2007: Global Warming Alarmism Reaches A Tipping Point
(For Selected Highlights of Speech Click Here:)
Floor Speech Coninued...
5) An August peer-reviewed study finds clouds may greatly reduce global warming: Here is an excerpt about the study: “This study published on August 9, 2007 in the Geophysical Research Letters finds that climate models fail to adequately take into account the effects of clouds. The study shows that tropical rainfall events are accompanied by a decrease in high ice clouds, thus allowing more infrared heat radiation to escape to space. Author Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville said: "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems. Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty." Spencer, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center where he received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, believes that the Earth self-regulates it own temperature. “In fact, for the amount of solar energy available to it, our climate seems to have a ‘preferred’ average temperature, damping out swings beyond one degree or so. I believe that, through various negative feedback mechanisms, the atmosphere ‘decides’ how much of the available sunlight will be allowed in, how much greenhouse effect it will generate in response, and what the average temperature will be.” (LINK)
6) A new peer-reviewed study finds that the solar system regulates the earth’s climate – The paper, authored by Richard Mackey, is published August 17, 2007 in the Journal of Coastal Research. Here is an excerpt about the paper: “According to the findings reviewed in this paper, the variable output of the sun, the sun’s gravitational relationship between the earth (and the moon) and earth’s variable orbital relationship with the sun, regulate the earth’s climate.” (LINK) & (LINK)
7) Chinese scientists Lin Zhen-Shan, and Sun Xian's 2007 study, published in the peer-reviewed Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, noted that CO2's impact on warming may be "excessively exaggerated." Here is an excerpt: "The global climate warming is not solely affected by the CO2 greenhouse effect. The best example is temperature obviously cooling however atmospheric CO2 concentration is ascending from 1940s to 1970s. Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated. It is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change," the two scientists concluded. (LINK) & (LINK)
8) A Team of Scientists Question The Validity Of A 'Global Temperature' - The study was published in Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics. A March 18, 2007 article in Science Daily explained: "Discussions on global warming often refer to 'global temperature.' Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. (LINK)
"It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth", Bjarne Andresen says, an expert of thermodynamics. According to Andresen: "The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless."
9) An April 2007 study revealed the Earth's climate "seesawing" during the last 10,000 years, according to Swedish researchers at Lund University. An excerpt of the study states: "During the last 10,000 years climate has been seesawing between the North and South Atlantic Oceans. As revealed by findings presented by scientists at Lund University in Sweden, cold periods in the north have corresponded to warmth in the south and vice verse. These results imply that Europe may face a slightly cooler future than predicted by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (LINK)
10) A new peer-reviewed study on Surface Warming and the Solar Cycle published in Geophysical Research Letters by scientists from the University of Washington claims to be "the first to document a statistically significant globally coherent temperature response to the solar cycle," according to an August 2, 2007 Science Daily article. The paper found "that times of high solar activity are on average 0.2 degrees C warmer than times of low solar activity." Despite the fact that one of the co-author's protests this study being used to chill climate fears, this paper is an important contribution to establishing the solar climate link. (LINK)
11) In 2007, even the alarmist UN IPCC reduced its sea level rise estimates significantly, thus reducing man's estimated impact on the climate by 25%. Meanwhile, a separate UN report in late 2006 found that cow emissions are more damaging to the planet than all of the CO2 emissions from cars and trucks. (LINK)
12) The UN Climate Panel has been accused of possible research fraud. Here is an excerpt: Douglas J. Keenan, a former Morgan Stanley employee and current independent mathematical researcher, accused the UN of "fabrications" and "discovered that the sources used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) have disregarded the positions of weather stations." Keenan has accused the UN of "intentionally using outdated data on China from 1991 and ignoring revised data on the country from 1997." (LINK)
13) A study in the summer 2007 American Association of Petroleum Geologists publication debunked global warming fears. The study by Geologist C. Robert Shoup, was entitled "Science Under Attack." It concluded: "The hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming does not yet meet the basic scientific standards of proof needed to be accepted as a viable hypothesis, much less as accepted fact."
Again, I stress that these research studies are but a sampling of the new science flowing in that is starting to overwhelm the fear campaigns of the global warming alarmists.
