What's Wrong With the Claim That '97% of Climate Scientists Agree' About Global Warming?

The 97% claim is the major underpinning of the global warming racket. Much of the literature on global warming uses scientific explanations that go over the head of the average Joe so Joe  simply decides that if the scientists say something, it must be right. He feels unqualified to disagree

So it is welcome that the paper below covers comprehensively the whole 97% fraud.  But, again, that too might be be hard going for some readers.  I prefer a simpler approach.  I don't criticize the Cook paper.  I just insist that people look at what it actually says.  It says that two thirds of the scientific papers on climatology TAKE NO POSITION on global warming.  So at best only one third -- not 97% -- of climate scientists support global warming. That's even to be found in the second sentence of the paper's summary: "We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW"


I find that approach to be both comprehensible and crushing to just about everyone.  There is however the occasional tenacious Warmist who fights on for his belief.  I came across one recently on Quora named Rupert Baines, an electronics guy.

He pointed out that even John Cook had been a bit freaked by all the "no opinion" scientists and had tried to get around that. He had sent out questionnaires to those same scientists directly asking what their opinion of global warming was.  Out of the replies he got back, 97.2% said they agreed with global warming.

Impressive?  Does not that show that "No opinion" really meant "Agree"? Hardly.  The response-rate to the survey was only 14%.  Even when directly asked, 86% declined to state a position on global warming.  They just threw the questionnaire into the bin.  So on the first survey 66.4% of scientists did NOT support global warming but that rose to 86% who did NOT support global warming on the second survey.

When I pointed that out, Comrade Baines was still unbowed. He said that the scientists felt that the truth of global warming was so obvious that they didn't need to state it. Even if he is right about that, however, it is only a guess, not data.

The most likely reason for the silence, of course, is that they doubted some aspect or all aspects of the theory but thought it wise to shut up about that.  You can lose your job by doubting global warming


A variety of studies have purported to find an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists on global warming. However, the studies rarely specify what it is to which the scientists agree. Usually it is nothing more than that the earth has warmed since 1800 and that human activity has contributed significantly to the warming — something almost no skeptics would deny.

No study — whether a survey of published articles or a survey directly of scientists — has found anything remotely near a 97% consensus not only that the earth has warmed and that human activity has contributed significantly but also that human activity has been the primary driver, that the warming caused by it is dangerous, and that attempting to prevent future warming by reducing CO2 emissions would do more good than harm — and those are the issues debated.

In 2004 Science published the results of a study by historian Naomi Oreskes claiming that “without substantial disagreement, scientists find human activities are heating the earth’s surface.” But an attempt at replicating the study both found that she had made serious mistakes in handling data and, after re-examining the data, reached contrary conclusions. As Benny Peiser pointed out in a letter to Science (Submission ID: 56001) that Science declined to publish but that the Cornwall Alliance summarized in 2006:

Oreskes claimed that an analysis of 928 abstracts in the ISI database containing the phrase “climate change” proved the alleged consensus. It turned out that she had searched the database using three keywords (“global climate change”) instead of the two (“climate change”) she reported — reducing the search results by an order of magnitude. Searching just on “climate change” instead found almost 12,000 articles in the same database in the relevant decade.

Excluded from Oreskes’s list were “countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change; and that climate modeling is highly uncertain.”

Further, even using the three key words she actually used, “global climate change,” brought up [not 928 but] 1,247 documents, of which 1,117 included abstracts. An analysis of those abstracts showed that:

only 1 percent explicitly endorsed what Oreskes called the “consensus view”;

29 percent implicitly accepted it “but mainly focus[ed] on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change”;

8 percent focused on “mitigation”;

6 percent focused on methodological questions;

8 percent dealt “exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change”;

3 percent “reject[ed] or doubt[ed] the view that human activities are the main drivers of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years’”;

4 percent focused “on natural factors of global climate change”; and

42 percent did “not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.”

Peter Doran and Maggie Zimmerman’s “Examining the Consensus on Climate Change” (EOS, January 2009), concluded, “It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

However, Doran and Zimmerman counted only 79 out of the 3,146 responses to their survey in determining the alleged consensus, and the two questions asked in the survey were framed such that even the most ardent skeptics — like Fred Singer, Richard Lindzen, and Roy Spencer — would have answered “Yes”:

* “When compared with pre‐1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”

* “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

Another study, “Expert credibility in climate change” (PNAS, April 9, 2010), by William Anderegg et al., reported that a survey of publication and citation data of 1,372 climate researchers found that 97 to 98 percent believed that “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming of the Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century.”

