The wicked Tom Harris



Canadian Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition is  roundly criticised for his advocacy of open discussion of climate matters in the article excerpted below.  It is a rather long article so I reproduce only the preamble to it.  The thing that stands out both in the preamble and in the full article is that it is totally "ad hominem".  It is a discussion of persons, not of science.  Not a single scientific datum on climate is discussed.  It is one long logical fallacy if it is meant as support for Warmism.

It is true that Harris did not present any scientific data either but that was not the point of what he was doing. He was simply calling for open and unhindered debate on climate matters.  That the writer below does his best to undermine that speaks volumes of itself.

And the writer would seem to be the sort of hack he claims to deplore.  He appears not to know the difference between "censor" and "censure". Harris called for censorship to be censured.  The writer below seems to think he wanted it censored! In his last paragraph he says of Harris:  "And he demonstrates his own hypocrisy by accusing climate realists of censorship while explicitly calling for censorship himself".  What a dummy!

The rather arcane terminology is amusing too.  Warmists are called "climate realists" and skeptics are called "climate disruption deniers".  All the persons involved are thereby prejudged.  Terminology is used in an attempt to dictate the conclusions.  The writer is obviously deeply committed to the conclusion he aims to reach.  Objectivity?  Not even aimed at, it seems. Prejudicing the reader from the beginning is obviously much preferred

Starting in the middle of December, 2014 and continuing through February, 2015, Tom Harris, Executive Director of the industrial climate disruptionA denying International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), wrote at least eight nearly identical commentaries. They were published mostly in small local newspapers and websites around the United States, Canada, and South Africa. The stated purpose of the commentaries was to call for scholars and philosophers to engage in the public argument over climate disruption (aka global warming or climate change), and Harris wrote that “philosophers and other intellectuals have an ethical obligation to speak out loudly when they see fundamental errors in thinking6.” As S&R hosts an occasional feature called “Climate Illogic,” we accepted Harris’ invitation and looked through his own commentaries for illogical arguments as well as other issues of concern.

As a result of our review, S&R identified five major areas of concern and a troubling observation. First, Harris engages in what is known as “tone trolling,” attempting to distract from an argument by complaining that the language or tactics used by the debaters is offensive. Second, Harris misidentifies many logical errors he alleges are made by others and he commits several logical fallacies of his own. Third, he misunderstands how science can legitimately draw conclusions that are “unequivocal” and discover “truth.” Fourth, he demonstrates a significant lack of understanding of the scientific method in general, the state of climate science in particular, and the differing levels of expertise between climate disruption deniers and climate realists. Fifth, Harris’ commentaries are found to be less about fixing the tone of a supposedly broken debate and more about undermining climate scientists, poisoning the well against any logic experts who actually engage in the discussion, and derailing the discussion as much as possible. Finally, S&R reviews the fundamental asymmetries between climate realists and climate disruption deniers and how those asymmetries enable Harris and his peers to regularly produce distortion-filled commentaries like these.

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Warmists re-enact pagan witchcraft

Climate Depot Publisher Marc Morano tells MRCTV that the Obama administration’s “weather witches” are trying to mandate the types of rituals used by Pagans to try to control the climate.

The Obama administration’s tactics mirror those of Pagans who would call on “weather witches” to try to prevent bad weather, Morano explains:

“This harkens back, and I’m actually doing research on this – they’re called ‘Weather Witches’ – at Pagan festivals, weather witches are brought out to keep bad storms away. They’re actually brought out to stop the tornadoes, to stop a thunderstorm that might ruin the festival.

“The White House is now spinning that kind of language: Barbara Boxer, people in the Senate, Sen. Whitehouse from Rhode Island – they’re arguing a carbon tax could help prevent tornadoes, in this case in Oklahoma. They’re turning into weather witches and they’re trying to legislate what Pagans do at their festivals to keep bad weather away.”

By believing it can prevent bad weather via regulation, the administration has plunged the U.S. into “an age of modern witchcraft and astrology,” Morano says – adding that incidents of severe weather aren’t even on the rise:

“They think they can stop future hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and droughts by EPA climate regs and U.N. treaties. It’s truly an age of modern witchcraft and astrology.”

“We are the first generation, outside of the Pagan rituals and the weather witches, who actually think we can do something about the weather. And they’re hyping every bad storm that happens. First of all, on every metric, on 50-100 year time-scales, extreme weather is either declining or showing no trend.