I frequently get asked by warming activists whether I can name a single peer-reviewed study disagreeing with Gore or the UN Summary for Policymakers.
As you can see, the skeptic's cup overflows with recent scientific studies.
In addition to the above recent sampling of new studies, I also refer to the more than 100 scientific studies by more than 300 coauthors that are cited in their new book "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years" by climate scientist Dr. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery. The book details extensive research going back decades to reveal how solar activity is linked to Earth's natural temperature cycles.
Interestingly enough, what the warming doomsayers like to avoid discussing is that a colder world causes more deaths than a warmer world.
Geophysicist Dr. David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, explained in January of this year:
"No one has ever died from global warming. What kills people is cold, not heat. For more than 150 years, it has been documented in the medical literature that human mortality rates are highest in the winter when temperatures are the coldest."
Undergraduates know more about climate than Gore?
Perhaps the most scathing indictment of the "more CO2 equals a warmer world" simplicity comes from Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, the chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Giegengack voted for Gore in 2000 and says he would do so again, but he is appalled by Gore's ignorance of climate science.
He tells his undergraduates: "Every single one of you knows more about [global warming] than Al Gore."
Giegengack said: "[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun's heat. That's just wrong ... It's a natural interplay." He continued, "It's hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It's easier to say temperature drives CO2."
"The driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It's the temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the temperature," he added.
Now this might be a bit technical, but what Giegengack is saying here is that it is temperatures that control CO2. This is crucial to understanding the reason why the scientific underpinnings of man-made global warming fears are utterly collapsing and the climate models are continuing to fail.
Giegengack continued: "Certain ‘feedback loops' naturally control the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A warmer temperature drives gases out of solution in the ocean and releases them." "[Today, humans] are putting 6.5 billion tons of fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere, and only 3.5 billion is staying there, so 3 billion tons is going somewhere else. In the past, when the Earth's climate rose, CO2 came out of the ocean, the soils, and the permafrost. Today as temperatures rise, excess CO2 is instead going into those and other reservoirs. This reversed flux is very important. Because of this, if we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it won't reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs ... If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn't see the effects of that for generations."
Let me repeat a key point Dr. Giegengack makes: "If we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it won't reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs." (reservoirs such as the oceans, soil and permafrost)
Giegengack is explaining the heart of the scientific skepticism about CO2's role in the Earth's climate system.
But Giegengack is not finished. "In terms of [global warming's] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don't think it makes it into the top 10," Giegengack said in an interview in the May/June 2007 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. (LINK)
It is entirely appropriate that a man who supports Gore politically may be putting the final nail in the coffin of the man-made global warming fears.
‘Unverified, remote, and abstract dangers'
The global warming scare machine is now so tenuous, that other liberal environmental scientists and activists are now joining Giegengack and refuting the entire basis for man-made global warming concerns.
Denis G. Rancourt professor of physics and an environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, believes the global warming campaign does a disservice to the environmental movement.
Rancourt wrote on February 27, 2007: "Promoting the global warming myth trains people to accept unverified, remote, and abstract dangers in the place of true problems that they can discover for themselves by becoming directly engaged in their workplace and by doing their own research and observations. It trains people to think lifestyle choices (in relation to CO2 emission) rather than to think activism in the sense of exerting an influence to change societal structures." (LINK)
Rancourt believes that global warming "will not become humankind's greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around." He also noted that even if C02 emissions were a grave threat "government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world."
Most significantly, however, Rancourt -- a committed left-wing activist and scientist -- believes environmentalists have been duped into promoting global warming as a crisis.
Rancourt wrote: "I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized."
"Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass," Rancourt added.
Finally, Rancourt asserted that in a warm world, life prospers. "There is no known case of a sustained warming alone having negatively impacted an entire population," he said, "As a general rule, all life on Earth does better when it's hotter: Compare ecological diversity and biotic density (or biomass) at the poles and at the equator," he added.
Indeed, 2007 has turned into the "tipping point" for the unsubstantiated fears and gross distortion of science by activists who have committed decades trying to convince the world it faced a man-made climate crisis. Rancourt so eloquently summed up the movement as one featuring "Unverified, remote, and abstract dangers."
