In almost every case these theories from the “population bomb” to “human-caused, catastrophic global warming” (AGW) are propagated initially by scientists hungry for credibility and funding that will enable them to live the lifestyle they believe is their due. This includes: funding for their worthless research, a comfortable living situation, royalty advances for the fear-generating books they write, high-paid speaking engagements, plus the adoration of followers who are either intellectually challenged or see these scientists as an aid to achieving their own agendas. I will describe this latter group of followers more completely later in the paper when I discuss the AGW perfect storm “scientific consensus.”
Human-caused “sky is falling” theories have existed for as long as we have been on this planet. Whenever human beings experienced anything unusual, whether it was a devastating weather phenomena, or a solar eclipse; there were always those false prophets screaming that humanity had angered the gods and declaring themselves humanity’s only hope for redemption. Only they could appease the gods and bring peace and tranquility back into their followers’ lives. There were many ways of appeasing the gods but human sacrifice was one of the favorites, for example:
Human sacrifice was a shared religious practice among ancient Mesoamericans and Peruvians. According to their beliefs, the gods provided for mankind only if they themselves were placated. … Its purpose was … to maintain a balance of the cosmos and appease the gods who presided over it.
This attitude of appeasing the gods can be seen in other activities like the burning at the stake of those who dared to go against the scientific consensus that the earth was at the center of the universe. Even today religious fanatics, who are convinced that humanity is destroying the earth, gladly destroy the lives and reputations of those scientists who dare to suggest that the processes that drive climate change are way beyond human interference or control. This is nearly as bad as burning them at the stake. To a scientist who has spent his whole life in the pursuit of truth, losing his reputation, being branded a heretic (denier), his credibility destroyed, along with any funding to carry on his work, is a fate worse than death. It even gets worse, some actually want scientists that do not agree that AGW is a factual disaster for the human race, to be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years. |
I was introduced to the “sky is falling” community of scientists with the publishing of The Population Bomb by Stanford University professor, Paul R. Ehrlich in 1968. In the book Ehrlich postulated that humans would suffer mass starvation in the 1970s and 80s due to over population. As a technological optimist, this seemed asinine to me; that humanity would allow this to happen made no sense whatsoever. However, his book, which sold over 2 million copies, created the belief that humanity was the problem and that we would suffer the consequences of our actions against Mother Earth, if we didn’t change our ways.
I, of course, was proved right, the entire concept was asinine. (Only the hopelessly ignorant would have been taken in by this idiocy.) However, not only was he off in his prediction, but we are literally feeding the world better today than we were in 1968. For example, there was 42 percent decrease in world hunger between 1990 and 2014.
Regardless, Ehrlich still stands by his prediction of the collapse of civilization due to over population, basically stating that he just had the timing wrong. And there are plenty of people who still support him and his position. |  |
Essentially, if you are a true scientist who is only after the actual processes that drive climate change, you’re reputation, credibility, and funding can be stripped from you; your scientific life ended. But, if you’re a fraud scientist whose research has proven to be a complete and total disaster, you can hold on to both your reputation and funding. An example of the crazy world we live in.
This reminds me of Marshall Applegate (one of many who have predicted the end of the earth). Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, claimed that a spacecraft was trailing the Comet Hale-Bopp and argued that suicide was ‘the only way to evacuate this Earth’ so that the cult members' souls could board the supposed craft and be taken to another ‘level of existence above human.’ Applewhite and 38 of his followers committed mass suicide. (There’s no way for us to know for sure whether they made it or not.)
In the same way, those that follow “sky is falling” false prophets like Ehrlich are not only committing intellectual suicide but they are also putting the world in danger. Fear of a human-caused, worldwide catastrophe does no one any good and leads others to take actions that can be detrimental to us, in fact, detrimental to the entire human race.
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The world was first introduced to the concept that humanity could cause great harm to the environment and the creatures that exist on the planet with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring in 1962. Her book stayed on the best seller list for 31 months and has since sold millions of copies. In addition, in 2006 her book was listed as one of the 25 best science books of all time by Discovery Magazine. Finally, she is given credit by many as being the inspiration for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The book represented a watershed moment, the catalyst that raised public awareness and concern for the environment and the dangers of runaway pollution. Although she remains one of the heroes of the environmentalist movement for her impact on the public’s consciousness, her major achievement was making DDT the villain that was destroying animal life around the world. This, in spite of The National Academy of Science concluding in 1965 (3 years after the publication of her book) that DDT had prevented 500 million deaths in the previous 20 years. |  |
In 1966 we got our first view of the earth as a planet residing in the immensity of space with the first photos of the earth sent back by the Apollo astronauts. This view of the world was exactly what was needed to take our responsibilities toward the planet/environment seriously. The National Academy of Sciences study was forgotten. When the environmentalist movement focuses on a subject, science and scientific research are pushed aside, and a vision of the world being destroyed by humanity moves front and center.
