http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_500531.html

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/07/table-of-conten.html

http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050

Professor Richard Lindzen is not the only Scientist that does not Believe we Face Dangerous Man-made Global Warming

Ed Gulachenski   EE ‘52

Following Richard Lindzen’s talk on April 17, 2007 at the Cape Codder Resort and Spa, some wondered how many other scientists share his views on global warming. As Prof Lindzen stated in his talk, many scientist are reluctant to express their true beliefs for fear of being ostracized and having their government research funding cut off. However there are many like Prof Lindzen who are not afraid to speak out and suffer the consequences.

Andrew Bolt in an article (May 25, 2007) in the Herald Sun of Australia

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21788999-5000117,00.html

 presented the following list of scientist who share Prof Lindzen’s view on global warming:

1. Scientists who doubt there's a scientific "consensus" that we face dangerous man-made global warming.

Prof John Christy, IPCC lead author and head of Alabama's Earth System Science Centre: "I've often heard it said that there is a consensus of thousands of scientists (who say) humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system. Well, I am one scientist, and there are many, that simply think that is not true."

Prof Charles Wax, Mississippi state climatologist: "There isn't a consensus among scientists."

Dr Roy Spencer, formerly NASA's senior climate scientist: "The only consensus I'm aware of is that it's warmed in the last century."

Prof emeritus Joel Kauffman, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia: "(M)any professors of climate science realize that carbon dioxide generated by human activity has caused little or no global warming."

2. IPCC scientists who doubt even the IPCC, said to represent 2500 scientists who all believe in dangerous man-made warming.

Prof Yuri Izrael, IPCC vice-chairman: "There is no serious threat to the climate."

Richard Lindzen, former IPCC lead author and meteorology professor at MIT: "There is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons."

Dr Vincent Gray, IPCC reviewer: "The continued fairly unchanging warm weather since 1998 shows no signs of increasing, and is probably influenced by changes in the sun."

Dr Christopher Landsea, former IPCC author and hurricane expert: "It is beyond me why my (IPCC) colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming . . . I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."

3. Petitions of scientists who doubt the faith.

A 2006 letter to Canada's Prime Minister signed by 60 experts in climate-related fields: " 'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified."

The Oregon Petition of Dr Frederick Seitz, US National Academy of Sciences past president, with the verified signatures of 17,800 scientists and technicians, including 2600 climate scientists: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere."

The 2005 Leipzig Petition of Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental science at Virginia University, and signed by about 80 prominent scientists and academics: "(W)e cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions."

4. Experts who once believed but now doubt.

Prof Nir Shaviv, Hebrew University astrophysicist: "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming."

Dr David Bellamy, famed green activist: "Global warming is largely a natural phenomenon."

Dr Reid Bryson, top climatologist and founding chairman of Wisconsin University's meteorology department: Temperatures are rising "because we're coming out of the little ice age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air".

Prof Tim Patterson, Carleton University paleo-climatologist: "The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles."

Prof Emeritus Jan Veizer, Ottawa University environmental geochemist: "The past record strongly favours the solar/cosmic alternative (to human gases) as the principal climate driver."

5. Local doubters.

Bob Carter, research professor at James Cook University: "That 20th century warming - the most recent of many previous warm phases of similar or greater magnitude - was dangerous or human-caused, or even that the warming has continued after 1998, all yet remain to be demonstrated."

William Kininmonth, former National Climate Centre head: "(A)larmist predictions have no sound basis."

Dr David Evans, former climate modeller at the Australian Greenhouse Office: "(N)ew evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical."

Ian Plimer, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University: Blaming humans is "pseudo-science".

6. Interesting doubters.

Prof Antonio Zichichi, World Federation of Scientists president: Plausible "man is not to blame".

Prof Edward Wegman, who led an inquiry for a US Congressional committee to check IPCC statistics: "The assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported."

The late Roger Revelle, the professor Al Gore says first warned him of warming: The science is "too uncertain to justify drastic action".

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of Russia's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory: "Solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040. It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on earth in 15 to 20 years."

Junk Science: Climate-Controlled Classroom?

Thursday , May 10, 2007

By Steven Milloy

ADVERTISEMENT

Should schools teach the global warming controversy by showing students only Al Gore’s alarmist movie? Roger Williams University just learned the answer to that question the hard way.

One week before Earth Day, the professors of the RWU course, “Core 101: Science, Technology and Society,” required their students to watch “An Inconvenient Truth.” The students were not presented with any other viewpoint on global warming.

Controversy erupted when the president of RWU’s College Republicans club complained to assistant dean Jeffrey Hughes, “With the issue of global warming being such a highly politicized topic, with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man-induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to only show the alarmist viewpoint?”

Hughes responded that Gore’s movie is an “ideal subject for a Core lab” because “the point of Core is to inform students of scientific principles and help them make decisions on issues with a scientific basis in their everyday lives,” according to a CNSNews.com report.

Dean Hughes continued, “After an initial and heated debate, scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process.

"I repeat: There is no doubt that we’re warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes. Penguins, polar bears and your unborn children have no vote in this. They must live with decisions we make today. As educators, we’re charged to encourage your intellectual growth.