Renowned Scientists Convert to Skeptics
Perhaps the biggest shock to the global warming debate was the recent conversion of renowned French geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre from a believer in dangerous man-made warming fears to a skeptic.
Allegre, a former French Socialist Party leader and a member of both the French and U.S. Academies of Science, was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, but he now says the cause of climate change is "unknown." He ridiculed what he termed the "prophets of doom of global warming" in a September 2006 article. (LINK)
Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States. He now believes the global warming hysteria is motivated by money. "The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" he explained.
I find it ironic that a free market conservative capitalist in the U.S. Senate and a French Socialist scientist both apparently agree that sound science is not what is driving this debate, but greed by those who would use this issue to line their own pockets.
Bravo for the growing scientific dissent. You don't have to believe me. In October, Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking."
The Washington Post's Eilperin wrote: "In late May, Michael Griffin, administrator of NASA, which conducts considerable amounts of climate research, told National Public Radio that he was not sure climate change was ‘a problem we must wrestle with" and that it was ‘rather arrogant' to suggest that the climate we have now represents the best possible set of conditions. Alexander Cockburn, a maverick journalist who leans left on most topics, lambasted the global-warming consensus last spring on the political Web site CounterPunch.org, arguing that there's no evidence yet that humans are causing the rise in global temperature."
Left-wing Professor David Noble of Canada's York University has joined the growing chorus of disenchanted liberal activists. Noble now believes that the movement has "hyped the global climate issue into an obsession." Noble wrote a May 8 essay entitled "The Corporate Climate Coup" which details how global warming has "hijacked" the environmental left and created a "corporate climate campaign" which has "diverted attention from the radical challenges of the global justice movement." (LINK)
Geologist Peter Sciaky echoes this growing backlash of left-wing activists about global warming.
Sciaky, who describes himself as a "liberal and a leftist" wrote on June 9: "I do not know a single geologist who believes that [global warming] is a man-made phenomenon."
And finally, world leaders like Czech President Vaclav Klaus and former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt have been outspoken in their climate skepticism.
Schmidt said on June 4 that fears of global warming were "hysterical" and "overheated" and called efforts to control the Earth's temperature "idiotic." (LINK) Another EU leader -- Spanish opposition leader Mariano Rajoy - spoke out against climate orthodoxy on October 23. Rajoy said, "No scientist has guaranteed to me what the weather will be like tomorrow" and he then asked "How can anyone know what will happen in the world within 300 years?" (LINK)
Former Vice President Gore's biggest worry is now coming true; previously committed believers in man-made global warming are now converting to skeptics after reviewing the new science.
New scientific findings changing minds
The 60 prominent scientists, many of whom advised the Canadian Prime Minister in the 1990's to ratify Kyoto, became the first to foresee 2007 as the "tipping point" for climate alarm.
"Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary," the 60 scientists wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper on April 6, 2006. (LINK)
The climate skeptics have welcomed many scientists from around the world into the fold recently. They include the previously noted Claude Allegre, top Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, Australian mathematician David Evans, Canadian climate expert Tad Murty, Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, Geologist Bruno Wiskel, Paleoclimatologist Ian D. Clark, Environmental geochemist Jan Veizer, and Climate scientist Chris de Freitas of New Zealand. (LINK)
And that is just to name a few. Again, please go to EPW.Senate.Gov for the full report and stay tuned for the upcoming blockbuster report detailing the hundreds of scientists who have spoken out recently to denounce man-made global warming fears.
Essential Point #4: Debunking "consensus"
The fourth and final essential point deals with how the media and climate doomsters insist that there is an overwhelming scientific "consensus" of man-made global warming. The notion of a "consensus" is carefully manufactured for political, financial and ideological purposes. Its proponents never explain fully what "consensus" they are referring to. Is it a "consensus" that future computer models will turn out correct? Is it a "consensus" that the Earth has warmed? Proving that parts of the Earth have warmed does not prove that humans are responsible.