It should be noted that the final result, according to scientific research, is that millions of lives have been lost mostly in poor tropical countries because DDT was not there to eliminate the mosquitos that carried malaria and the louse which carries typhus. In addition, Carson, who had no scientific training, was completely wrong; DDT has effectively no toxicity to animal life. Tens of millions have died because of her extraordinary claims about DDT and the environmentalist’s willingness to jump on the “bad DDT” bandwagon.
This great need to be active in saving the earth from humanity’s lack of concern for the environment, a need that was supported by the success of both Silent Spring and The Population Bomb, was solidified by the creation of Earth Day, held for the very first time in 1970 and still being held every April 22, and celebrated in over 193 countries. Initially held to encourage and demonstrate for environmental protection, the focus today is on the dangers of fossil fuels and the “fact” of AGW (human-caused global warming). To emphasize this commitment, the 2016 landmark Paris Agreement on climate change was held on Earth Day. But, I’m getting ahead of myself; the global warming issue was preceded by many others.
With the tremendous interest in how humanity was destroying the planet, the 70s spawned many other predictions by pseudo-scientists who jumped on the funding bandwagon and tried to make a name for themselves in the environmental movement. Here are 17 examples:
- Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
- “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
- The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
- “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
- Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
- “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
- Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
- In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
- Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
- Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
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- Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 Earth Day article that “air pollution … is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
- Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.
- In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
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- Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”
- Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
- Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look (April 1970) that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
- Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
So, where do we stand in regard to the numerous “sky is falling” predictions made by these pseudo-scientists? There were four major predictions: massive starvation; air pollution will kill hundreds of thousands; crude oil will be used up by the year 2000; and we are in store for another ice also by the year 2000. Looking at each threat individually, here’s where we stand in 2017:
Massive Starvation. While the world still has a problem with millions still undernourished, we have made massive strides and there is no reason this trend won’t continue. However, there are two main issues that could easily cause us to lose ground:
- Ethanol has gotten a bad name as a waste of a valuable food source. A closer look supports the opposing view that there seems to be plenty of corn being grown to meet all of our needs. Currently (2016) the United States produces 37 percent of the world’s supply of corn and fully 44 percent of the corn we produce is used for food-associated needs. This is a bit more than is being used to produce energy.
- While ending starvation is an important goal, currently we seem to be doing much more than our share to solve the problem. As a result, we are feeding more people around the world better than ever and, as I said earlier, there’s no reason this trend can’t continue.Actually, the major problems with feeding many of the world’s poor is war and evil governments where the leaders take any funds available for their own use, with no concern for the people that are under their rule. One of the best examples of this is North Korea where famine and starvation are just around the corner. It is estimated that as many as 3 million people starved to death in the late 90s; however, 2011 showed signs of another major food shortage. When a shortage appears, then food stuffs are hidden and the influential use the situation to their own advantage. But, this is only one case; dictatorships around the world run extremely inefficient governments where the people are unable to feed themselves even though they are in areas with excellent environments to be able to feed their own populations. In addition, those in power steal the resources that come to them from nations wanting to help eliminate the problem.
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- Current research on the Sun is suggesting that we may be in for another mini ice age. The relationship between a “quiet Sun” (an absence of sun spots) and global cooling is very strong and as we learn more about the Sun’s life cycles the potential for a drop in the temperature of the planet is becoming more likely. If this hypothesis proves to be true, the impact on the growing season could be devastating. I’m not trying to create a “sky is falling” scenario, but this is something we could prepare for. However, currently, our efforts to stop global warming are in direct opposition to what we would need to do if we end up in another mini ice age. Essentially we would need to put some grain crops in storage, and possibly minimize the use of corn to create ethanol. In addition, we would need to garner all of the energy sources we could so that we could ride out the cooling in relative comfort. As you can easily see, shutting down coal mines and oil/gas fields while shifting prematurely to alternative fuels is exactly what we would not want to do under the cooling scenario.
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Air Pollution: In the United States air pollution is really no longer a problem; however, it is a big problem in China and India. Regardless, CO2 is not the problem in either of these countries and forcing them to focus on eliminating CO2 “pollution” is taking them off focus from the real problem. These countries are growing rapidly and many people within those countries are moving above the poverty line, well into the middle class. With this advancement comes desire for material things that need energy to operate, from automobiles to televisions to the Internet and to washing machines. Plus hundreds of millions have to be fed, clothed, and given a warm, dry place to live. All of this takes energy and when this energy is produced inefficiently, air pollution is the result. Again, I am not talking about CO2, I’m talking about actual air pollution that is a real danger to the physical health of the society’s citizens. Bottom line, we know how to have the energy we need without causing air pollution, we’ve done that in the United States. Those countries with a pollution problem need to take it seriously and begin adopting our methods to solve the problem.
