the rtcc site as having had the support of the Foreign Office (something I hope someone will investigate).  The video contains a doom-laden future thanks to 'climate change' - the classic CAGW stuff.  Designed to keep children awake at night.  Awake and screaming for help perhaps.[6 Jan: Climate Science has highlighted the Foreign Office connection]

‘Common Core’  in the USA. That’s the official name for sweeping changes proposed in developing a national curriculum in the States. It doesn’t look good for the children.  For example, in Colorado ‘Fifth grade students at Fremont Elementary School in Colorado were assigned a reading passage that describes global warming as a dangerous, man-made phenomenon that will destroy civilization in a few hundred years.'  Everyone wants to do their bit to disturb the young, even teachers of English it would seem.  Another report entitles this 'Students Receive Doomsday Climate Propaganda' and that seems about right.

UNESCO deep in planning for ESD next year.      (ESD = Education for Sustainable Development.)  By which they mean 'suppressed development', and which of course is driven by the usual set of climate fears, and buttressed by any other eco-scare you care to mention.  The banner of sustainable development is the big vehicle for the political and financial ambitions for many taking advantage of the climate scaremongering.  Who could possibly be against 'sustainable' they must suppose.  Anyone who has given it more than a moment's thought would be my response.  Anyway, there is to be an ESD conference in Japan in November, 2014.  I'd like to think it will be cancelled for lack of interest, but that would require a lot of wishful thinking to be sustainable for very long, sad to say.

[Note added 12 Oct 2017:  Good news. USA to quit UNESCO in 2018.  Not before time.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/12/u-s-withdraws-from-unesco-the-u-n-s-cultural-organization-citing-anti-israel-bias/?utm_term=.d79a39b9fdb2]

Looking Ahead

The hapless shipload of climateers currently stuck in the Antarctic ice provides a fittingly allegorical end to 2013 for the CAGW movement as captured by Josh (hat-tip: Bishop Hill):

http://cartoonsbyjosh.com

Let us hope that they are all brought to safety in due course, but let us also hope that their cause continues to be morally and intellectually and economically and politically in trouble next year as well, and in every successive year until it is dismissed forever as an awful aberration.  One that nevertheless caused a great deal of harm while it lasted.  

Loss of respect for science may well be one of the longer-lasting effects, but it will take more and more scientists to lift their attention from their own studies and devote some serious attention to what has been done in their name if this aberration is to end sooner rather than later.  The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change has been doing sterling work in building up a body of research .  Its report 'Climate Change Reconsidered II' was for me one of the most important events in 2013, not least because this report could be of value for years to come for scientists intent on getting more information about what we know and don't know about the climate system, and who have realised that they cannot trust the IPCC, nor those who embellish and exaggerate what it has chosen to publish..  I hope that more and more teachers, educational leaders and administrators, and interested politicians will come to the same realisation sooner rather than later.

[hat-tip: Dave W for some of the links used in this post, and for general encouragement]

A Merry Christmas to all my readers!

Not being blessed, if you like, with religion myself I still find a great deal to admire in Christianity: the compassion, and generosity to be found in the texts and amongst so many of its followers, and the beauty-that-can-make-you-gasp to be found in some of its buildings, large and small, and also in some of the music.  The above singing and the building it is taking place in, are fine examples of this.  

More usual posts will resume before the New Year - I have a bit of a backlog of ideas and notes, but most of them are about matters that invoke the opposite of the cheerful spirit of this coming week in much of the world.  So I'll leave them to one side for a few more days.