“And that includes floods on over a hundred years, droughts – droughts are actually declining on 60-year trends – tornadoes, big tornadoes, F3 and larger, are down since the 1950’s, and hurricanes, we’re on the longest period of no category 3 or larger hurricane hitting the U.S., in nine or ten years.”

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Pretenses of Economic Viability “Blown Away” by Attempt to Remove Offshore Wind Net Benefit Test

Offshore Wind Remains an Economic Loser for New Jersey

 Legislation introduced by the Senate Environment and Energy Committee, and being pushed by Senate President Steve Sweeney, removes all pretenses that offshore wind would be good for the state’s economy according to Americans for Prosperity, the state’s leading advocate for taxpayers.

“Just as Massachusetts ratepayers have been spared a big blow to their electricity bills by offshore wind, politicians and extremist environmentalists here in New Jersey continue their crusade to stick it to taxpayers,” said AFP communications director Mike Proto. “Affordable energy is the lifeblood of our economy. Anyone enjoying low gas prices feels this. When it costs less to fill your car at the pump or to keep your lights on and heat your home, it makes things easier and puts money back in your family budget.”

“By now it’s clear, supporters of this scheme just do not care what this will do to New Jersey families. They don’t care if they have less in their pockets to pay for this scheme. All that matters is their myopic ‘climate change’ agenda even though this offshore wind scheme will do next to nothing about it.”

“No less than four analyses have shown the Fishermen’s Energy offshore wind project would mean higher rates and lost jobs. Yet, today all we heard was falsehoods and propaganda from the Sierra Club and other environmentalists claiming offshore wind is ‘cost effective’ when it’s anything but.”

“The federal government’s own data shows that levelized costs for offshore wind are enormous. While natural gas is $66.30 per megawatt hour, offshore wind is $204.10 per megawatt hour. Also, these costs do not reflect offshore wind’s capacity factor, the actual percentage of the time it produces electricity, which is just 37% versus 87% for natural gas. Simply put, wind turbines only produce electricity when the wind blows. Does Jeff Tittel think the EIA pulls these numbers out of a hat?”

“As winds may gust to 60 miles per hour during the pending blizzard, guess what; those wind turbines would have to shut down. When the wind isn’t blowing, no electricity is produced and when it’s too high no electricity is produced,” Proto said. “This is why wind power can never replace the energy New Jersey’s economy needs and for our residents and business to keep their lights on. Traditional sources must be used to back them up—something the proponents of this scheme do not want be honest about.”

“Sen. Sweeney is right about one thing. New Jersey’s economy is not in good shape. Yet, the Senate Majority leader and others in the Legislature continue to pursue reckless, ideological driven energy policies which will only make our economy worse and worsen the quality of life for New Jersey families.”

“The attempt to get rid of the net economic benefits test for this offshore wind scheme removes all pretenses. This project is an economic loser for New Jersey and the only way to prop it up is with massive taxpayer subsidies into the six figures.”

“Our residents deserve access to abundant, affordable energy not politically motivated efforts to achieve ‘diversity’ in our energy portfolio. This project would only mean higher rates and more and more businesses leaving New Jersey for good,” concluded Proto.

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White House Announces ‘Goal of Ensuring Climate Smart Citizenry’

“In December of last year the White House Climate Education and Literacy Initiative was launched--with the goal of ensuring a climate smart citizenry in the United States,” Dr. John Holdren says in a White House video released last week.

“Based on our scientific understanding of climate change the administration is continuing to develop and implement a number of policies to cut carbon pollution in America, to prepare for the climate impacts that cannot be avoided, and to work with the international community so best practices for emissions reductions and building resilience are embraced everywhere,” Holdren continues.

A December 2014 White House press release announcing the effort says, “In response to an initial call to action made in October, more than 150 activities, projects, and ideas were submitted by individuals and organizations across the country, from more than 30 states. These included a diverse array of innovative approaches being implemented in K-12 classrooms, on college and university campuses, and in zoos, parks, aquariums, and museums to educate and engage students and citizens of all ages. Today’s launch includes a number of exciting new commitments by Federal agencies and outside groups.”

Among the efforts listed by federal agencies include “leveraging digital games to enhance climate education” by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and using the National Park Service (NPS), “the plan will assist NPS interpretive managers and practitioners in the creation and delivery of effective climate-change messages in the programs and exhibits across all National Parks.”