But Anderegg’s study covered only the 200 most prolific writers on climate change, excluding thousands of others, and even the conclusion that humans caused “most” of the warming doesn’t mean that those scientists consider global warming a crisis or that we should spend trillions of dollars attempting to stop it.

Probably the most widely cited study claiming to find such consensus, John Cook et al.’s “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature,” purported to find that “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”

Of course, “Humans are causing global warming” is something that nearly every skeptic — including myself — could affirm. The question is not whether we’re causing global warming, but whether we’re causing most of the recent warming, whether it’s dangerous, and whether we should abandon abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels in exchange for sparse, expensive, intermittent energy from “renewables” in an effort to stop it.

Cook et al.’s paper was critiqued in another paper by David Legates et al., who reviewed the same papers Cook et al. had reviewed and concluded that the actual consensus supportable by their abstracts was only 0.3%. Legates et al. critiqued only Cook et al.’s statistical methodology and methods of interpreting the literature, not the quality of the selection process by which Cook et al. determined which papers to include and which to exclude from their survey.

But another scholar, José Duarte, did look at the selection process and found it “multiply fraudulent.” So Duarte called for Environmental Research Letters to retract Cook et al. He pointed out that although Cook et al. had claimed to have excluded papers on “social science, education, research about people’s views on climate,” they had in fact included many such. He also listed some of the many properly scientific papers that Cook et al. ignored but should have included and that would have counted against their conclusion.

Cook et al. surveyed 11,944 papers on global warming that had been published from 1991 through 2012. They did not read the papers or talk to the authors, but they did read the abstracts. The results of the abstracts were divided into seven categories:



It appears that Cook et al. decided to compare only those scientists who had strong opinions. If that is the case, the first two categories represent scientists who believe man is causing all or most of the warming (986), while those in categories 6 and 7 believe man is causing none or almost none (24). This ratio is about 97%. But the most important result of this study is that almost 8,000 had no opinion or were uncertain. So much for the 97%.

Why were there only 24 papers published by skeptics? We found out in 2009, when 22,000 email exchanges between senior meteorologists in the U.S. and Europe were released. Many of the emails were published by Steven Mosher and Thomas Fuller in “Climategate: The Crutape Letters” (nQuire Services, 2010). We learned the following things from this scandal:

Those promoting man-made global warming:

Controlled the meteorology and climatology journals in the U.S.;

Controlled non-meteorological science publication (Nature, Science, etc.);

Controlled Wikipedia;

Manipulated data;

Demonized skeptics.

Papers by skeptics were blackballed and not published in U.S. professional journals. In contrast, Kenneth Richard has documented over 1,000 peer-reviewed papers published in Europe and Asia in 2014, 2015, and 2016 that challenge the hypothesis that CO2 has been the primary driver of recent global warming (and other aspects of the bogus “consensus”) and support solar, oceanic, and other natural cycles as the primary causes of global warming, but they are not found in the U.S. publications.

SOURCE




EPA: Goodbye Captain Planet and Hello Real Leadership

Obama based environmental policy on kids' fiction. Trump has a much more realistic approach.

If you grew up watching Captain Planet, you would know that the greatest threat to the environment is the human species. And the worst culprits among these humans are, of course, business owners. The job of planet heroes, then, is to fight against the evil capitalists and to be a voice for the voiceless rivers, oceans and clouds.

While this propagandistic narrative works well for a cartoon series (ok, it was atrocious there too), in real life, capitalism and private property incentivize clean air, water and reforestation. Let’s say, for example, that you own a timber farm that harvests wood every seven years. You would take care of your land and the nearby water sources because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have the robust healthy trees for the next harvest seven years later and your renewable resource would no longer be renewable.