There is one other form of air pollution that is not getting any better and may be getting worse, as a result of the policies the United Nations has demanded from member countries. This is the pollution caused when the major source of energy for heating and cooking is bio fuel (wood, cow dung, etc.). Burning bio fuels directly, in the home, is causing hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world. This could easily be solved by providing electricity for heating and cooking to every person on the globe. However, since this can, currently, only be accomplished through the use of fossil fuels, there is no push to provide the energy sources and distribution technologies needed; those dependent on bio fuels will continue to suffer approximately 200,000 deaths a year.
We Are Running Out of Crude Oil: This was supposed to happen by the year 2000, another phenomenal miscalculation. With the discovery of new oil fields around the world and the use of new fracking technologies, it is currently estimated that the world has between 50 and 100 years of fossil fuels left, depending on how much is used. Notice that as we learn more and more about how to obtain the fossil fuels that exist on this planet, we keep finding more and more resources. Back in the 70s it was about 30 years and now it’s up to somewhere between 50 and 100.
Personally, I don’t think we will run out in the foreseeable future; new technologies will develop additional energy sources and ways of storing the energy and this will lower the need for fossil fuels. The major concern in the 70s was that when we ran out of crude oil, civilization would come to a screaming halt. This prediction was as wrong as the predictions of Hillary’s easy electoral win in 2016. The truth, as we need more energy, we find more and better ways of obtaining and distributing it. I can see a future where basic, clean energy needs are considered a right. There’s no reason why not. Energy ultimately comes from the Sun and may, someday, be as free as the air we breathe; hope springs eternal!
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New Ice Age: This prediction is extremely interesting to me. Note how quickly we went from considering the possibility of another ice age to the “scientific fact” that humanity is causing catastrophic global warming. Yet, now solar scientists are predicting another period of cooling like was experienced around the time of the forming of America. This is one prediction that may ultimately be proved to be correct; we will just have to wait and see. If it happens, it will happen within our lifetimes. I only hope that, if it does happen, we will be prepared for it and loss of life will be minimized.
You can see that these “sky is falling” predictions tend to be completely wrong in that they completely rule out the earth’s ability to correct itself and humanity’s exceptional ability to adapt in ways that often improve the situation. When we consider that we are about to become a spacefaring race, the resources that are available in the solar system should give us easily another 1000 years of prosperity. Assuming, of course, that we escape a nuclear war, or an ELE (extinction level event). But that discussion will have to wait for another time; we have other fish to fry today.
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Part 2 - Anthropogenic Global Warming
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It’s time to take a look at the most current “sky is falling” prediction, AGW or human-caused catastrophic global warming.
A Swedish scientist, Svante Arrheniu, was the first to claim that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming. In 1896 he proposed a relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature. This research did not have much of an impact because scientists at that time believed that the human influence on climate was insignificant compared to nature.
The CO2 impact on the earth’s temperature really didn’t start to gain traction until the slight cooling trend of the 1940s to 1970s ended and the temperature began to rise once more. In fact, the Earth’s mean temperature rose so fast from 1980 through 1998 that many scientists and others began to take the possibility of increase global warming very seriously.
In 1998, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes created the “Hockey Stick Graph” model that strongly suggested that increases in CO2 had a major influence on global temperature. In fact, if their model was correct, if we continued to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, through the burning of fossil fuels, it wouldn’t be too long, probably within our lifetime, that the earth would become uninhabitable. Models from other climate scientists tended to show the same result and the AGW hypothesis gained significantly new strength, especially in popular culture. In other words, a “perfect storm, scientific consensus” was born.
It should be noted that the birth of “scientific consensus” is not all that unusual. It usually happens when an idea takes an area of the scientific community by storm and everybody buys into it without much questioning. It is also true that “scientific consensuses” are often ultimately proven wrong. Some notable examples are:
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| The Clovis People who were considered to be the first humans to settle in the western hemisphere. Initially, this seemed like an excellent hypothesis. Clovis sites were found in many places easily identified by a specific arrowhead design. Once the idea became almost totally accepted and the reputations of prominent archeologists were set in stone, it became literally impossible to fight the consensus and those archeologists who believed that they had found earlier sites were denounced and sent to the back of the bus; their careers destroyed. |  |
It took many decades for archeology to begin to recognize earlier sites and to rethink how humanity first discovered and then populated the western hemisphere. This research is still ongoing with full knowledge that we are still making new discoveries about how and when humanity populated the planet.
