Is Climate Change a man-made phenomenon?
The Words of St. Francis: I ask you with whatever reverence I can that you do not let the cares and worries of this world cause you to forget God and turn from the path of his commandments.
9 Things You Need To Know about Climate Change phenomenon The “Daily Wire”
Oct 7, 2016
With Hurricans wreaking havoc, the Left is predictably seizing the storm as a means of promoting their radical global warming agenda. Climate change has not been a major theme this election cycle, but Hillary Clinton is now trying to turn it into one, with the help of global warming guru Al Gore. Unfortunately for the climate change alarmists, despite all the celebrity endorsements and high-minded rhetoric, the facts keep getting in the way. Here are 9 things you need to know about the climate change hoax.
1. The Climategate scandal proved that key data involving man-made climate change was manipulated. In 2009, the public discovered emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit exposing how scientists who have been enormously influential in promoting the concept of man-made climate change actually attempted to cook the books to obtain results that served their narrative that the planet was heating at a dangerous trend due to higher levels of carbon dioxide.
One of these scientists included Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming. Hansen, Philip Jones, Michael Mann, et al. were all involved in trying “to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming,” according to the leaked emails. The emails also revealed how this cabal of scientists would discuss various ways to stonewall the public from seeing the “background data on which their findings and temperature records were based,” even going as far as deleting significant amounts of data. They would engage in efforts to smear “any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work.”
2. The Climategate scandal was given new life in 2011, with the release of new emails. The new round of leaked emails at the time provided more teeth to the revelations of 2009. Here are a couple of egregious emails from Jones found, via Forbes:
“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,” writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.
“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
An email written by Mann showed that he tried to get “an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” a climate skeptic scientist named Steven McIntyre.
3. NASA may have also been involved in manipulating data to serve the narrative of man-made climate change. The Washington Times reported in 2009: “Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.”
Since this occurred at around the same time as the Climategate scandal, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a lawsuit to get NASA to release their relevant data sets on this issue and was able to expose emails from NASA that revealed a disturbing fact: the agency admitted “that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit,” reported Fox News in 2010 – meaning NASA climate change data sets were less accurate than the organization embattled with manipulating data sets. Protecting our environment is something we can all do.
A 2015 Washington Times editorial also highlighted another example of NASA cooking the books:
Paul Homewood, a skeptical researcher, found that in Paraguay, temperature readings for the 20th century at all nine weather stations supervised by NASA had been “adjusted” to transform a cooling trend into a warming trend. His analysis of readings in the Arctic found that rapid warming between 1920 and 1950 — before human activity could have increased the production of greenhouse gases — were adjusted downward so that the 1980s and ‘90s temperatures would stand out as warmer.
4. NASA also declared 2014 to be the hottest year on record – despite the fact that they were only 38 percent sure about it. The latter fact was left out of their press release at the time, as well as the fact that 2014 was supposedly hotter than the previous hottest year, 2010, by 0.02C – well within the margin of error of 0.1C that scientists tend to adhere by. The Washington Post attempted to spin in favor of NASA by arguing that NASA simply said that 2014 was the most likely hottest year on record – but their press release unequivocally stated that “2014 was the warmest year on record” and leaving out the aforementioned key facts makes such a declaration seem misleading, as it’s clearly not a guarantee that 2014 was even likely the hottest year on record.
5. There is no evidence that the Earth has been warming in recent years. As The Daily Caller highlights, a recent peer-reviewed study concluded that when accounting for El Ninos and La Ninas – which are the “the fluctuations in temperature between the ocean and atmosphere in the east-central Equatorial Pacific” that “occur on average every two to seven years,” according to NOAA – there has been a flat-line temperature trend since 1997. In fact, the study found that the El Ninos and La Ninas disproved the existence of the Tropical Hot Spot, which the Environmental Protection Agency claimed as evidence of carbon dioxide supposedly warming the atmosphere.
6. The left likes to claim that 97 percent of scientists support the concept of man-made climate change. It’s likely closer to 43 percent. The 97 percent myth stems from a variety of flawed studies, as the Daily Wire explained here. On the other hand, the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency conducted a survey in 2015 that found that only 43 percent of scientists believe in man-made climate change, which is far from a consensus.
7. The amount of Arctic sea ice has become quite high. Data from the Danish Meteorological Institute shows that the “average [ice] extent over the month [of September] is one of the highest in the last decade,” according to Paul Homewood. This runs directly counter to the predictions of the climate change models.
8. Money from the federal government and leftist organizations fuel a lot of misinformation from man-made global warming alarmists. Climate change alarmism is an extremely lucrative industry. All in all, there have been over $32.5 billion of federal government grants that have funded climate change research from 1989-2009, far more than any research funded by the oil industry. National Review reports:
Last summer, a minority staff report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works gave details on a “Billionaire’s Club” — a shadowy network of charitable foundations that distribute billions to advance climate alarmism. Shadowy nonprofits such as the Energy Foundation and Tides Foundation distributed billions to far-left green groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which in turn send staff to the EPA who then direct federal grants back to the same green groups. It is incestuous. It is opaque. Major media ignored the report.
Mann, one of the scientists mentioned earlier for his role in the Climategate scandal, received nearly $6 million in grants from the federal government. The sources of funding for scientists like Hansen are unknown, the federal government has been resisting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to reveal them.
9. It is patently absurd to link Hurricane Matthew to climate change. Not just because of the aforementioned reasons, but because as Marco Morano points out at Climate Depot, “The data show for the last 10 years we have had an unusual drought of landfalling major hurricanes (Category 3 and higher) on the continental U.S.”
“That’s right, no major hurricanes have made landfall for over a decade,” Morano continued. “This is the longest such drought on record.”
Here are seven more things you need to know about global warming.
