Prominent Scientists Declare Climate Claims Ahead of UN Summit ‘Irrational’ – ‘Based On Nonsense’ – ‘Leading us down a false path’

A team of prominent scientists gathered in Texas today at a climate summit to declare that fears of man-made global warming were “irrational” and “based on nonsense” that “had nothing to do with science.” They warned that “we are being led down a false path” by the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris.

The scientists appeared at a climate summit sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The summit in Austin was titled: “At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit.”

Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, derided what he termed climate “catastrophism.”

“Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial,” Lindzen said.

Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is – when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc.  — is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.”

Lindzen also challenged the oft-repeated UN IPCC claim that most of warming over past 50 years was due to mankind. “People get excited over this. Is this statement alarming? No,” Lindzen stated. “We are speaking of small changes. 0.25 Celsius would be about 51% of the recent warming and that strongly suggests a low and inconsequential climate sensitivity – meaning no problem at all,” Lindzen explained.

“I urge you when looking at a graph, check the scales! The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree,” he noted.

“When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period. And they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree,” Lindzen said.

“And the proof that the uncertainty is in tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree,” he said.

“The UN IPCC wisely avoided making the claim that 51% of a small change in temperature constitutes a problem. They left this to the politicians and anyone who took the bait,” he said.

Lindzen noted that National Academy of Sciences president Dr. Ralph Cicerone has even admitted that there is no evidence for a catastrophic claims of man-made global warming. ]

See: Backing away from climate alarm? NAS Pres. Ralph Cicerone says ‘we don’t have that kind of evidence’ to claim we are ‘going to fry’ from AGW

Lindzen also featured 2006 quotes from Scientist Dr. Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, admitting that claims of a climate catastrophe were not the “language of science.”

“The discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device,” Hulme wrote to the BBC in 2006. “The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science,” Hulme wrote.

“Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?” Hulme continued.

Lindzen singled out Secretary of State John Kerry for his ‘ignorance’ on science. “John Kerry stands alone,” Lindzen said. “Kerry expresses his ignorance of what science is,” he added.

Lindzen also criticized EPA Chief Gina McCarthy’s education: “I don’t want to be snobbish, but U Mass Boston is not a very good school,” he said to laughter.

Lindzen concluded his talk by saying: “Learn how to identify claims that have no alarming implications and free to say ‘So what?’”

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, called policies to reduce CO2 “based on nonsense.”

“Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. They are all based on computer models that do not work. We are being led down a false path.

“Our breath is not that different from a power plant,” he continued. “To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?” he asked.

“Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world. Coal is CO2 from ancient atmospheres. We are simply returning CO2 to the atmosphere from which it came when you burn coal. And it’s a good thing since it is at very low levels in the atmosphere. We are in a CO2 famine. It is very, very low,” Happer explained.

Happer continued: “CO2 will be beneficial and crop yields will increase.” “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture,” he added.

Happer then showed a picture of polluted air in China with the caption: “Real pollution in Shanghai.” “If you can see it, it’s not CO2,” Happer said.

“If plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” Happer declared.

Happer also rebutted the alleged 97% consensus. “97% of scientists have often been wrong on many things,” he said.

Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discussed the benefits of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “Let’s celebrate CO2!” Moore declared.  “We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said.

“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued.

“The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added. “Co2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said.

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Doubters of Global-warming Apocalypse Must Be Silenced?

In a speech delivered November 10 at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, Secretary of State John Kerry (shown) appeared to be intentionally amping up the already incendiary rhetoric aimed at those scientists and citizens who express doubt or skepticism about — or opposition to — the wild, apocalyptic claims of the climate-change choir. “The science tells us unequivocally, those who continue to make climate change a political fight put us all at risk,” Kerry said. “And we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that.”

This was not the first time Secretary Kerry has made comments that lightly veil an implicit threat aimed at climate realists. Kerry, who has been beating the anthropogenic (manmade) global (AGW) warming drum loudly all year long, in preparation for the imminent UN Climate Summit in Paris, made a similar comment before the Atlantic Council in March. “When an apple falls from a tree, it will drop toward the ground. We know that because of the basic laws of physics. Science tells us that gravity exists, and no one disputes that,” Kerry said, in statement of supposedly unassailable logic that should end all debate. “Science also tells us that when the water temperature drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it turns to ice. No one disputes that,” he continued. Then came the “logical” clincher: ”So when science tells us that our climate is changing and human beings are largely causing that change, by what right do people stand up and just say, ‘well, I dispute that, or I deny that elementary truth?’”