One of my favorites was the “scientific consensus” that the earth was protected from comets and asteroids by our atmosphere. Believe it or not in the 1950s science believed that all meteor craters were really volcanic produced, including the famous meteor crater in Arizona. It wasn’t until the late 50s that a young Princeton PhD student began studying impact craters, especially the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, that someone began to seriously suggest that these craters were caused by the impact of meteors or comets from outer space. This young man had an uphill battle, always true when fighting a “scientific consensus,” and he didn’t win his first supporters until he discovered a substance in these craters that could only be explained by the ground being struck at high impact from an outside source. Still, there were plenty of geology scientists that were not convinced.
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| Fast forward to 1993 when Shoemaker, his wife Carolyn, and David Levy were deeply involved in discovering Earth-Orbit Crossing Asteroids, hoping to be able to give the world an early warning should one be on a collision track with the Earth. Instead, they discovered a comet, really a string of them, somewhat like a string of pearls, on a collision path with the planet Jupiter. This would be the first time that science had ever observed a comet hitting a planet. Even at this late date, there were still plenty of geologists who doubted that comets could do much damage to a planet with an atmosphere. So there was much discussion about what we would be able to see when the string of comets hit Jupiter. The consensus what that the massive atmosphere of Jupiter would swallow the comet without a trace visible to the eye of the Hubble Telescope, trained on Jupiter, just in case. Well, as the comets struck the planet explosions that size of the earth were clearly visible. From that moment on, there was no doubt that the earth is in potential danger of being struck by a major asteroid or comet; an ELE that could easily destroy the entire human race. |  |
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As I have stated earlier, the birth of the “perfect storm scientific consensus” around AGW really took hold in 1998 when the El Nino of 1997-1998 created higher global temperatures than had been seen for over 100 years. This event seemed to support the climate models that were being developed to predict the temperatures that the earth might experience due the continued use of fossil fuels, which seemingly poured massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. In almost every case the models predicted catastrophic global warming, the end of life on the planet. The timeline and early results varied but the conclusion was inevitable.
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However, it is important to remember that these models were based on an untested hypothesis. Science depends on the thorough testing of any hypothesis, usually done by other scientists to be sure that bias doesn’t enter the equation. In this instance, dealing with global climate change, it would take years, if not decades, to actually determine the accuracy of the predictions. The scientists involved, committed (as most scientists are) to their models, believed that we didn’t have years to do the proper testing and even though they knew that some facets of the hypothesis would ultimately need to be adjusted, they were convinced that the basic concept was correct: the earth was in trouble because of human activity and if something wasn’t done immediately, the next generation would not live out their lives; they would die in a world too hot to maintain human life. In their opinion the sky was really falling.
Panic set in and has continued unabated to the current time. The true believers, as you will see by the many predictions that were made, all speak of dire consequences if humanity doesn’t act immediately. Here’s a list of some of the most ridiculous predictions:
The sea levels are rising at an alarming rate and could rise as much as 20 feet in a couple of generations. There’s no doubt that sea levels have been rising for the past one hundred-plus years, as we come out of the mini ice age of the late 1700s and early 1800s, but the rate of rise has not increased. Dr. Nils-Axel Morner of Stockholm University has attacked the IPCC report predicting major sea level rise. This myth is alive and well today with the “scientific consensus” in full support of the catastrophic predictions being made. The fact that this just isn’t happening doesn’t stop the consensus from continuing to publish outlandish predictions.
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Major storms, hurricanes and tornadoes, will increase at an alarming rate. Again the consensus completely ignores reality; the incidence of tornados has been steadily decreasing for the past 45 years. Not only did Mother Nature just set a record for lack of tornado activity, she absolutely shattered the previous record for fewest tornadoes in a 12-month period. During the past 12 months, merely 197 tornadoes struck the United States. Prior to this past year, the fewest tornadoes striking the United States during a 12-month period occurred from June 1991 through July 1992, when 247 tornadoes occurred. Hurricane inactivity is also setting all-time records. The United States is undergoing its longest stretch in recorded history without a major hurricane strike, with each passing day extending the unprecedented lack of severe hurricanes, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.
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From Climate Depot |
Polar bears are dying because of the temperature increase in the Artic. This is either a clever lie designed by an immoral public relations person, to get the children on their side so they could help convince their parents as to the “fact” of AGW, or poor research on the part of the “climate scientists” responsible for the panic. The true population of polar bears is difficult to ascertain; however, today the estimate worldwide is approximately 39,000. York, Dowsley, Cornwell, Kuc, and Taylor do not believe that polar bears are under any threat due to any climate crisis. In fact, their research shows that polar bears have already lived through three climate changes where the Artic was much warmer that it is expected to be during this period of warming.
The Artic is melting. In 2009, Al Gore, the High Priest of Global Warming, stated, with a 75 percent probability, that the entire Artic would be ice free in summers by 2013. This is only one of his spectacular misses. He really got nothing right and yet is still highly revered within the media; they will never learn! Actually, during October 2013, sea-ice levels grew at their fastest pace since records have been kept and September 2016 was another record-breaking month. It seems as if Mother Nature is playing with these “experts”; every time they make a prediction or have a meeting she makes them look like the fools they are.