While it may appear to the casual observer that scientists promoting climate fears are in the majority, the evidence continues to reveal this is an illusion. Climate skeptics -- the emerging silent majority of scientists -- receive much smaller shares of university research funds, foundation funds and government grants and they are not plugged into the well-heeled environmental special interest lobby.
On the other side of the climate debate, you have an comparatively well funded group of scientists and activists who participate in UN conferences, receiving foundation monies and international government support and also receive fawning media treatment.
The number of skeptics at first glance may appear smaller, but the skeptics are increasingly becoming vocal and turning the tables on the Goliath that has become the global warming fear industry.
Key components of the manufactured "consensus" fade under scrutiny. We often hear how the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) issued statements endorsing the so-called "consensus" view that man is driving global warming. But what you don't hear is that both the NAS and AMS never allowed member scientists to directly vote on these climate statements.
Essentially, only two dozen or so members on the governing boards of these institutions produced the "consensus" statements. It appears that the governing boards of these organizations caved in to pressure from those promoting the politically correct view of UN and Gore-inspired science. The Canadian Academy of Sciences reportedly endorsed a "consensus" global warming statement that was never even approved by its governing board.
Rank-and-file scientists are now openly rebelling. James Spann, a certified meteorologist with the AMS, openly defied the organization when he said in January that he does "not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype." In February a panel of meteorologists expressed unanimous climate skepticism, and one panelist estimated that 95% of his profession rejects global warming fears.
In August 2007, a comprehensive survey of peer-reviewed scientific literature from 2004-2007 revealed "Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory."
"Of 539 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers 'implicit' endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no 'consensus,'" according to an August 29, 2007 article in Daily Tech.
In addition, a September 26, 2007 report from the international group Institute of Physics' finds no "consensus" on global warming. Here is an excerpt: "As world leaders gathered in New York for a high-level UN meeting on climate change, a new report by some of the world's most renowned scientists urges policymakers to keep their eyes on the "science grapevine", arguing that their understanding of global warming is still far from complete." The Institute of Physics is also urging world leaders "to remain alert to the latest scientific thought on climate change."
Debunking UN mirage of "consensus"
In May, UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared "it's completely immoral, even, to question" the UN's alleged global warming "consensus," according to a May 10, 2007 article.
There are frequently claims that the UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers is the voice of hundreds or even thousands of the world's top scientists. But such claims do not hold up to even the lightest scrutiny.
According to the Associated Press, during the IPCC Summary for Policymakers meeting in April 2007, only 52 scientists participated. The April 9, 2007 AP article by Seth Borenstein reported:
"Diplomats from 115 countries and 52 scientists hashed out the most comprehensive and gloomiest warning yet about the possible effects of global warming, from increased flooding, hunger, drought and diseases to the extinction of species."
Many of the so-called "hundreds" of scientists who have been affiliated with the UN as "expert reviewers" are in fact climate skeptics. Skeptics like Virginia State Climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels, Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy, New Zealand climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray, former head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo, Tom V. Segalstad, and MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen have served as IPCC "expert reviewers" but were not involved in writing the alarmist Summary for Policymakers.
New study finds IPCC "consensus" an "illusion"
An analysis released in September 2007 on the IPCC scientific review process by climate data analyst John McLean, revealed that the UN IPCC peer-review process is "an illusion."
The new study found that very few scientists are actively involved in the UN's peer-review process. The report contained devastating revelations to the central IPCC assertion that 'it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years."
The analysis by McLean states: "The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section. Moreover, only 62 of the IPCC's 308 reviewers commented on this chapter at all."
Let me repeat the key point here: Only four UN scientists in the IPCC peer-review process explicitly endorsed the key chapter blaming mankind for warming the past 50 years, according to this recent analysis.
UN scientist says IPCC has ‘flawed review process'
This analysis was echoed by UN scientist Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist.
In an August 13, 2007 letter, Khandekar lashed out at those who "seem to naively believe that the climate change science espoused in the [UN's] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documents represents ‘scientific consensus.'"
Khandekar continued: "Nothing could be further than the truth! As one of the invited expert reviewers for the 2007 IPCC documents, I have pointed out the flawed review process used by the IPCC scientists in one of my letters. I have also pointed out in my letter that an increasing number of scientists are now questioning the hypothesis of Greenhouse gas induced warming of the earth's surface and suggesting a stronger impact of solar variability and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns on the observed temperature increase than previously believed."
