Articles Tagged "Letter"

The column "Where are we going with climate change?" (Feb. 21) could have been written by me 43 years ago. Only I would have been writing about the coming calamity of global cooling.

In 1970, I leafletted for the first Earth Day. I belonged to the Coalition for the Environment, Sierra Club, donated to Greenpeace, etc. I was a true believer. Never did I question that science could be promoting an agenda for those who would like to exercise control over human beings by promoting this green ruse and making this into a moral crusade. Nor did news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, newspapers and all of the media question anything put out by the "experts." All in the media behaved as stenographers, as is happening today with global warming. Scientists who are not on board were ignored in the '70s and are ignored today. Or mocked.

Global cooling came and left and was replaced with global warming. With no explanation. Although I am sure an explanation for this could be concocted by someone clever enough with info that has been altered, massaged and jiggered.

I was a believer in 1970 but I am no longer a believer in what is being pushed because I believe science has become corrupt in support of a sham.

Kate Martin • St. Louis County

Sir Paul Nurse
President
The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG
February 25, 2013

Dear Sir Paul

My attention has been drawn to a speech you gave last month at Melbourne University, in which you chose to criticise me by name in terms which bear no relation to the truth. In the interests of accuracy, I have obtained a full transcript. I recognise that, as a distinguished geneticist, you are not a climate scientist, and may therefore feel ill at ease discussing the complex issue of climate policy. But that is no excuse for wanton misrepresentation both of the issues involved and of my own position.

So far as the latter is concerned, you claim that I “would choose two points and say ‘look, no warming’s taking place’, knowing that all the other points that you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case”. That is a lie. I have always made clear that there was a modest degree of recorded global warming during the 20th century (see, for example, my book An Appeal to Reason, which you have clearly not taken the trouble to read). However, so far from choosing any arbitrary ‘two points’, I was drawing attention to the fact that this warming trend appears to have ceased, since – contrary to the predictions of what you describe as “consensus scientific opinion” – there has been no further recorded global warming at all for at least the past 15 years, as even the IPCC Chairman, Dr Pachauri, has now conceded. Whatever the precise reason for this, it cannot simply be dismissed or denied.

Mr. John Hamer
BBC Trust Unit
180 Great Portland Street
London
W1W 5QZ

Dear Mr. Hamer

BBC – Complaints Framework Consultation submission March 2012

Your email dated 8 March 2012 refers. Its receipt is a blessing flowing, I presume, from the stimulating exchanges between us over the course of the last some years.

I have, indeed, had numerous encounters with the current Complaints Procedure of the BBC almost, but not quite, all in connection with coverage of so-termed climate change. All, without exception, have been unsatisfactory and for precisely the same reason, namely the pursuit by the BBC of a partisan agenda not merely without benefit of evidence but, on the contrary, in the face of copious multi-stranded contra-indications. I will focus primarily on the climate change issue, but will touch upon others before completion of this submission, for they too are of importance in connection with the

a. BBC’s respect for its own published Editorial Standards;
b. BBC’s proposed revisions to its Complaints Framework.

FROM the two page advertisement in the West Sussex Gazette (February 15), I see the German company, E.on hope to construct a wind farm off the coast of Sussex. For the reasons listed below I am probably one of many who pray that this project is firmly rejected.

Dr John Constable, Director of the Renewable Energy Foundation (www.ref.org.ukwww.ref.org.uk ) has stated that “The UK’s planning system prevents development where the damage of the proposal exceeds the benefits.”

What wonderful news that is, as it SHOULD mean no more wind turbines will be constructed, either on or off-shore, in the UK! Please bear in mind that:

Dear BBC,

Congratulations BBC on the Weathershow. This was shown at 7.30A.M. on Sunday morning, Jan 1st and I fear that many of my friends and colleagues might have missed this show, after seeing the New Year in. Happily they can all pick it up again on their computers with iPlayer.

This was a revue of the weather in 2011. It was explained that La Nina was exceptionally cold at the beginning of the year and this weather system moving across the South Pacific collided with the warmer air over Australia with the result that Queensland was devastated by enormous floods. Here we see clearly Great Nature strutting her stuff.

This was not the only result of this weather system, as hurricanes and tornadoes battered a USA, which was exceptionally cold in the first 3 months, followed by exceptional heat in Texas later on. In fact the hot, dry period was also mirrored in the horn of Africa, which was devastated by drought.

Meanwhile earthquakes devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, and we must remember the tsunami in Japan, both caused by the movement of the tectonic plates. In every instance we can see the power and the unpredictability of Great Nature.

In the UK the severe winter was followed by an exceptionally warm April. So frost-free was this month that apple blossom thrived and my apple trees produced such a bumper crop that apples formed a layer a foot deep under the trees. This early or late Spring, take your pick, suited some birds and did not suit others, as caterpillars appeared too early for some species.