In 2009 NASA scientist James Hanson, of hockey stick fame stated that we only have four years to save the earth. Hanson has as great an ego as Gore and appears to be just as wrong. What these faux scientists do when they are proven wrong is state they just had the timing wrong, but that their basic thesis is spot on. They have gotten wiser, their drop dead now is about 50 years out; in this way they can escape the ridicule of being wrong almost all of the time.
In the same year, Canada’s Green Party wrote that we only had hours left to stop global warming. These guys are a bit different. They are honestly convinced that humanity is a scourge upon the earth. Because of this they grab onto these predictions hook, line, and sinker. Then blast them to the world. Nothing will ever convince them they are wrong in their belief anymore that you can convince a Jehovah’s Witness that there is no Jehovah.
Also in 2009, United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only 50 days left to save Earth. In this instance we just have an ignorant man, a non-scientist, who believes what the false prophets tell him and then, like a good acolyte, he shares the false prophet’s prediction with the intent of increasing number of followers.
The U.N.’s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years to save the world. This was the prediction of Rajendra Pachauri. Like all false prophets, his time was off.
Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade. George Monbiot was convinced that we had only a decade before global warming would make growing food crops in much of the world impossible, that we would have to choose between farming or saving the world’s animals, that we wouldn’t be able to do both. We are feeding more people today than ever before and there’s no reason why the trend cannot continue for the foreseeable future. And we haven’t had to destroy the world’s wildlife to accomplish this.
In 1989 Noel Brown, a senior environmental official, stated that entire nations would not survive rising sea levels and that we must reverse this trend by the year 2000 or it would be too late. What can I say that I haven’t already said? The sad fact is that even though this prediction has not come true the U.N. continues to raise the same alarm year after year.
The United Nations warned in 2005 that the effects of global warming would lead to massive population disruptions as areas of the world became uninhabitable. According to the report we would see these results within 10 years. What we’ve actually seen is that humanity is very good at “massive population disruptions,” not from global warming but from wars, terrorists, and evil rulers.
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The end of snow forever. Climate alarmist David Viner said in 2000 that snow would soon be a thing of the past, that our children would have to read about it in history books. The past winters in both the United States and Britain have proved him to be another climate change (global warming) charlatan.
All of this cold weather is a result of global warming. This idiocy has been touted by no one less than the White House Science “Czar” John Holdren. This is standard practice amongst progressive scientists or politicians; when the facts don’t support your initial prediction, blame the results on someone or something else. However, blaming unexpected, extremely cold winters on global warming is taking this idiocy much more than one step too far.
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| Climate scientists predicted that warming temperature due to CO2 emissions would cause the polar ice caps to melt. Since the Antarctic Ice Cap averages 7000 feet thick, and in some places 15,000 feet thick, the melting would raise sea levels significantly. I’m not sure this is true, if I have a glass of water filled with ice, as the ice melts the water doesn’t rise. I can see where melting glaciers would cause sea levels to rise, but it seems to me that sea ice melting would have very little effect on sea level rise. However, this is moot, as the Antarctic Ice Sheet is not melting; it is growing in size. The area that seems to be melting has nothing to with global warming, but instead is in the midst of an undersea volcano. |
The ignorant, arrogant President Obama made many ridiculous predictions. The fact that he probably hasn’t had any scientific education since high school, has not stopped him from spouting his “wisdom” to the world. He’s blamed everything from raging fires, crippling drought, and powerful storms on AGW. The fact that every one of these is on a downward trend, even as CO2 emissions are not only continuing but increasing, doesn’t stop him from making these unproven, ridiculous statements. His height of arrogance happened in June of 2008 when Obama declared: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children … this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” I’m positive that he actually believes that he was put on the earth to save it from the destruction caused by humanity, especially western man. If he wasn’t a past president, they would have long called the men in white coats to take him where he couldn’t harm himself or others.
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Much of what I’ve reported above came from an excellent article in the New American. The rest comes from years of researching “sky is falling” frauds and ELEs (extinction level events). |
Part 3 - "Perfect Storm Scientific Consensus"
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While most of these predictions (if not all of them) look ridiculous now, back in the late 80s until around 2010 they were scientific gospel; there were only a few of us that were shouting “fraud” and “hoax” from the very beginning. The rest of the world were convinced that humanity was in the process of burning down its home, like two spoiled kids whose iPhones were taken away from them because they misbehaved. Here’s what happened and why we are in the shape we are in today.
Initially, the idea that fossil fuels were playing a role in the warming of the planet made an excellent hypothesis. There’s no doubt that we were putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere and it was also clear that the planet was warming. So, the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis was created. This hypothesis stated that as we pumped more and more CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the global temperature would rise accordingly.