Barack Obama based his Captain Planet environmental policy on the incorrect assumption that business deliberately pollutes the environment. Thus, rather than dealing with, say, lead in the soil or toxins in the air, he focused on regulating businesses out of business and thereby bolstering bureaucratic power. This flawed theory casts private sector businesses as top polluters, and government-run companies as charitable saviors. Of course, look no further than the exceptionally managed $535 million federal loan to the now defunct Solyndra to see the truth. One report estimated that the total taxpayer cost may be as high as $845 million. The crony capitalist government “start-ups” that benefit bureaucrats and cost the taxpayer millions are nobody’s charity.

While Obama busied himself with failed government start-ups, he ignored the larger issues like air quality and Superfund. The EPA manages a program called “Superfund,” which cleans up some of the nation’s most hazardously contaminated sites. These sites can contain toxic and hazardous chemicals and require the remediation by the EPA. The EPA establishes a National Priorities List (NPL) of the top U.S. sites in need of Superfund clean-up or remediation. Yet some of these sites have stayed on the list due to lack of action by the EPA for years, even decades.

Take, for example, the West Lake Landfill Superfund site near St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973, 38,000 tons of solid waste were mixed with 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate (a uranium ore processing residue) left over from the Manhattan Project, a World War II era government (ahem) program which developed nuclear bombs. In 1990, the EPA designated it as a Superfund site on the NPL. Yet, under Obama, nothing happened except “investigations” and “studies.” Meanwhile, the residents of St. Louis live with this unacceptable level of toxicity. Despite Obama’s claims to be “for” the environment, 1,322 Superfund sites like this still remain around the country (more than when he came into office).

And then there’s air quality. The EPA sets air quality standards, called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), which put limits on six air pollutants (sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and particle pollution). There are currently 34 states that do not meet the EPA’s air quality requirements, 10 more than when Obama first took office. Ignoring the obvious needs of our country to deal with toxic waste, soil and water contaminants irresponsibly puts public health at risk.

So how did Obama, so lauded by the media as an environmental crusader, fail on such an epic level?

Well, because for him, a business-killing, highly regulatory EPA was a success. While it failed in protecting the environment, it succeeded in massive regulations on manufacturing and other businesses.

The good news is that we are saying goodbye to the fictional assumptions of Captain Planet and saying hello to real leadership at the EPA. President Donald Trump’s new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has recommitted the agency to actually focusing on the environment while also supporting economic growth. Last month, Pruitt issued a memo that prioritizes the cleanup of the toxic 1,322 Superfund sites across the country. Under his leadership, the EPA is planning to roll back needless regulations, which will save an estimated 1.4 million U.S. jobs. Pruitt’s commitment to the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the process by which administrative rules are made means that the agency won’t be abused by special-interest groups who seek to change policy though a “sue-and-settle” strategy. Additionally, the new leadership has already begun to restore their relationships with the states, as opposed to Obama’s modus operandi of dictating from Washington.

Finally, President Trump’s recent decision to exit the Paris Accord not only preserves our sovereignty to establish our own environmental priorities (which are cleaner than most in the world), but frees us from the obligation to pay for the remediation of other countries (namely India and China).

Obama’s failed leadership co-opted the environment issue as a way to concentrate government power by killing manufacturing and energy businesses, while simultaneously ignoring the real issues of air quality and toxic Superfund site cleanup. Trump’s and Pruitt’s leadership prioritizes the environment while also supporting business, jobs and the American worker. This new team seeks to achieve what we all want: clean water, air and soil, clean places to live and removal of toxic substances in order to provide a clean environment for the humans, plants and animals of the next generation.

SOURCE





EPA wants to reopen talks on GE cleanup

In 2015, after years of protests, lobbying, and drawn-out government studies, General Electric Co. was ordered to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the Housatonic River, which the company polluted for decades from its plant in the Berkshires.

Now, the divisive plan, criticized by GE as too costly and by environmental advocates as too lax, may be upended by the agency that crafted it: the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In an abrupt shift that comes amid the Trump administration’s sweeping changes at the EPA, agency lawyers said last week that they want to reopen negotiations over the $613 million cleanup order. They have notified surrounding towns and environmental groups that they intend to delay an EPA appeal board hearing set for Thursday, at which GE planned to argue for changes to the plan.

“Although the case has been fully briefed, EPA has determined that a stay of the proceedings at this time is appropriate and necessary,” the lawyers wrote in an e-mail. They said they would seek to postpone the hearing for three months.

