Articles Tagged "Pat Michaels"

When will our greener friends at the UN learn that it’s just not a good idea to make definite predictions about certain disasters?

This time they have been called out on their 2005 prediction that by now there would be 50 million “climate refugees”—people choosing to emigrate because of bad weather. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) even came up with a global map showing precisely where people would migrate from.

Pretty much every forecast about climate change or its effects should be viewed as a hypothesis rather than a fact. After all, as Firesign Theater once noted, “the future’s not here yet”. But the UN named a specific year (2010) which allows for an actual test of their prediction.

Census takers around the world have inadvertently adjudicated the UN’s forecast. It was dead wrong. Pretty much every recent census reveals that populations are growing rapidly precisely where everyone was supposed to be migrating from. (And where is the story that global warming causes babies?).

Folks were supposed to be streaming away from low-lying tropical islands because of worse and more frequent hurricanes. The population of the Bahamas, which catches about as many tropical cyclones as any place on earth, is up 14% since 2000. The Solomons, up 20%. Sychelles: 9%.

Either global warming is the greatest crisis ever to confront humankind, or it is a lefty plot completely manufactured by scientists and politicians in pursuit of research funding and control over our lives. That’s about the way it plays out in the media, on blogs and in conversations on the Metro. Anyone out front on this issue is either an apocalyptic or a denier, virtuous or vile.

Similarly, one camp maintains that temperatures are rising dramatically with unspeakable portents, while the other thinks what has happened is entirely a result of undefined internal oscillations in the earth-sun climate system, and that there is virtually no human component to climate change. This group is especially fond of the lack of statistically significant surface warming since 1995. Since 1997, temperatures really flatlined.

There’s a third way, which suffers from the problem that it is subtle, neither black nor white, and doesn’t do well in sound bites. It’s a “lukewarm” synthesis, arguing indeed that humans have something to do with the rise in surface temperature measured since the mid-1970s, but that it is hardly the end of the world as we know it. This view claims to accommodate the seemingly odd behavior of temperature in the last 15 years.

Each of these positions – let’s call them hothead, flatline, and lukewarm – are testable against observed history and theory. To keep some interest in this occasionally boring topic, I’m going to examine them sequentially, starting with the hotheads.

As the United Nations meets for the umpteenth time this week -- this time in Cancun, Mexico -- in its ongoing effort to confront climate change, there is a growing chorus from both sides of the global warming debate that the world body's efforts have failed and that it is time to look for other ways to address the issue.

Some critics say the U.N. will never achieve a resolution and the time has come to let a smaller group, like the G-8 or the G-20 or regional commissions, set the world's agenda for climate control.

Since the establishment of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the signing of the Rio Treaty on Climate Change in 1992, the U.N. has established itself as the arbiter of the state of the Earth's climate and the place from which solutions are expected to emerge. The IPCC was set up to provide authoritative updates to the world on what reliable science was discovering about climate change and to advise governments on how to deal with its findings.

CLICK to see:- The House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment heard from a dozen witnesses about how the public and private sectors are approaching climate change.

See also - A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response H/T The Week That Was(TWTW) Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Climate science has painted itself into a corner, seriously damaging the public’s faith in the field — as precious a commodity as there is in civil society. Like lab rats that will do anything to keep the cocaine flowing, climate scientists, universities, and federal laboratories are addicted to the public’s money.

The latest illustration of this sad new reality is the letter of resignation from the American Physical Society (APS) of one of the lions of science, Harold Lewis, emeritus professor at University of California–Santa Barbara.

In his letter, Lewis rightly states that it is the global-warming-research industry, “with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS with it like a rogue wave.” Specifically, Lewis objects to the heavy-handed way in which APS quashed and impeded any attempt to modify its outrageous 2007 “national policy” statement on climate change.

The statement is remarkably misleading, and commits the same rhetorical mayhem as similar statements from the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. APS’s solemn declaration — “The evidence is incontrovertible. Global warming is occurring.” — has recently been part and parcel of all such statements.

Is “climate change” to blame for the smog in Moscow and the peat fires which have swept across Russia and devastated 30 per cent of its wheat harvest?

But of course, says a man from the Met Office, as reported in a BBC bulletin so predictably skewed towards AGW alarmism it might just as well have been taken from a press release by the World Worldlife Fund. (And which is the other expert the BBC decides to quote on this issue? Why none other than the Russian head of “Climate and Energy Programme” at the WWF, who – quel surprise! – sees the fires as a clear sign that greenhouse gases must urgently be reduced).

For a more balanced perspective, try this interview with Pat Michaels on RT.



Or this interview with Piers Corbyn.

Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that "Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find."

No links? One of the panel's four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton's school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia "adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity."

As many know, I recently returned from ICCC4. It has taken me a couple of days to get back on track and I want to share over the next couple of days, some of the things I saw there.

One thing I witnessed was a story of courage and of professionalism in the face of adversity. As many know, Heartland formally invited many scientists and scholars who are AGW proponents from the other side of the aisle.

This has been done for every conference since the first one in 2008.

James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the sponsoring Heartland Institute and the person who recruited all of the 70-plus presenters Including yours truly) at the May 16-18 conference, said this about the invitations:

“I personally and cordially invited literally dozens of high-profile scientists who disagree with our speakers, including Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Phil Jones, William Schlesinger, and many others,” Taylor said. “I planned to give each side equal time at the conference.

Regrettably – and predictably – only two ‘warmists’ accepted my invitation to participate: Scott Denning of Colorado State University and Tam Hunt, a consultant on renewable energy and a lecturer at UC Santa Barbara’s School of Environmental Science & Management.”

EPA scientists say manmade carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming of the global climate -- and as such represent a threat to human welfare. But a leading climatologist says his research indicates that CO2 poses no threat to human welfare at all, and he says the EPA should revisit its findings.

CHICAGO -- Carbon dioxide is hazardous to your health, the Environmental Protection Agency says. Oh really?

EPA scientists say manmade carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming of the global climate -- and as such represent a threat to human welfare. Officials went so far as to declare the gas a danger to mankind in early December. But a leading climatologist says his research indicates that CO2 poses no threat to human welfare at all, and he says the EPA should revisit its findings.

“There is an overestimation of the environment’s sensitivity to CO2,” said Dr. Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the CATO Institute and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.

In his Dec. 18 op-ed "How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus," Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute falsely claims that work by him (and other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians) has been unfairly blocked by me and others from appearing in mainstream science journals because the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate science deniers.

In truth, the only bias that exists at such publications is for well-reasoned writing that is buttressed by facts.

That is why climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama—who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse—have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.

And what about those who are not being published? Every scientist dealing with a major public issue must decide if he or she is going to be a scientist or a de facto politician.