In 1999 Mann and associates took this concept to an entirely new level with models and the hockey stick graph showing that the warming would not only increase, but increase exponentially. This is a scary proposition and is best explained with this scenario.
Let’s say a pond has a cell of algae in it and the algae and future cells of algae divide once a day. If the pond is completely full of algae on day 30, when is it half full? Obviously, on day 29. This potential screams about the danger of global warming if we wait too long to fix it. If we wait until day 29, we will have waited too long.
Because of this, the urgency was shouted to the world before the hypothesis could be proven to be correct. This action completely nullifies the scientific process that demands proof of concept before the hypothesis is proven to be correct. It is interesting that it is the “warmists” (the term used to identify fanatics who see the AGW hypothesis literally as gospel), who scream that “deniers” (we actually prefer “realists”) are anti-science, when it is their behavior that is totally ignoring the scientific process essential in order to obtain valuable scientific data and research. But, they had their reasons that they believed were essential to save the planet and the human race.
The idea the world was about to end and that humanity was the cause appealed to many groups: environmentalists, the main stream media, progressives/globalists, governments, and ultimately a large portion of the scientific community.
Environmentalists thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Finally the world was recognizing the danger humanity was to the planet. They’d always believed this and some the real nuts in this community had actually become eco-terrorists. According to the FBI, these people caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage between 2003 and 2008. There is at least one murder blamed on eco-terrorism. Regardless, the scientific hypothesis that humanity was destroying the planet was music to the ears of environmentalists across the globe.
The Main Stream Media was almost giddy. This was the story of the millennia, only the second coming could outdo it. The world was going to end, the sky was actually falling, and, best of all, we were at fault. Our greed, our raping of the environment, our ignoring the signs that we were going too far, testing the ability of the earth to handle our misdeeds. They, too, believed they had died and gone to heaven. They couldn’t get enough of this bad news; nothing sold the media, be it print, TV, or Internet any better. The last thing they wanted to hear was that the hypothesis was wrong. Not only would they have egg on their respective faces, but the story would die and they would never have another so juicy, so bad.
Progressives and globalists embraced the hypothesis with open arms. This was a problem only governments could solve, in fact, a worldwide government. They had been dreaming of this potential for decades, if not centuries. The ultimate power of a worldwide central government that could lay down the law, make decisions that the hoi polloi could not be trusted to make. They would have ultimate power more than the pharaohs of Egypt could even dream of. The progressives didn’t want a constitution that limited the power of the central government, they wanted to be able to expand the power of the central government to the extreme and the AGW hypothesis gave them the excuse they needed to demand that the central government take over every aspect of living thing on the earth. They, too, believed they had died and gone to heaven.
With the AGW hypothesis governments finally had “reasonable” reasons to increase taxes (hidden taxes) on the poor and middle classes. They might make a showing by lowering income taxes or providing certain tax breaks for those classes. But , they could soak them by taxing energy companies, the carbon tax, who would be forced to pass the added expenses on to their customers, and the poor and middle classes would suffer the most because of the resulting increases in the price of energy for cooking, heating, cooling, driving, and on and on. This never ends because everything we consume depends on energy either to produce it or deliver it. But, that’s only one of boons the federal government gains. They also gain immense power over people’s lives as is best demonstrated by the massive rules and regulations created by the Obama EPA. Power over the people, finally the end of that ridiculous old-fashioned saying, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” They, too, felt they’d died and gone to heaven.
With these groups firmly on the side of the AGW hypothesis, things began to develop rather rapidly. The people wanted to know what global warming meant in their lives and they turned to the government to tell them. Governments gladly took on the responsibility and began handing out what ultimately was billions of dollars to research facilities that were willing to embrace the hypothesis and answer the question. What does this mean? Those in the scientific community that were concerned that the hypothesis was still unproven were shut down and didn’t receive any government funding. What funding they did get from organizations that wanted to know what was really going on, quickly dried up as public opinion turned against those that opposed the hypothesis. Any research that desired to test the hypothesis and/or offer opposing views was taken to the woodshed or made to sit in the very back of the bus. In essence it was a career-destroying decision to go against what had become not only a “scientific consensus,” but a “perfect storm, scientific consensus.”
As I stated earlier, we’ve had “scientific consensus” before and in almost every case they tend to hamper research, setting it back decades if not centuries, destroy reputations, cut off the funding of those opposing the consensus, and, ultimately, they are proven to be wrong. But, this was different, this was the first time in literally centuries that the consensus had the support of governments, the media, and the people. The last time this happened was when the consensus insisted that the earth was the center of the universe. That time people were burned at the stake, not allowed to publish or lecture, and scientific research was put on hold for decades. This is why I have dubbed this “scientific consensus” as the “perfect storm” consensus.