Coming after bitter, protracted negotiations, the EPA’s missive shocked many of the groups that for decades have pressed the Boston-based company to remove large amounts of toxic chemicals known as PCBs that its plant in Pittsfield dumped into the river from the 1930s to the 1970s. PCBs, once ubiquitous as coolants and insulating fluids, were banned in 1979.

The environmental groups worry that the agency’s move reflects the new priorities of the Trump administration – that companies should be protected from government regulations and mandated cleanups.

“Looks like Massachusetts is about to become Exhibit A in the Trump administration’s efforts to go easy on polluters,” said Matt Pawa, a lawyer who represents towns that support the EPA’s plan for the Housatonic, including Lenox, Lee, and Great Barrington.

He noted that GE and the EPA already went through mediation, and that the mediator ruled in favor of the cleanup plan.

“As far as I know, the only ‘interested party’ here is GE – neither I nor the state of Massachusetts’ lead lawyer knew anything about such settlement discussions,” before the e-mail from the EPA, Pawa said.

Critics of the move pointed to a directive, issued last month by EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, that requires him or his deputy to approve all agency-mandated cleanup plans that exceed $50 million. Previously, regional offices could issue such decisions, as the New England office in Boston did for the Housatonic cleanup in 2015.

Shortly after his directive, Pruitt launched a new task force to make recommendations on “how the agency can restructure the cleanup process, realign incentives of all involved parties to remediate sites, encourage private investment in cleanups and sites, and promote revitalization of properties across the country.”

The task force, Pruitt added, is intended to “reduce the administrative and overhead costs and burdens borne by parties remediating contaminated sites, including a reexamination of the level of agency oversight necessary.”

Those changes came as the Trump administration has proposed a 25 percent budget cut to the Superfund program, which oversees the cleanup of some 1,300 toxic waste sites around the country.

GE submitted its formal appeal of the Housatonic cleanup plan last year, shortly after moving its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to Boston. The industrial giant argues that it should be allowed to dispose of the dredged pollutants in landfills near the river, despite state regulations that require the toxic sludge to be removed from Massachusetts.

GE officials say they should be exempt from state hazardous waste regulations and other environmental rules. They’ve called the government’s “rest of the river” cleanup plan “arbitrary and capricious,” and say it violates the terms of a 2000 settlement among the EPA, the company, and state and local officials.

GE has already spent more than $500 million since the 1990s to clean 2 miles of the river closest to the plant and on related environmental projects in the area, company officials say. But the company acknowledges that contaminated soil still stretches along more than 10 miles of the river, its banks, and its floodplains between Pittsfield and Lenox. The Housatonic runs nearly 150 miles from Western Massachusetts through Connecticut to Long Island Sound.

The company contends it shouldn’t have to remove the dredged soil from the state because it wasn’t required to in the first phase of the cleanup, which was completed in 2006. The out-of-state location hasn’t been designated yet.

Officials at GE declined to say whether they lobbied the EPA to reopen settlement talks, but they acknowledged taking note of Pruitt’s initiative to review costly cleanups.

“Consistent with that initiative, we reaffirmed our previous support to EPA for settlement negotiations with the parties to explore the possibility of expediting a common-sense solution that meets our commitment to a comprehensive cleanup,” said Jeff Caywood, a spokesman for GE. “Negotiations are a part of any litigation.”

After receiving the EPA’s e-mail, Pawa and other opponents of renewed negotiations wrote the agency to object.

“We appreciate the feedback from the parties to this matter,” Nancy Grantham, a spokeswoman for the EPA, replied.

She forwarded a document that showed that Timothy Conway, a lawyer from the New England office, would be appearing before the appeals board, but declined to comment on whether the agency would ask the board to delay oral arguments.

Conway and other officials from the agency’s New England office didn’t return calls for comment.

“Mr. Conway intends to respond to the issues presented by the board,” Grantham wrote.

In the past, however, EPA officials have defended their plan, which they say would reduce PCB levels in the river’s fish by 95 percent over the next 13 years.

“We find those to be acceptable levels,” Jim Murphy, an EPA spokesman based in Massachusetts, told the Globe last year. “We’re getting out of the river what we need to get out to protect human health and the ecosystem.”

At the time, Murphy acknowledged the criticism from both sides and said the agency was mindful of costs in designing its plan. Environmental advocates lobbied for a more ambitious cleanup that would have cost more than $1 billion, he said, while reducing the toxic chemicals in the river’s fish by only slightly more.