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‘Big Wind’ destroys the environment while providing no net benefit

Considering the history of complete and utter civil discord created by Big Wind projects in rural New York State communities over the past decade – and the fact that industrial wind is a net economic and environmental loser – Orleans and Niagara County residents should be alarmed by Apex’s proposed wind factory.

The Industrial Wind industry was initiated in the U.S. under the pretense that it would significantly reduce CO2 emissions, and thereby help abate Global Warming. Yet, 30 years into subsidizing the building of wind factories off the backs of taxpayers and ratepayers has proven otherwise.

With approximately 250,000 industrial wind turbines installed worldwide today, CO2 emissions have NOT been significantly reduced, nor has a single conventional generation plant been decommissioned anywhere thanks to industrial wind. As Manhattan Institute scholar Robert Bryce said: “Wind turbines are climate-change scarecrows.”

Industrial wind provides NO Capacity Value (aka: Firm Capacity – specified amounts of power on demand). Thus, wind turbines need constant "shadow capacity" from our reliable, dispatchable baseload generators – that is, if you want to be sure the lights will come on when you flick the switch. Thus, wind generation actually locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, and as Big Wind CEO Patrick Jenevein candidly admitted, “Consumers end up paying twice for the same product.”

Consider this reality:

ONE (1) 450 MW gas-fired Combined Cycle Generating Unit located at New York City (where the power is needed in NYS) - operating at 60% Capacity Factor, would provide more power than all of NYS's 16 installed wind factories combined, at 1/4 of the capital costs – and would have significantly reduced CO2 emissions and created far more jobs than all those wind farms – without all the added costs (economic, environmental, and civil), and of all the transmission lines that must be added across the state to NYC.

Industrial Wind has proven to be effective only as a tax shelter generator for large corporations in search of increased bottom lines – just as it was originally intended to do by ENRON, the trailblazer for Big Wind in the U.S. As Warren Buffett candidly admitted, “We get tax credits if we build ‘windfarms.’ That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense otherwise.”

Property values are significantly negatively impacted, as are peoples’ personal health and quality of life by the noise (ie: infrasound), resonant ground vibrations, flashing red lights, shadow flicker, TV interference, etc., that is generated by these giant bird-and-bat-chopping machines.

Just ask the citizens of Orangeville in Wyoming County, who are now suing Invenergy for $40 Million dollars! Likewise, the Wisconsin Board of Health recently declared Duke Energy’s wind turbines a “Human Health Hazard.”

The fact that American citizens are being assaulted with their own taxpayer and ratepayer money (which is subsidizing the building of these wind factories to the tune of 80 percent of the total costs), in the name of the failed “green” energy boondoggle of wind is shameful, and simply un-American. Save yourselves, and your community – JUST SAY "NO!" to Big Wind.

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UN promotes Global Warming Consistent with Agenda 21

Information about U.N. Agenda 21 has not been widely published, but neither is it a secret. One only needs to do a minimum amount of research to discover the many tentacles of Agenda 21 and realize it has infiltrated into many of our cities and certainly our country, with the full cooperation of those in our highest positions of authority.

In November of 2013, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its “Synthesis Report,” which completed its Fifth Assessment evaluation (AR5) on the Earth’s climate.  IPCC is the pathway through which the environmental proposals of Agenda 21 are being carried out, such as designing compact cities without cars under the guise of sustainability. The IPCC report claims “Human influence on the climate system is clear and growing, with impacts observed on all continents”  However, there is a growing number of critics who will no longer remain or be silenced on this issue.  They deserve to be heard.

Known the world over as a skeptic of man-made Global Warming, The Heartland Institute in Chicago had the fortitude and the courage to publish its own report to counter the U.N.’s AR5 report, using its affiliation with The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change or NIPCC to do so. NIPCC is an international panel of non-government scientists and scholars who have come together to present a comprehensive, authoritative, and realistic assessment of the science and economics of global warming.  Because NIPCC is not a government agency, and because its members are not predisposed to believe climate change is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, it is able to offer an independent second opinion of the evidence reviewed, or not reviewed, by the United Nation’s IPCC on the issue of global warming. Find here the independent Heartland NIPCC report published to counter the U.N.’s 2013 AR5 report.  Read here comments made by 10 Heartland experts about the conclusions reached by AR5.   Check here for another report that takes the U.N.s AR5 report to task.