But it gets even worse. A entirely new industry to support the consensus has been created—the “green” industry is worth a trillion and a half dollars worldwide. For governments and progressives their greatest fear is the AGW hypothesis being proven wrong. If this hypothesis fails, their world will come crashing down around them. Science will lose massive credibility, that will take decades to regain; the green industry will collapse and along with it some very important research, especially the research on new battery technologies; environmentalists will be laughed at and organizations like Green Peace will lose funding, governments will lose their ability to over-tax the masses (this is a good thing); and, most important, the effort to form one, powerful, and ultimately immoral world government will be set back decades, hopefully forever. Essentially, all of these groups will discover that it wasn’t heaven but hell that they had created. Is there any doubt why all of these groups are so afraid of a Trump administration? He is the kink in their armor, the leak in their dam, he represents the end of their world. They will do anything to destroy him and his administration, and I mean anything.
So, with literally trillions of dollars at risk and many special interested groups depending on the money, the “perfect storm scientific consensus” was born. Again, it’s a perfect storm, because other groups and organizations supporting it are so very powerful, so influential. There’s a saying that a lie can make it around the world before the truth can get its pants on. In this instance the lie has the complete support of those scientists and scientific organizations whose funding and reputations depend on it; it has the support of the new media who thrive financially and emotionally on everything but good news; it has the support of worldwide governments who see this as an excellent opportunity to gain power, influence, and funds to support those activities that are demanded by the rich that are looking to influence the laws and regulations that are passed. And it has the support of a large portion of the entertainment industry that has its own reasons for wanting a global society, and don’t forget those that honestly believe that humans are the problem and therefore we are obligated to fix it. This time, the lie had a personal jet and the truth was left with a kiddie car.
So, that’s how it all began, but there is another side of the story, the opposing side those of us private citizens, scientists, and politician who are denigrated and called “deniers” (again, we prefer “realists”). Why do we doubt the consensus? This is why.
First and foremost, the proper scientific process was completely ignored and a dangerous (to human life and our nation’s socioeconomic health) hypothesis was allowed to influence governmental policy around the world, from the smallest countries to the U.N. itself. The way science happens is that scientists notice something and that sparks their curiosity.
I remember reading Dr. Richard Feynman’s, book, You’ve Got to be Kidding Dr. Feynman, and in it he describes his inspiration for one of his discoveries. He was at a circus theme restaurant, having dinner, as he watched the professional plate twirler, twirl plates on the end of a stick he notice a wave pattern that he’d never seen before. His curiosity was peaked and the research that he did to satisfy that need led to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Again, the scientist notices something; his/her curiosity is sparked; after some research a hypothesis is formed that attempts to explain what has been observed; models are created that are designed to prove the hypothesis is correct. Once the hypothesis is proven to the scientist’s satisfaction, a paper is published, usually in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that defends the hypothesis and fully describes the research and provides all of the necessary data. This is done so that other scientists can have a crack at it, try to duplicate the results. If it passes muster, their hypothesis gains some credibility, but it is still not considered to have reached the level of an acceptable theory, not especially scientific fact.
There are times when the honest scientist discovers the hypothesis is completely wrong, even if it has been an accepted hypothesis. For example, the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess for discovering that the rate of expansion of the Universe was increasing. The interesting thing was that their research was designed to determine how much the expansion rate was slowing. That was the current consensus: the rate of expansion of the universe was slowing down. However, they actually proved the opposite and the results surprised them as much as it surprised the scientific world. This is an excellent case of scientific research being done honestly, of not being afraid to challenge a current belief, no matter how much acceptance that belief has, when the data seems to be showing that something else is going on, that another, unbiased, look is needed if the truth is to be discovered.
This essential, scientific process was ignored in the case of the AGW hypothesis. Again, the climate “scientists” had, what was for them, a reasonable, even responsible, excuse. There wasn’t time to wait for the hypothesis to be proven scientifically. That would take at least a decade and could take even more. They “knew” that we didn’t have a decade, the hockey stick graph showed that global warming was on an exponential curve. There was literally no time left, the train was leaving the station, the conductor sounded the alarm, and the world jumped on board for a trip to fantasy land.
Ultimately, of course the hypothesis was tested and honest, accurate, scientific data proved that global warming essentially halted in 1999, with 1998 being one of the warmest years on record (due to a very powerful El Nino). Temperatures have not increased at anywhere near the rate that the hypothesis predicted, definitely not exponentially, and actually, really not at all. In addition, the Antarctic ice sheet is growing and the Artic has yet to see a summer without ice. In addition, there’s still plenty of snow around, with this year showing records for California, the upper Mid-West, and the East Coast. Powerful storms seem to be declining again, definitely not increasing. And, let’s not forget the polar bears, who have a great resurgence since the late 1960s when the polar bear population was about 12,000, the latest estimates put population at about 26,000 worldwide. In addition, as shown earlier, it appears that polar bears have survived, over the past million plus years, periods of warmth much greater than we will experience in the next decades and probably much longer.