Yes, by what right? After all, they are “putting us all at risk,” right? “And we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that,” can we?

Kerry doesn’t say what “we” can do to stop these doubters who put us all at risk, but he is playing to a powerful global choir that has already been salting public opinion with invective, the purpose of which is to demonize and criminalize those who challenge the “elementary truth” or the “settled science” of the AGW alarmists.

Recently, as we have reported, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) called on the Obama administration earlier this year to use the anti-mafia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to persecute heretics who cast doubt on the AGW dogma.

That tyrannical proposal, which should have earned Senator Whitehouse an immediate recall effort, was echoed shortly afterward when a group of 20 so-called climate scientists sent a letter to President Obama urging him to use the federal RICO statute to prosecute their fellow scientists who disagree with them and publicly expose the fallacies and fraud underpinning the “settled science” of cataclysmic climate change.

Talking Points Memo (TPM)  infamously published an article (which has since been removed from its website) entiled, “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.”

Posted under the pseudonym  “The Insolent Braggart,” the profane incitement to violence and intolerance of diverse opinion stated:

"What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don’t want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it’s a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth. So when the right wing f***tards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events — how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?"

Very prominent voices in the climate-alarmism choir have been priming the lynch mob.

James Hansen, the discredited NASA climateer and “grandfather” of the AGW lobby, called for prosecution of climate-catastrophe skeptics for “high crimes against humanity.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is notorious for his environmental extremism, has said of climate realists who doubt the UN IPCC dogma: “This is treason, and we need to start treating them as traitors.”

Joe Romm, a former Clinton administration official who now runs the influential alarmist ClimateProgress website, published a commenter who ominously threatened climate skeptics: “It is not my wrath you need fear when there’s an entire generation that will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds.” This may not be an idle threat, as millions of school kids are being brainwashed with emotional AGW propaganda in classrooms across the nation, and around the world. Romm later took the comment down, but defended it by claiming it “was clearly not a threat but a prediction,” and those who detected a threat had “misread it.”

Bill Nye, of TV fame as “The Science Guy,” recently appeared on the Huffington Post’s TV program, where he called on the host to stop using the term “skeptic” and use the more hateful term “denier” when referring to climate realists. “We just don’t like to use that word [skepticism],” Nye told host Josh Zepps. “These people are deniers.”

In a November 6, 2015 interview with Salon, Nye again hit the theme of tarring opponents with the “denier” label, censoring them, and denying them a place at the “debate” table. “Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse,” said Nye. “You know, we can’t have these people — they’re absolutely toxic.”

Nye was one of the signers of a letter sent to media organizations last December calling on journalists to stigmatize AGW skeptics as “deniers.”  Among the dozens of academics who signed the letter (which was larded heavily with psychologists and social “science” professors) were, notably, the two academics most responsible for concocting the fraudulent claim that “97 percent” of scientists endorse the “overwhelming  consensus” that AGW is a serious danger: John Cook and Naomi Oreskes.

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Britain To Slap Tax On Wind And Solar Farms

The Govt Giveth, The Govt Taketh Away

Wind and solar farms will be forced to pay for the extra costs they impose on the UK’s electricity system as a result of their intermittent nature, Amber Rudd, the energy secretary has announced.

Renewable generators will be held “responsible for the pressures they add to the system when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine”, she said, under new plans being drawn up by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

In a long-awaited policy “reset” speech, Ms Rudd also unveiled plans to offer billions of pounds of new subsidies for offshore wind farms, potentially doubling the UK’s offshore wind capacity with a further 10 gigawatts in the 2020s, on top of 10GW expected by 2020.

However, she said that offshore wind remained “too expensive” and that the cash would be strictly conditional on deep cost reductions.

She also confirmed plans to close down unabated coal-fired power plants by 2025, but said the Government would only proceed with the policy if it was “confident” that replacement gas plants would be built in time.

Ms Rudd said she wanted “a competitive electricity market, with government out of the way as much as possible, by 2025″.

But a competitive market – in which the cheapest technologies triumph – could only be achieved “when different technologies face their full costs”.

Critics of wind and solar have long argued that they impose greater costs on the UK energy system than simply the subsidies they are paid for the electricity they produce.

If the renewable generators were forced to pay their true costs, they would require even higher subsidies to be viable – affecting their competitiveness, they argue.

For example, the fact solar will generate no power at times of peak demand on dark winter evenings – and that the entire UK wind farm fleet may produce almost no power on a calm day - may increase the total amount of power plant capacity needed on the UK system to act as backup.