"That can (actually, will) be uncomfortable at times, and we’re also here to help you deal with that discomfort. It’s truly what makes being a human such a joy, privilege and challenge.”

But if anyone has learned about how “uncomfortable” learning can be, it is Dean Hughes, who seems to have changed his mind about RWU’s one-sided global warming curriculum.

An RWU spokesman told me that the backlash against the required viewing of Gore’s movie prompted Dean Hughes to “explore alternatives” to teaching global warming. The spokesman said that one alternative includes the presentation this fall of the counter-alarmism movie, "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a Channel 4 (U.K.) documentary that is best described as must-see global warming TV.

As the chastened Dean Hughes learned, while many people have made up their minds about global warming, many others have not. Further, there is evidence that, when presented with both sides of the debate, many believers end up changing their mindset from alarmism to skepticism about the alleged climate crisis.

Last March, the prestigious New York debating society Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on global warming.

On the alarmist side of the debate were the Union of Concerned Scientists Brenda Ekwurzel, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt and University of California oceanographer Richard C. J. Somerville.

The skeptical view of global warming alarmism was presented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen, University of London bio-geographer Philip Stott, and “State of Fear” author Michael Crichton, who is also a Harvard-trained physician and an instructor at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A pre-debate poll indicated that, by 2-to-1 (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided), the audience believed that manmade global warming was a crisis. But in the post-debate poll, the audience reversed its pre-debate views — the ranks of the skeptics swelled to 46 percent, the believers plummeted to 42 percent and the undecided declined slightly to 12 percent.

That’s the power of debate.

It follows that schools, if they choose to teach the global warming controversy at all, ought to be teaching both sides of the controversy, not just Al Gore’s alarmism.

Last fall, the National Science Teachers Association rejected Al Gore’s offer of 50,000 free DVDs of “An Inconvenient Truth” for use in classrooms.

Recognizing that Al Gore and his global warming viewpoint is just that, opinion rather than undisputed fact, the NSTA expressed concern that other “special interests” might also want to distribute materials and that it didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film, according to a Washington Post report.

The NSTA probably made the correct decision at the time simply because it would be egregiously biased to present just one particular viewpoint about a controversy as heated and important as global warming.

Now that the counter-viewpoints are available, however, schools ought to show their students “An Inconvenient Truth,” “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and the Intelligence Squared debate.

According to a recent front-page Washington Post story, one-sided teaching about global warming is taking a terrible emotional toll on children.

“For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today…Parents say they're searching for ‘productive’ outlets for their 8-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.”

It’s time to learn that bias plus teaching does not equal education.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Respond to the Writer

1. Max Anacker says:
   April 2nd, 2007

A Layman’s Review of the latest IPCC report (2007)

Is global climate changing?

Yes, undoubtedly. The only constant in climate is change. Average surface temperatures rose by around 0.6°C over the period from 1900 to 2000, possibly a few tenths of a degree less if we correct for the “urban heat island effect”. This warming trend already started around 1800, with 0.5-0.6°C warming over the period from 1800 to 1900, as well. Prior to 1800 the earth was in a global Little Ice Age, which started around 1300, with temperatures cooler than today.

Have atmospheric CO2 levels risen?

Yes. From around 290 to 375 ppm over the period from 1900 to 2000.

Is this increase in atmospheric CO2 levels man-made?

While man-made CO2 emissions are only a small percentage of the total carbon cycle, there is no doubt that man-made CO2 has contributed to at least a part of this increase.

Is there a scientifically proven link between increased CO2 and higher temperatures?

No. Just model scenarios that have been programmed in by the IPCC to demonstrate this link. Certainly the warming actually experienced from 1800 to 1900 and from 1900 to 1940 had little to do with man-made CO2 emissions.

If it isn’t from higher CO2 levels, from where is the warming coming?

We all know that the primary source of energy for Earth is the sun (not the exhaust gas from your automobile). Warming and cooling trends on Earth have always come from swings in solar activity, long before there were any automobiles or humans, for that matter. There are many scientific studies that show this link.

Is the “warmth of the last half century unusual in at least the previous 1300 years”, as the IPCC report states?

No. This is not true. It ignores the existence of the scientifically proven and historically well-documented global Medieval Warm Period, with temperatures higher than today.

But the latest IPCC report (2007) states that it is very likely that man-made CO2 is causing the recent and projected future temperature rise and that this will lead to all sorts of problems: melting ice caps; rising sea levels and flooding; reduction of snow cover and thawing of permafrost; higher ocean salinity; increase in severe weather events including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones; loss of habitat and possibly even extinction for many species; increase of tropical diseases; increased deaths from heat waves; etc.

This all sounds pretty scary (as it is obviously intended to do by the writers).

But is there any sound scientific basis for these dire predictions?

Fortunately not.