There’s no doubt that you can find opposing views to those that I just mentioned and, different from the warmists, we welcome opposing views and welcome opportunities to debate warmists. However, keep in mind that trillions of dollars are at stake, as well as the reputations and credibility of many organizations and other groups of individuals. There is nothing that will make a person ignore the truth more than a fact that will take dollars out of his back pocket. A fact that will take all his dollars and his reputation too, is a fact that must be ignored.
As realists, our major issue is that we don’t ignore the scientific process in order to support an unproven hypothesis. When government policy is created based on the unproven hypothesis that adds insult to injury and when those with an opposing view are shut out of the conversation, that’s adding potential disaster to injury, and nothing good results.
Secondarily, it needs to be understood that, in reality, there is no such thing as a “scientific consensus.” In fact, one of the major objectives of science is to prove that the current accepted scientific “truths” are essentially wrong. This includes everything from the big gang theory to the theory of gravity to our understanding of molecular processes within the human body. The AGW hypothesis does not get a pass. This quote by Einstein is one of my favorites, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
Potential Dangerous Results (or the Unintended Consequences)
This is not just a scientific argument, it has become a major societal decision that will affect millions of people’s lives and well-being. There are at least three potential dangers to staying on the AGW hypothesis path: major damage to our nation’s socioeconomic health, Immense suffering and loss of life worldwide (already happening), being totally unprepared should the world enter a mini ice age, the rise of a world government and the end of nation states; the end of the United States as we know it (many are striving for just this to happen), and decades of delay in discovering the actual processes that drive climate change.
The many billions of dollars that must be spent to, theoretically halt global warming will greatly damage our socioeconomic health by wasting funds that could be used in much more realistic ways. The gentleman who has studied this issue for the past decade is Bjorn Lomborg. In 2007, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine after the publication of his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which challenged widely held beliefs that the environment is getting worse. While supporting the basic concept that humanity is causing global warming, he realizes that there is basically nothing that we can do about that and that the trillions of dollars needed would be much better spent in other areas which includes research in technologies that will minimize the impact without disrupting life on the planet. I encourage you to do a Google search and learn about some of the ideas that this brilliant man has to “save the planet.”
What major development has taken a major segment of humanity from day-to-day suffering to a relatively comfortable successful life, and has allowed us to feed more people than experts ever believed possible? The answer is simple, the energy that comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels drive the engines of progress and make the world a safer place to live. They have brought light to the darkness, given warmth in the winter, and cool on a hot summer day. They bring food to the table and medicines to the hospitals. They provide a level of individual freedom to billions of people that, not too long ago, was only available to the very wealthy.
The hope was to spread this boon throughout the world so that everyone would at least have light, warmth, and a hot meal and possible everything else the energy brings. The need is great, millions are dying from the burning of biofuels to cook and heat homes.
The policies put in place by the U.N. are not allowing the distribution of the relatively inexpensive energy that comes from fossil fuels and, therefore, these countries, these areas of other countries are stuck in a third world environment. But, warmists don’t care, all they care about is their precious belief that humanity is destroying the planet. This is happening right now, but, as the price of energy increases, alternative energies are not inexpensive. There are many others even in countries like the United States that will suffer a loss of freedom and, potentially, loss of life, as they can no longer afford to buy the energy they need to heat their home or buy the food they need for sustenance. This is just the beginning of where the unintended consequences of global warming policies are causing more suffering than global warming will ever cause; there is no present danger of human-caused catastrophic global warming.
Solar scientists around the world are verifying a link between a “quiet sun” (when the sun has a lack of sunspots) and global cooling. This link has been known for decades because we have sunspot data that goes back centuries and the climate data to associate with that. Our sun is currently entering one of the quietest phases that science has ever observed and some solar scientists are predicting that a mini ice age will begin in 10 to 20 years. If they are correct, this will result in shorter growing seasons and a much greater need for energy. China seems to recognize this danger and they are buying up fossil fuel energy sources around the world, plus adding many more coal plants and refineries. In other words, they are making the right decisions and we are making exactly the wrong ones. Our efforts to halt climate change are exactly the opposite of what we should be doing if we believed that the mini ice age was a strong possibility. Right now, we are less that prepared for this eventuality and the suffering that could result will not be pleasant to experience or observe.
I’ve talked enough about the dangers of a worldwide government. There is little doubt that it would quickly devolve into a worldwide dictatorship. Additionally, if this took place it would guarantee that China would soon rule the world. There’s no doubt in my mind that they are planning for the eventuality, however it may come about. Regardless, the dream of America and the peace and prosperity that we have literally brought to the world will be forgotten. This is not a future that I wish on my progeny.
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