Despite their concerns about the EPA’s plan, environmental advocates now worry that the agency will weaken it further.

Pruitt “seems intent on undermining years of work by his own agency,” said Julia Blatt, executive director of the Massachusetts River Alliance. “This is incredibly disrespectful to the EPA staff who have worked for decades to get GE to clean up its pollution, and to the people who live and work in that area and deserve a clean Housatonic River.”

SOURCE




Climate Change Hypocrites
 
Maybe the most laughable reaction to Donald Trump’s pulling out of the Paris climate accord came from European and Chinese leaders who blasted Trump and America for “surrendering its world leadership” role. The sanctimonious leaders of Asian and European nations pledged to move full speed ahead on clean energy without the United States. Be my guest.

But we’ve been to this movie before. The Europeans were all in on the Kyoto Protocol deal back in 2005 — an international treaty the U.S. rightly rejected. Euroland promised a massive shift to green energy and to abandon fossil fuels to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But guess what? The green energy revolution was a bust. None of these countries came close to meeting those targets. Now these nations, especially Germany, are moving away from the saintly clean energy sources.

They say they are solemnly committed to a new treaty — but if they violated the last one, why would we believe them now?

Even more amazing and underreported is that the United States — even though we did not make a pledge to reduce our greenhouse gases in accord with that treaty — has reduced its carbon emissions more than some of the European signatories.

Contrary to the flood of insults directed at the Trump administration, the U.S. is not the bad actor on the world stage when it comes to environmental protection. We are the world leader in environmental stewardship, and our energy use, as a share of the economy, continues to shrink.

An even more preposterous claim is that China — the largest polluter by far — and India are moving away from fossil fuels and transitioning to wind and solar power.

No, they are not. Here is what The Wall Street Journal reported in a November story about China and India “doubling down” on fossil fuel use: “China’s government said it would raise coal power capacity by as much as 20 percent by 2020, ensuring a continuing strong role for the commodity in the country’s energy sector despite a pledge to bring down pollution levels. In a new five-year plan for electricity … the National Energy Administration said it would raise coal-fired power capacity from around 900 gigawatts last year to as high as 1,100 gigawatts by 2020.”

Wait. We are going to be lectured by these nations about saving the planet? This is like taking a lesson in personal hygiene from Pig-Pen (my favorite Peanuts character).

We should have learned by now that with foreign nations, you always have to watch what they do, not listen to what they say. China isn’t interested in reducing pollution levels. It is hyper-focused on one goal: gaining global dominance in every industry and using the cheapest and most reliable energy sources possible to get there. China and Europe want the U.S. to transition to more expensive energy sources — in no small part because they want to regain the competitiveness they lost due to their own green energy policies.

The press is also having a field day with the story that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SolarCity, has resigned from a Trump economic advisory council out of protest. But Musk, according to the Los Angeles Times, has received almost $5 billion in government subsidies. SolarCity and Tesla are likely out of business without all the taxpayer-funded green handouts. Why doesn’t the press report that Musk has a multibillion-dollar personal stake in global warming?

America has at least 200 years of shale gas, which is clean burning, efficient and made in America. We have 500 years of coal, and the emissions of pollutants from coal plants have fallen by more than 50 percent in recent decades. Clean coal is here, and rather than shut down this industry and put tens of thousands more coal miners in unemployment lines, we should allow technology and innovation to make it cleaner still through gasification, carbon capture and so on.

Because of stunning advances in drilling technologies, the value of American oil, gas and coal resources that are currently recoverable is estimated at near $50 trillion — which is more than double our national debt. The Paris climate accord would require America to keep this massive treasure chest of resources in the ground, never to be used.

Sadly, President Barack Obama negotiated a treaty that accommodated the economic interests of our rivals and put America last. Trump’s gutsy decision puts America on the path to becoming the global energy superpower in the decades to come and puts American workers first.

SOURCE





Australian climate skeptics use Socrates to question global warming



AN ad published in a major newspaper purports to prove climate change isn’t real using a hypothetical conversation with Socrates. The Climate Study Group says it researches ‘climate truths’. I have deleted some opinionated adjectives below. 