To put it in plain words, the IPCC 2007 report is largely based on “junk science” backed up by “garbage in / garbage out” computer models and leading to unfounded “disaster scenario projections”. Some examples:

· uncorrected surface temperature records show more rapid warming than is actually occurring
· claim (unsubstantiated) that urban heat island effect has a “negligible effect” of “less than 0.006°C per decade” has been proven by two separate studies to be untrue
· more accurate, more comprehensive and more pertinent satellite temperature record of the troposphere (available since 1980) is ignored (this shows 0.3°C lower temperatures during last 10 years than the uncorrected surface record)
· claim (unsubstantiated) that discrepancy between surface and satellite record has been reconciled is not true
· models created to show that greenhouse effect from “anthropogenic CO2” is the primary driving force for climate change when there is no scientific evidence or proof for this supposition and a significant amount of paleoclimate evidence to show that CO2 does not drive climate change
· greenhouse effect of naturally occurring water vapor is ignored – instead water vapor has been programmed into the models as a “positive feedback” to man-made CO2, more than doubling the calculated impact of CO2 alone on warming
· impact of clouds is ignored
· effect of variations in solar activity are relegated to a very minor role in driving climate despite fact that past records for millions of years show this is the major driver of climate on Earth
· claims made that Greenland ice cap has melted from 1993 to 2003, causing an increase in sea levels of 0.21 mm per year while latest ESA study of essentially same period shows an increase in Greenland ice, equivalent to a lowering of sea levels by 0.27 mm per year
· claims that reductions in the Antarctic ice sheet have contributed to a further 0.21 mm per year rise in sea levels over the period 1993 to 2003, when latest ESA studies show a net increase in Antarctic ice, corresponding to a lowering of sea levels by 0.08 mm per year
· forecasts sea levels rising by up to 59 cm (23 inches) over next 100 years, when the international organization responsible for monitoring sea levels worldwide states that any prediction for the next 100 years exceeding a maximum of 20 cm (7.9 inches) is nonsense and 10 cm (4 inches) is more likely
· claims that world-wide tropical cyclone activity has increased both in frequency and intensity due to global warming, when the record outside USA shows a net reduction in both frequency and intensity and the US record shows a reduction from 1940 to 1995 followed by an increase from 1996 to 2005 (including 2005 with Katrina and Rita), followed by a drop in 2006, with overall 1940-2006 record showing essentially no statistical increase in either intensity or frequency; also, theory says these are driven by the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, which will decrease with warming
· claims that other extreme weather events, such as heat spells, extreme precipitation events, thunderstorms and tornados are increasing due to global warming when there are no comprehensive reports to show this and many local reports show there is no statistical change in extreme weather events
· claims that tropical diseases have increased and will continue to do so as a result of anthropogenic warming have been refuted by world experts on these diseases
· population checks on polar bears, for example, show these are stable or increasing slightly on average and have increased from around 5,000 in 1970 to 22,000 to 25,000 today despite the warming

All in all, we should ignore most of what is in the IPCC 2007 summary report, just as we should ignore the sensationalist press reports on global warming and its dire consequences and the calls by politicians for immediate action to stop this “impending disaster”.

It’s all hot air.

But why do so many scientists and political leaders plus many in the media support the man-made global warming theory?

“Cherchez l’argent.”

It’s driven by an estimated 2.5 to 4 billion dollars per year in climate research grants, with the grants going selectively to those scientists who make the most disastrous predictions.

The media also love disaster stories, since they sell better to the public than “it’s OK” reports, thus generating more profits for the media.

The politicians and bureaucrats love the idea of “carbon taxes”, higher taxes on fossil fuels, “carbon footprint offset” schemes, etc., because it gives them more money to spread around (and more power).

Not only that, but it’s also become “sexy” and “trendy”, with pop stars, Hollywood figures and many other “media darlings” jumping on the bandwagon.

It’s truly a “win-win” situation for everyone, except for the people that will end up paying for this circus: you and I.

We’d be much better off diverting our time and resources from this non-problem of “CO2 pollution” to address the true problems of today, such as poverty, hunger, genocide, slavery, disease, terrorism driven by religious fanaticism, illiteracy, lack of clean drinking water and electrical power for millions of people, world dependence on a dwindling supply of imported fossil fuels, killing off of the rain forests, real pollution of the environment, etc.

Just think what we could do in these real problem areas with 2.5 to 4 billion additional dollars per year, not to mention the hundreds of billions it would take to truly implement the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol…

Max Anacker 30 March 2007

Children Need Not Loose Sleep over Global Warming

Survey shows that half of children age 7 to 11 are loosing sleep because of fears of global warming, Cape Cod Times, April 29 article by Darragn Johnson of the Washington Post.  We as grandparents can draw on our life experience, common sense and wisdom to put their minds at ease so that they can sleep peacefully without fear. Here are five truths we can tell them:

1.      The average global temperature has increased only a half a degree in the last 100 years.

2.      There has been no increase in temperature in the last 10 years.

3.      The polar bear population has increased from 5000 in 1970 to 25,000 today.

4.       There is no decrease in Greenland and Antarctic ice.

5.      The sea level  is not rising enough to notice.

Having told them these truths, they will say but this is not what we are being taught in school. Your reply will be, yes I know because your teachers want you to grow up to protect the environment by conserving energy and to use alternate  energy  and think you have to be scared  into adopting this life style.  To which they will reply, that’s silly, we want to do all that anyway. They don’t have to scare us.  Good night, grampa.