Obama administration equates global warming with the threat of terrorism

The Obama administration has accepted the dogma put out by scientists who concocted the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in close proximity with Agenda 21, while further endorsing the propaganda as the main cause of Global Warming and linking CO2 to Global Warming.  Just last week President Obama’s new national-security strategy ranked combating climate change as a top priority, and astonishingly claimed it to be at the same level of threat as terrorism, biological emergencies, and nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue states.  A subsequent White House report indicated that the President is committed to confronting the urgent crisis of climate change, largely through national emission reductions, international diplomacy, and commitment to the Green Climate Fund. Rational people continue to demand the subject be given a fair and balanced investigation of all the facts, not the one-sided approach it has been given.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) was not at all pleased with the President’s new assessment of priorities and national-security strategy, as reflected in this response:

“I doubt [the Islamic State], the Iranian mullahs, or [Russian President] Vladmir Putin will be intimidated by President Obama’s strategy of ‘strategic patience,'” Mr. Graham said. “From their point of view, the more ‘patience’ President Obama practices, the stronger they become.

The Obama Doctrine, or “strategic patience,” has led to a world in chaos. So, while President Obama pursues the debatable man-made global warming fear mongering, the known and highly critical problems affecting national security are given less attention.

MIT Professor Emeritus Richard Lindzen contradicts Global-Warming Alarmists

A recent report by MIT Professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, dismisses global-warming alarmists as a discredited “cult” whose members are becoming more hysterical as emerging evidence continues to contradict their beliefs.  In discussing the cultish nature of the movement,

Professor Lindzen had this to say:

“As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what is happening here. Think about it, he said. “You’ve led an unpleasant life, you haven’t led a very virtuous life, but now you’re told, you get absolution if you watch your carbon footprint. It’s salvation!”

Professor Lindzen scoffed accordingly at a New York Times report that acknowledged there is only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year on record, and if it was, it was only by two-100ths of a degree:

“Seventy percent of the earth is oceans, we can’t measure those temperatures very well. They can be off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous. Anyone who starts crowing about those numbers shows that they’re putting spin on nothing.”

In reference to CO2, Lindzen said that until recently, periods of greater warmth were referred to as “climate optimum”; optimum being derived from a Latin word meaning “best.”  Throughout history there have been natural cooling and warming periods.  Climate changes have occurred throughout our planet’s history.

Lord Mockton and others react negatively to Al Gore’s award-winning Oscar documentary of 2006 – “Inconvenient Truth”

The concept of Global Warming, and the idea that CO2 is the main culprit to what is perceived by some as man-made Global Warming, reached the public’s attention with the release of Al Gore’s award-winning Oscar documentary of 2006, “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Gore’s movie should have been called “Al’s Science Fiction Movie” or “Seriously Inconvenient Truths About Global Warming”, because after its release many of what he claimed to be facts, were proven to be false.

Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and political adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, had many negative comments about Gore’s award-winning documentary, which, amazingly, is still considered by global warming enthusiasts as the gospel truth.  Mockton announced in a more recent article in September of last year on ClimateDepot.com that his scientific satellite data shows the temperatures have remained fairly stable between October 1966 and August 2014, despite a rise in greenhouse gas emissions.  Calling it the “Great Pause,” Monckton wrote, “It is becoming harder and harder to maintain that we face a ‘climate crisis’ caused by our past and present sins of emission.”

Of concern is that much of the false information in Gore’s movie are now being taught as fact in classrooms across this nation, planted within the controversial Common Core curriculum. This recent article (February 5, 2015) by Alex Nussbaum, “Temperatures Rise as Climate Critics Take Aim at U.S. Classrooms”, relates the frustration of those who doubt that humanity is indeed baking the planet.  Roy White, a Texan and retired fighter pilot, shared in Nussbaum’s article how climate change is being presented from only one side in classrooms across this nation, and that Al Gore’s promoting the  statement that “Global warming is an established fact and the debate has ended”, is neither factual or the truth, as more and more scientific evidence emerges proving man-caused global warming to be a myth.

Another excellent critique of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” appeared in New Scientist in October of 2007 and can be read here.

Epilogue:  Wisdom and Truth

Friedrich  August von Hayek (1899-1992) Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences, left this warning for humanity:

“Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that “the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science.” Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.”

As more American city, county, and state governments are duped by the global warming fanatics (alarmists) into initiating new harsh laws and removing individual freedoms, the public can no longer afford to yawn and ignore U.N. Agenda 21 and all its tentacles into our lives. We must remind ourselves of Thomas Jefferson’s warning:   “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.  I do not add “within the limits of the law”, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

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