I can see no substance in the criticisms below.  The argument is straightforward:  High CO2 in the past was not bad so why is it bad now?  Life thrived mightily in an era when CO2 levels were much higher than now so why is life threatened now, amid much lower levels of CO2?  Is not raised CO2 good for life rather than threatening to life?  Is not a small rise in CO2 likely to be beneficial on balance?

It is true that there were no humans in the Carboniferous but there were plenty of dinosaurs with respiratory systems very similar to ours.  And our metabolism is in fact more flexible than theirs so we are better at adapting.  So we should thrive amid raised CO2 as well


A GROUP that claims to study “climate truths” is behind a newspaper ad that uses ancient philosopher Socrates to try and prove climate change isn’t real.

The paid advertisement ran in The Australian newspaper, published by NewsCorp, which also publishes news.com.au, on Friday has shocked both scientists and philosophers as it tries to link the two disciplines to prove CO2 and fossil fuels have nothing to do with global warming.

The quarter-page advertisement features a large image of Socrates and showcases a “hypothetical conversation” between the philosopher and a fictional “strong believer in climate change”, dubbed Mr Smith.

The conversation sees Socrates question Mr Smith’s unwavering belief about emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels which were formed before and during the carboniferous period.

In the imaginary exchange, Socrates questions whether there was evidence of global warming prior to this period, and makes some other “philosophical inquiries”, which are then claimed to “reveal the truth with compelling logic and facts which refute longheld belief”. Mr Smith is led to finally “understand the truth” and ultimately reject climate change.

Social media users have slammed the add, and Reddit commentators have called it just plain weird. Actual experts are outraged too.

Deakin University senior philosophy lecturer Patrick Stokes said aside from scientific conjecture, the philosophical side of the group’s argument was dangerously flawed.

“The reason that climate change denialists like Socrates is they are wedding to a brave individual exposing the corrupt elite,” he said. “The problem is of course that science doesn’t work the way Socratic questioning works. The idea that you come along and lob a couple of Socratic questions and explode it all just doesn’t hold water.”

Mr Stokes said there were “glaring fallacies” in the argument, and argued that Socrates would have been “quite affronted” by the ad. He said on Twitter: “Whoever wrote this: Socrates would have kicked your arse, and rightly so.”

Melbourne University climate scientist Andrew King said the advert put forward “a nonsensical ill-founded argument”.

“Essentially their argument is the CO2 was higher in the past and that the carbon is from a natural source,” Dr King said. “One obvious criticism is that the Carboniferous Period (being 300 million years ago) is a poor analog for the climate of today. It was warmer but lifeforms were also very different with nothing similar to humans.

“Human life is adapted to the climate we have today. If the climate was much warmer, as in the Carboniferous period, we’d be in a lot of trouble! Really?  Our present tropics are many degrees warmer than Europe but people still thrive there, including high birthrates.  And warming up Siberia would be very congenial.  The man is talking rubbish

“They also talk about the lack of “dangerous global warming” in the Carboniferous period, but, in a large part, the problems that result from global warming are caused by the absolute temperature as opposed to the rate of change of temperature.” But that is what the skeptics are arguing

Dr King also argued it was unfair to invoke Socrates. He said that having been dead for a long time he wasn’t around to give his own opinion.

News.com.au spoke to the convener of The Climate Study Group, who described the organisation as “a group that studies the climate truths”.

The man asked to remain anonymous for fear of hate mail, but has previously publicly identified himself as the leader of the organisation in government submissions and articles.

He said he did not wish to discuss the advertisement or the research behind it any further.

The same organisation came under fire for another unusual advertisement that took a similar format and was published in the same paper in August 2015.

In an advertorial entitled “Psychology and the new climate alarm”, the climate-denial collective sought to use psychological research to prove there was no evidence that CO2 had affected climate.

See here for details of the 2015 advert

The Australian Psychology Society attacked the group, saying it was “disturbed to see psychology being used to mislead the public” and claimed the publisher had ignored a “huge body of scientific evidence”. Like what?

The same band of climate deniers has also been behind bizarre research papers and submissions to the Prime Minister, Foreign Affairs Minister, and Minister for the Environment, using its own research to back up allegations that economists were being alarmist due to their psychological makeup and that an ice age is the most urgent environmental threat.

SOURCE

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