However, as the proliferation of subsidised renewables means reliable gas-fired plants may only be needed for short periods of time as backup, they are uneconomic to build without either subsidy, or sky-high prices when they do generate.

The Government has already introduced the capacity market scheme,which will cost consumers £1bn a year, in part to address this issue by offering subsidies to new gas plants.

There may also be extra costs from wind and solar because their output may fluctuate more, and less predictably, than conventional power plants – so increasing the costs of minute-to-minute balancing of UK electricity supply and demand.

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The UK's energy 'policy’ is an act of national suicide

Britain is heading for the greatest self-inflicted political disaster in its history

In years to come, last Wednesday’s speech by Amber Rudd on our energy policy may be looked back on as the moment when, more clearly than ever before, she confirmed that Britain is heading for the greatest self-inflicted political disaster in our history.

The Energy Secretary’s “main purpose” was to “make clear” that, over the next few years, the Government is determined to see the closing down of all those remaining coal-fired power stations that still supply a third of all the electricity we need (and easily the cheapest) to keep us functioning as an industrial nation.

This brings starkly nearer that long-predicted moment when we finally confront the catastrophic consequences of how, for more than a decade, successive governments have deliberately set out to “decarbonise” our electricity supply, by eliminating the fossil fuels that still provide nearly two thirds of our power – to rely on “carbon-free” renewables and nuclear energy.

To this end, they have, on one hand, forced us all to pour ever more billions of subsidies into renewables, while on the other piling easily the world’s highest “carbon taxes” on to coal and gas, to make those renewables somehow seem “competitive”.

At least the penny has finally dropped that weather-dependent wind and solar are hopelessly unreliable – which is why Ms Rudd recognised that, to provide reliable back-up for all those times when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, we urgently need to subsidise a doubling of our gas-fired power plants.

But so far this just isn’t happening. To such a state of chaos and uncertainty has the Government’s hostility to fossil fuels reduced our electricity market that our largely foreign-owned supply companies are simply not stepping forward to build the new gas plants Ms Rudd dreams of. Only one, near Manchester, is still under construction. Plans for any more are firmly on hold.

In a new study for the Centre for Policy Studies, energy analyst Tony Lodge predicts that, with the closure of three more major coal-fired power stations early next year, we could by next winter be facing that critical moment when any surplus of reliably available electricity over predicted demand finally disappears.

The long-predicted crunch will at last have come. Beyond that will be nothing but a great black hole. And, for all those thousands of diesel generators under contract at colossal expense to provide emergency back-up, there will be nothing the Government can do to fill the gap.

We cannot be reminded too often that this will not be just a repeat of those “three-day weeks” of the Heath era.

From cash points and shop tills to our entire transport system, our computerised economy is now so wholly dependent on electricity that without it, as the windmills fail to turn on windless winter days, the nation will grind to a halt.

Nothing better underlines the total insanity of all this than Ms Rudd’s claim that we are doing it to “to set an example to the rest of the world”.

She seems wholly oblivious to the fact that, with the approach of that Paris climate conference, both China and India have announced that, over the next 15 years, they plan to double and triple their CO2 emissions by building hundreds more coal-fired power stations. They each plan to add more CO2 every year than the mere 1.2 per cent of global man-made CO2 emitted by Britain.

Ms Rudd may wish us to take pride in committing national suicide, “to set an example to the rest of the world”. But the rest of the world is not taking a blind bit of notice.

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Make it cheaper to go green

Germany has committed to pay more than $110 billion in solar subsidies over the next 20 years

By Bjorn Lomborg

WITH LEADERS gathering in Paris later this month for a major climate summit, it is clear that our modern-day approach to climate change is backwards. We spend a massive amount of effort trying to make carbon too expensive and unappealing for the world to use. Instead, we need to make green energy much cheaper.

Our dependency on carbon-emitting fuels is overwhelming. The fact is that the world will not stop using fossil fuels for many decades. Despite all the excitement about green energy, globally we get a minuscule 0.4 percent of our energy from wind and solar panels.

According to the International Energy Agency, even with an optimistic scenario, we will get just 2.2 percent of our energy from solar and wind in 2040, and even then those industries will still need $77 billion in subsidies per year. In 2040, renewables will still on average be the most expensive option for all regions.

We must acknowledge that fossil fuels will be part of the energy mix for a long time. That certainly doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means that we need to put a stronger focus on moving from coal to gas, since gas emits about half the greenhouse gases.

Next we need to recognize that bad climate policies could easily cost much more than global warming damage will — while helping very little.

