Articles Tagged "Roger W. Cohen "

In his Aug. 6 op-ed, "A New Climate-Change Consensus," Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp speaks of "the trend—a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather." We have seen quite a few such claims this summer season, and Mr. Krupp insists that we accept them as "true." Only with Lewis Carroll's famous definition of truth, "What I tell you three times is true," is this the case.

But repetition of a fib does not make it true. As one of many pieces of evidence that our climate is doing what it always does, consider the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's year-by-year data for wet and dry years in the continental U.S.

From 1900 to the present, there are only irregular, chaotic variations from year to year, but no change in the trend or in the frequency of dry years or wet years. Sometimes there are clusters of dry years, the most significant being the dry Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. These tend to be followed by clusters of wet years.

Despite shrill claims of new record highs, when we look at record highs for temperature measurement stations that have existed long enough to have a meaningful history, there is no trend in the number of extreme high temperatures, neither regionally nor continentally. We do see the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s setting the largest number of record highs, at a time when it is acknowledged that humans had negligible effect on climate.

Dr. Harold Lewis sent this today via email with a request to make it public here. I’m happy to oblige. Read the letter to understand the movie poster.- Anthony Watts - WUWT

Date: Saturday, November 06, 2010 2:32 PM
To: Curt_Callen
Cc: Kate Kirby
Subject: followup
Dear Curt:

When on October 6 I sent you my letter of resignation from APS , I of course expected the Empire to strike back in one way or another. It pleased me however, when I read your response, to find a very minimum of ad hominem attacks, confined mostly to apparently irresistible eruptions of “Lewis is a liar.” (“His statements are all false” is the equivalent.) So I thank you for that courtesy.

What took me by surprise was the pusillanimous, almost puerile, tone of the comment, which reads more like an ad for a used-car lot than as a declaration of a great scientific society. All our products have passed a complete inspection by our factory-trained mechanics. We’re making no money on this, take it and be thankful. Etc. Not a single major issue confronted in any substantive way. Yet everyone knows about the sloppy handling of the 2007 statement; everyone knows about the financial investments of many of the major players; there is plenty of dirt in the public domain, yet you continue to pretend it is all in a different universe.

Curt, you cannot have written such a shabby document.

Roger Cohen has written an incisive deconstruction of your response, and I can add little, so let me turn to the repair options. For the record, though my resignation from APS gives me no standing, my objective here is to help slow the APS rush toward the cliff. This is what I think must be done at the proximate meeting of the Council.

Legislation and regulation aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions are predicated on the belief that science definitively shows that man's greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth's temperature to rise, with serious deleterious effects.

What if the cause-and-effect relationships between GHGs and temperature are greatly overstated? What if the data used to measure temperature change and its effects are of poor quality? What if we don't adequately understand important climatic systems (such as clouds or oceans) to simulate them accurately in the computer models used to predict climatic change? What if the stated positions of key scientific societies are under assault by the member rank and file? What if the state of empirical knowledge points to only a small human effect on climate? What if the best scientific information we have does not justify the economic costs associated with proposed legislation and regulation?

The answers to these questions directly impact the legislative and regulatory debates underway in the Congress and the Obama Administration.

On May 14, Dr. William Happer and Dr. Roger Cohen will review key features of climate science.

Click PDF file to see Invitation

To APS Open Letter Signatories,

This message outlines the key problems we see with the APS process to date and lays out the next stage of this initiative. It also provides opportunities for you to re emphasize your position to the APS.

As laid out at the APS website aps.org and in president Cherry Murray’s note to members (attached), two key claims are made with respect to the APS process that considered the proposal contained in our Open Letter.

1. The APS claims that the “[Kleppner Ad Hoc] committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research.”

2. The APS claims that “APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter.”

My colleagues and I thought you would be interested in this letter-to-the-editor, ”Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change,” published in the July 23 issue of the scientific journal Nature. It briefly describes the objectives and status of our initiative relating to the American Physical Society statement on climate change. The Nature letter is signed by Professors S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia), Hal Lewis (University of California at Santa Barbara), Will Happer and Robert H. Austin (Princeton University), Laurence I. Gould (University of Hartford), and myself. We are joined by more than sixty other members and former members of the Society who have signed the attached Open Letter. The Open Letter includes a proposed Alternative Statement which the signatories find a more accurate representation of the current state of the science than the unsupported assertion of the APS: “The evidence is incontrovertible.” The signatories are a diverse group who share only a background in physics and a concern for the integrity of the science process. They come from academia, industry, and government. Many are distinguished prize winners (including a Nobel laureate), members of national academies, authors of books, chairs of studies of historical significance, and leaders of important activities in industry and government.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like more information.

Sincerely,
Roger W. Cohen, Fellow, American Physical Society, July 23, 2009

You have recently received an Open Letter from the Woods Hole Research Center, exhorting you to act quickly to avoid global disaster. The letter purports to be from independent scientists, but that Center is the former den of the President’s science advisor, John Holdren, and is far from independent. This is the same science advisor who has given us predictions of “almost certain” thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

The facts are:

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists’ computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact

THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN’T EXIST.