Sep 14, 2016
1. A few decades ago the media and many in the scientific community were in hysterics over global cooling. Newsbusters has a roundup of the various news outlets that promoted the global cooling hysterics from 1970:
“Scientists See Ice Age in the Future,” Washington Post, January 11
“Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?”, Los Angeles Times, January 15
“Pollution Could Cause Ice Age, Agency Reports,” St. Petersburg Times, March 4
“Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century,” Boston Globe, April 16
“Pollution called Ice Age Threat,” St. Petersburg Times, June 26
“U.S. and Soviet Press Studies of a Colder Arctic,” New York Times, July 18
“Dirt Will Bring New Ice Age,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 19
An article from Newsweek in 1975 cited the “almost unanimous” consensus among meteorologists that global cooling “will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.” The article even cites a report from the National Academy of Sciences at the time warning: “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale.”
Sounds familiar.
2. There is no consensus that global warming is a man-made phenomenon that requires “urgent” action. One of the most common talking points used by global warming alarmists is that 97 percent of scientists agree that it’s man-made and unless action is taken, armageddon will ensue. This is patently false, as Joseph Bast and Dr. Roy Spencer explain in The Wall Street Journal, this number comes from three sources and they’re all riddled with errors
• In 2009, a University of Illinois student conducted a two-question survey for her master’s thesis that asked respondents if “global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.” Skeptics and proponents typically answer yes to both questions, so unsurprisingly 97 percent said yes. Additionally, only 79 scientists responded to the survey.
• A student at Stanford found in 2010 that 97 percent or 98 percent of “the most prolific climate change writers” believed that “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming.” No mention on how serious the problem was, and he only found the views of 200 researchers when the number of climate change researchers are in the “thousands.”
• La Jolla, Calif.determined in 2013 that 97 percent of “abstracts of peer-reviewed papers” believed that “human activity is responsible for some warming,” but a more exhaustive study of Cook’s work determined that only 0.3 percent of the 11,944 papers reviewed by Cook concluded that “human activity is causing most of the current warming.”
There are also plenty of scientists, meteorologists and researchers who don’t think human activity will result in overheating the planet:
Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.
Finally, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that “human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.” Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing “anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing.”
Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that “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 and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
There is no “consensus” that there’s man-made global warming that will cause an ensuing catastrophe.
3. Some global warming alarmist scientists weren’t able to get the results they wanted, so they tampered with the data. For instance, there was the infamous scandal known as “Climate-Gate” where leaked emails showed that a cabal of world-renowned scientists discussed hiding the lack of warming because it wasn’t the outcome they wanted, as documented here and here. Additionally, NASA appeared to have cooked the books as well; in 2007 they found that 1934 was the hottest year in its record instead of 1998, so they recalculated the data to make it seem like 1998 was actually the hottest year on record.
4. There has simply not been a lot of global warming in recent years. As The Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro has written:
For example, The Economist reported in 2014, “Between 1998 and 2013, the Earth’s surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s.” That forced the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to come up with a whole new way of evaluating its data to fight those results. It also forced global warming advocates to claim that the oceans somehow ate up all of the excess heat in the air. All of that led President Obama to claim to the world in Paris that 14 of the past 15 years have been the hottest on record. But when scientists said that 2014 was the hottest year on record, they admitted they were only 38% sure that was the case.
This trend continued in 2015, which was nowhere near the hottest year recorded by satellite, meaning that there has been an 18-year pause in global warming. Additionally, there has been a “trend since 1900 [that] is equivalent to 0.75 Cº per century,” which is statistically insignificant, according to Christopher Monckton.
5. The sea levels are not rising by record levels, and there has not been an increase in extreme weather events. Here are the relevant facts for each, as previously reported by The Daily Wire:
• For the past 50 years, the sea levels have gone up by a little more than one millimeter a year, which is normal. There is no evidence that they’re going to rise by faster levels in the future.
• There has been a net increase in ice growth in Antarctica.
• Data from NOAA shows that there has been a decrease of tornadoes, falling hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and bitter winters. There is also evidence that is no link between global warming and wildfires and extreme rainfall.
6. There is evidence to suggest that it is actually higher temperatures that result in higher levels of CO2. The videos below provide the evidence and explain why this occurs:
Note: See, Thomas Sowell’s book, Global Warming Manufactured by Intellectuals?
In fact, there is a graph in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that shows exactly this, but it’s only shown for a short amount of time in the movie so the viewer doesn’t see the correlation.
7. Not only will the left’s “solutions” to global warming do little to actually stop warming, they would cause massive harm to the economy. As radio host and constitutional scholar Mark Levin has written in his book Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, Dr. Niv Shariv at Hebrew University concluded: “Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50 percent increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have all called for an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Shapiro explains just how devastating this would be:
In California, the average resident is responsible for 9.42 tons of carbon emissions each year. By 2050, that would have to drop to 1.88 tons. That’s about what the current residents of North Korea emit, according to Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute. Per capita GDP in that country is currently $1,800 per year. If we extend that model out to the entire United States, every resident would have to drop to below-Mexican standards of carbon usage, and likely to Mexico-standards of GDP (try $10,400 per year). It would apparently cost us $5 trillion by 2050 just to subsidize businesses to create more energy efficient solutions. And that doesn’t mean that the solutions are better than what we currently have.
The president has made these following statements.
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump appeared to do an about-face on the issue of climate change, urging Americans to move away from fossil fuels and signaling that there may be some truth to global warming theories.
The Washington Examiner reported that he said that “there is still much that needs to be investigated” about climate change, calling for Americans to transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. In the past, he has called climate change a “hoax” created by the Chinese, but he also has said he supports local bans on fracking.
“Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels,”
He said, more pressing environmental needs must be addressed including cleaning up water, and reducing disease.