A recent letter puts forth the proposition "Warming Real, Documented." The writer states that Earth's temperature is increasing and cites some statistics from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The writer goes on to cite the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report about warm recent years. Other parts of the global warming proposition are then stated, including glacier loss, a possible upcoming ice-free Arctic region, damage to coral reefs and extreme weather events. The writer appears to agree with the conclusion of the UN-IPCC that mankind is responsible for all of this.

As a retired scientist with more than 40 years of experience, including 24 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, all I can say about all of this is "rubbish."

I have studied the global warming issue and have amassed a huge inventory of peer-reviewed scientific papers showing that, basically, there is not a shred of scientific evidence that mankind is causing Earth's temperature to rise because of carbon dioxide emissions. I can show, through these papers by some of the world's most knowledgeable scientists, major flaws in the global warming alarmism.

First, carbon dioxide by itself has very little effect on Earth's temperature. The major global "greenhouse gas" is water vapor. The only way that the global warming supporters can make carbon dioxide important is by assigning a large, positive "feedback" factor to it, whereby a small increase in CO2 causes an increase in water vapor in the atmosphere.

When I attended Whitman College, I met a wonderful instructor named Dick Clem who awakened the fascination with geology I still feel 40 years later. One thing he showed us on our field trips was the evidence found by J. Harlan Bretz of the great Ice Age floods that sculpted the landscape of what is now eastern Washington.

Ice sheets moving down from Canada had created a huge lake behind the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. Periodically the ice dam would fail sending a wall of water across the land. The floods plucked out rocks to create the coulees of the channeled scablands and piled the rubble in deposits all over the area. There are even gravel deposits as far downstream as Cowlitz County. Once high-level air photography became available the evidence was incontrovertible.

Later, I took a degree in Geology from the University of Puget Sound and did graduate work at Western; lots more about how glaciers had shaped the landscape of the North West.

Bretz's ideas seemed sound to me since it met the most important qualification of a scientific theory: it enabled one to accurately predict what one was going to find. When I came to Cowlitz County I looked for, and found, deposits of water-rounded pebbles containing kinds of rocks that are not found as bedrock within hundreds of miles of here. They are hundreds of feet above the Columbia River, as Bretz's theory would lead one to expect.

This year is rapidly drawing to a close with the ASMU satellite measured global average temperatures now plunging far below those of 2008 the closest year of this decade likely making 2011 the second coldest in the last ten years.

This year also continues the global warming temperature standstill that has occurred since 1998 despite the fact that according to EIA global, CO2 emission increases in the last ten years have more than tripled compared to CO2 increases occurring in the prior decade. Given the huge increases in world CO2 emissions the more than decade long outcome of global temperature standstill strongly supports that CO2 emissions are not controlling global temperatures or climate.

Satellite derived global temperatures are of far superior quality and reliability than land based temperature data. Land based measurements suffer from the intractable problems of systematic contamination of unknown amounts due to impacts of urbanization, land use change, station location changes, measurement changes, station discontinuities, etc. The recent non-peered reviewed best temperature study press release information fails completely to define let alone resolve these significant land based temperature measurement problems.

This year also marks the continuation since 2010 of declining global sea levels measured by satellite data evaluated by the University of Colorado in Boulder. Further the rate of sea level decline reflected by this data is increasing. This outcome completely unexpected by the alarmists and their supporters in the media is the antithesis of what the climate fear advocates flawed model exaggerations have projected about rising sea levels.

TUC Climate Change Policy Link

To the TUC Leaders (via the TUC Information Service),

Following on from your Information Service's response to my web enquiry (see below) I would appreciate some enlightenment from the TUC as to why they have, without question, taken the government's position on climate change to heart.

For as far as I understand the matter, the TUC was formed to look after the workers and to fight any and all government schemes that would undermine the well-being of the workers.

From your unequivocal alignment with government policy that

Climate change resulting from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions poses the greatest threat to our existence on this planet. To contain that threat, the world needs to cut emissions by about half by 2050 and to start reducing emissions now.

you appear unaware of two issues:

1. There has never been any proof positive that human activities have influenced the climate and

2. Reducing "emissions" [of carbon dioxide] will lead to wholesale job losses and widespread poverty.

Please stop for one moment and read the selected excerpts below, then please read this seven-page essay (Copernicus Meets the Greenhouse Effect by Joseph E. Postma) then ask me to visit your offices for a 30-minute presentation on the truth about climate change and what drives it.

I HAVE received a number of emails from your readers on the subject of global warming and ocean temperatures.

Some even suggested I do not understand the science. So let me explain.

To simulate the influence of the Sun on the oceans, it is necessary to experiment with light whose peak wavelength is in the green sector of the visible spectrum: for it is this short-wave radiation that is capable of penetrating several feet beneath the surface and thus causing warming.

The surface tension of water does not act as a barrier against this short-wave radiation.

There is, after all, a good reason why swimming in the tropics is more comfortable than swimming in Bognor or Brighton.

Long-wave radiation from the Sun (accounting for around half of its incoming radiation) does not penetrate more than a fraction of an inch, and causes little oceanic warming.