Consider Germany. It has committed to pay more than $110 billion in solar subsidies over the next 20 years, even though solar contributes only one percent of primary energy consumption. The net effect of these solar panels for the climate will be to delay global warming by a mere 37 hours by the end of the century.

Globally, we will spend $2.5 trillion on subsidies for wind and solar over the next 25 years — and they will still need subsidizing, according to the IEA. The impact will be a trivial reduction in temperature rise by 2100 of 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit. What if, instead of spending these trillions of dollars trying to push the deployment of inefficient solar and wind, we devoted ourselves to making green energy cheaper?

If we could make solar and wind cheaper than fossil fuels, we wouldn’t have to force (or subsidize) anyone to stop burning coal and oil. Everyone would shift to the cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

This could take a decade or it could take four. But the truth is that, as long as we invest mostly in today’s inefficient technology that we know doesn’t work, we will not get much closer.

In 2009, the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate gathered 27 of the world’s top climate economists and three Nobel laureates. They found that the smartest long-term climate policy is to invest in green R&D in order to push down the price of green energy.

If we were willing to devote just 0.2 percent of global GDP to green-energy R&D, research shows that we could dramatically increase the chance of a breakthrough. This would be significantly cheaper — and much more effective— than our current approach. Economists have calculated the returns to society from focusing on green energy R&D as $11 on every dollar invested. This is 100 times more good than what comes from current subsidies to wind and solar.

A technology-led effort would have a much greater chance of actually tackling climate change. It would not just focus on solar and wind power, but also on a wide variety of other alternative-energy technologies. Moreover, it would also have a much greater chance of political success, since countries that fear signing on to costly emission targets are more likely to embrace the cheaper, smarter path of innovation.

We need to stop subsidizing inefficient technologies and trying to make fossil fuels too expensive to use. Instead, let’s fund the basic research that will make green energy too cheap to resist.

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NYT Laments Global Warming Has Affected Fall Fashion

Since there has been no global warming for 18 years, this MUST be false.  The time of onset for the seasons varies from year to year -- as it always has

 In what has to be one of the more unusual pieces by the liberal media sounding the alarm on global warming, a piece in Thursday’s New York Times complained about the inability of wealthy (liberal) New Yorkers to wear their lucrative fall clothing due to the alleged climatology on earth and stretches of warm temperatures in the Empire State.

Profiling a plethora of New Yorkers stricken with this predicament, reporter Miranda Purves explained that “[f]all has long been New York’s proudest season” in terms of fashion but have suffered:

"But this has been the warmest fall quarter in 25 years. And while many people are concerned with global catastrophe — contemplating harrowing images of Greenland melting away and scorched earth in Los Angeles — others are just spinning wildly, like the confused leaves, to figure out what autumn in New York means for their wardrobes".

Purves also spoke with owners of high-end stores who have resorted to altering their orders and inventory as a result of the climate change:

"The woolen mittens memorialized by Oscar Hammerstein may be languishing on store shelves, but “we sold over 80 units of Dior sunglasses alone in October,” said Elizabeth von der Goltz, a senior vice president and general merchandise manager at Bergdorf Goodman. She herself bought a heavy Burberry cape and hasn’t had call to bust it out since Paris Fashion Week in September.

Although Ms. von der Goltz still sees those traditional “upper tier” department store customers who buy their full fall wardrobes in May, and the second tier of wealthy but busy professionals who do a one-stop for their full fall in September, she said there had been a major shift to “a buy now, wear now” model with “special” replacing “seasonal.” ....

Beth Buccini, an owner of the 16-year-old SoHo boutique Kirna Zabête, preordered a different version of the hot (as in temperature) hot (as in trendy) fur-lined parka, by Mr. and Mrs. Italy, back in May. “I’m like a psycho next-level planner because I see everything first and I know what I like,” she said.....

Buyers say that these “precollections” — formerly done by only a few labels and now widely embraced — have become synonymous with “seasonless,” relied upon more and more to keep revenues up as weather-driven shopping becomes increasingly unpredictable and customers, encouraged by the 24/7 Internet, seek more instant-gratification purchases.

“Heaven knows that you cannot control Mother Nature, and so every season it seems that we buy ‘seasonless’ more,” Ms. Buccini said."

Invoking the upcoming United Nations summit in Paris on global warming, Purves also joked that “one might fantasize about the eggheads at M.I.T. devising a new discipline — Fashionology-Climatology? — to explain the mystifying algorithms where both rapidly changing systems intersect.”

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