"Unfortunately, the IPCC climate change documents do not provide an objective assessment of the earth's temperature trends and associated climate change," Khandekar concluded.
Paul Reiter, a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, participated in a past UN IPCC process and now calls the concept of consensus on global warming a "sham." Reiter, a professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, had to threaten legal action to have his name removed from the IPCC. "That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed," he said on March 5, 2007. "It's not true," he added.
Hurricane expert Christopher W. Landsea of NOAA's National Hurricane Center, was both an author a reviewer for the IPCC's 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, but resigned from the 4th Assessment Report after charging the UN with playing politics with Hurricane science.
Landsea wrote a January 17, 2005 public letter detailing his experience with the UN:
"I am withdrawing [from the UN] because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns."
"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," Landsea added.
As if to further cement these allegations, the UN allowed a Greenpeace activist to co-author a key economic report in 2007. Left unreported by most of the media was the fact that Bill Hare, an advisor to Greenpeace, was a lead co- author of a key economic report in the IPCC's 4th Assessment. Not surprisingly, the Greenpeace co-authored report predicted a gloomy future for our planet unless we follow the UN's policy prescriptions.
The UN IPCC's own guidelines explicitly state that the scientific reports have to be "change[d]" to "ensure consistency with" the politically motivated Summary for Policymakers.
In addition, the IPCC more closely resembles a political party's convention platform battle - not a scientific process. During an IPCC Summary for Policymakers process, political delegates and international bureaucrats squabble over the specific wording of a phrase or assertion.
Steve McIntyre, one of the individuals responsible for debunking the infamous "Hockey Stick" temperature graph, slammed the IPCC Summary for Policymaker's process on January 24, 2007.
McIntyre wrote: "So the purpose of the three-month delay between the publication of the (IPCC) Summary for Policy-Makers and the release of the actual WG1 (Working Group 1) is to enable them to make any ‘necessary' adjustments to the technical report to match the policy summary. Unbelievable. Can you imagine what securities commissions would say if business promoters issued a big promotion and then the promoters made the ‘necessary' adjustments to the qualifying reports and financial statements so that they matched the promotion. Words fail me."
UN activist scientists hype data
As you continue to scratch beneath the surface of the alleged global warming "consensus" more discoveries await.
Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.
"I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol," Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007.
Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. also detailed the corruption of the UN IPCC process on September 1, 2007:
"The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow," Pielke explained.
He added: "We need recognition among the scientific community, the media, and policymakers that the IPCC process is obviously a real conflict of interest, and this has resulted in a significantly flawed report."
Kyoto represents ‘authentic global governance'
Politics appears to be the fuel that runs the UN IPCC process from the scientists to the bureaucrats to the delegates and all the way to many of the world leaders involved in it. And another key to the motivation of the UN was explained by former French President Jacques Chirac in 2000:
Chirac said Kyoto represents "the first component of an authentic global governance."
These growing critiques of the politicized IPCC process have been echoed by the UK's Lord Nigel Lawson - former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Member of the House of Lords Committee that reviewed the IPCC process.
Lawson called for the abolishment of the UN's IPCC process.
"I believe the IPCC process is so flawed, and the institution, it has to be said, so closed to reason, that it would be far better to thank it for the work it has done, close it down, and transfer all future international collaboration on the issue of climate change..." Lawson said in 2005.
Extravagantly Funded Warming Crusade Follows Ice Age Fears
The huge organizational and funding advantage that proponents of climate alarmism enjoy over scientific skeptics has led to a pretty elaborate and impressive façade of "consensus." Many climate skeptics have been excluded from key roles in the politicized IPCC process and largely ignored by the media unless they are being demonized as "flat Earther's" or accused of being part of a well funded industry campaign. But in reality, it is the climate fear peddlers that enjoy an overwhelming funding advantage over skeptics.
Since the late 1980's when global warming fears rose out of the scorched frost of the 1970's coming ice age scare, an international organized effort and tens of billions of dollars have been spent promoting the warming fear gravy train.
Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter estimates proponents of global warming fears worldwide have received over $50 billion from international sources and the U.S. over the last two decades.
"In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one," Carter wrote on June 18, 2007.
The U.S. alone spends over $5 billion a year on research directly or indirectly related to global warming. Adding to these totals of funding man-made climate fears are large foundations like the Heinz Foundation, international governments, the United Nations, worldwide universities and individuals like billionaires like Richard Branson, and George Soros.
In fact, if you want to get a study funded today on anything from suicides to butterflies, researchers are finding that they better somehow link the issue to global warming and it will increase your chances of securing funding dramatically.
Meteorologist James Spann suggests scientific objectively is being compromised by the "big cash grab" of money flowing to proponents of man-made climate fears. I previously noted that NASA's James Hansen received a $250,000 award from the Heinz Foundation.
"Billions of dollars of grant money are flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story," Spann wrote on January 18, 2007.
The imbalance of money between the promoters of climate fears and skeptics is so large that one 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant of $20 million to study how "farm odors" contribute to global warming exceeded ALL of the money the groups skeptical of climate fears allegedly received from ExxonMobil over the past two decades.
CNN's Anderson Cooper noted my campaign funding sources in a program just this week, but he failed to investigate the huge financial advantage proponents of man-made global warming have over skeptics.
Hundreds of skeptical scientists to be heard in upcoming Senate report
Later this fall, my staff on the EPW committee will also be releasing a report detailing the hundreds of scientists, many of them affiliated with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process, who have spoken out recently to oppose climate alarmism. The report will feature the scientists -- many of them who have finally had it with claims that "all scientists agree" -- in their own words. The report will be complete with the scientists' biographies and web links for further reading.
This new research and the hysteria created by the UN, Gore and the media have prompted frustrated scientists to finally fight back in the name of a rational approach to science.
Climate rationalists or skeptics do not need to engage in smoke and mirrors to state their case and we will be offering the world a chance to read and decide for themselves, unfiltered from the increasingly activist and shrill lens of media outlets like NBC News, Newsweek, Time, CBS News, ABC News, CNN.
I have stood on this floor for years detailing all the unfolding science that debunked climate alarm. These scientific developments of 2007 are the result of years or decades of hard work by scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears. Finally reaching the point where we can watch the alarm crumble is very satisfying.
Skeptics called ‘traitors'
Despite the massive scientific shift in favor of skeptics, proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics.
During Gore's LIVE Earth concert in July, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said of climate skeptics:
"This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."
Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel called for denying certification of any meteorologists skeptical of climate fears
And in August, NASA's resident alarmist James Hansen called skeptics ‘deceitful' & ‘court jesters.' This is the same activist Hansen who conceded in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of "extreme scenarios" to dramatize global warming "may have been appropriate at one time" to drive the public's attention to the issue --- a disturbing admission by a prominent scientist.
Other climate fear promoters have called for Nuremberg-style trials for those expressing man-made global warming skepticism.
In September, the Virginia State Climatologist skeptical of global warming lost his job after a clash with the Governor. Dr. Patrick Michaels claims he was censored by the governor because he held a different view of climate science.
Michaels said: "I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist."
If the advocates for climate change alarm are so confident the science is on their side, why are they so afraid of debate? Why do they resort to such low brow name calling and intimidation?
The reason is obvious. The latest scientific findings are refuting climate fears and prompting many global warming activists to try desperate measures to silence the debate. When they do agree to debate the scientific facts, the alarmists lose and lose badly. In March, an audience of several hundred in New York City was persuaded to the view that global warming was not a "crisis" following a public debate with scientists.
When I became Chair of the Environment and Pubic Works Committee four and a half years ago, I vowed to make science one of the cornerstones of my agenda - to ensure that policy is based on sound science. And as I continue on as Ranking Member of EPW, I have continued this goal.
I think it is probably fair to say that no other federal legislator has devoted as many hours addressing Congress about the science of climate change. I have spent this time because sound policy requires understanding, and what climate policy direction we choose will have enormous consequences not only for our nation, but for the world.
(For Selected Highlights of Speech Click Here:)
