To the Editor,
According to NASA website [1], "Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.[2][3] In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position."By listening to the constant drumbeat of the radical free enterprise fundamentalists, you wouldn't think that its been largely settled by climate scientists. As with Vaccines and Evolution, there is no controversy regarding Anthropogenic Climate Change in the world of climate scientists. See Graph [4]
A recent book titled the "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"[5] tells the story of how an elite group of political ideologues and scientists distorted and misrepresented and outright became liars for hire to fight the cigarette cancer connection, acid rain due to Sulphate Aerosols from Coal plants, the Ozone Hole depletion from flourocarbons, the science of the Nuclear Winter, Anthropogenic Climate Change and even revised an attack on Rachael Carlson's Silent Spring and subsequent banning of DDT.
Russ Wiles' buddy, eternal anti-communist cold warrior doubt monger Fred Singer is featured throughout the book in most of the stories; denying the dangers of Acid Rain, Ozone depletion, SDI, a winnable nuclear war and the subsequent Nuclear Winter, second hand smoke, and Anthropogenic Climate Change. In every case his claims were scrutinized, debunked, and thoroughly dismissed as bogus, dishonest and politically motivated. After all, Singer's gang was made up of lobbyists, economists, industry representatives, other corrupt scientists for hire, right wing think tanks and the media. Joseph Romm, a Washington scientist and author, after hearing Singer's 1500 year cycle theory said, "I don’t think there’s anybody in the scientific community who takes Fred Singer seriously,"
As Justin Lancaster, who worked with Climatologist Roger Revelle claimed, "Fred Singer is the most unethical scientist, in my opinion, that I have ever met. I said so in the early 1990s, publicly, and I am still confident in the truth of this statement." Right before his death, Revelle remarked to his secretary, “Some people don't think Fred Singer is a very good scientist.” When Merchants of Doubt was made into a documentary to be released in theaters March - June 2015, Fred Singer was furious and threatened libel and sought out allies with which to block the movie. Of course he doesn't want people to find out who really is, what he does in his ideologically pigheaded way, and how he did these deceitful things for the sake of protecting big industry, their profits and their regulatory status quo. He failed to intimidate anyone working with the movie. It opened in March, closes in June and then goes to streaming services. The book is awesome. Very fast Summer reading, too.
Being such a small minority, the clique of arrogant ideologues that are the climate deniers have lost this battle in the world of science but in their half century fashion, continually repeat all the things in the mass media and the internet that have already been debunked by climate scientists. After all, Fred Singer is a Cold War Physicist not a trained climatologist no matter how much he or his glassy eyed followers protest. For a side by side chart of scores of Singer's absurd claims answered by what the science says go to this page at Skeptical Science.[6]
[5] http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ Kindle at Amazon, too.
To the Editor
Don Ewing did not address my rebuttal of his claim that the warming trend we are in now is caused by the same warming trend that brought us out of the Little Ice Age. Instead, he side steps to another denier myth, that climatologists were projecting global cooling. His link shows us how the popular media printed issues about global cooling. News magazines are not peer reviewed journals. They ambitiously sell a product with sensationalism. This cooling alarmism is a myth and a misrepresentation. It distorts the scientific position in the 1970s, when only a small number of papers were considering global cooling while the rest of climate scientists were predicting warming. Don is committing the fallacies of cherry picking and of magnifying minorities. The cause of the the lull in the warming trend after WWII was not the Sun but the Sulfate and Nitrate Aerosols of fossil fuel emissions. Like the same Aerosols of Volcanoes, they block incoming Solar radiation and have a cooling affect (Like Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, Tambura in 1812, Krakatoa in 1884).
This is why there was a cooling period that began after heavy industrial pollution exploded on us after WWII. Rivers were flammable! But that lull ended when we put scrubbers on our plants due to dense smog, increased Cardiac and Respiratory diseases, and the destructive acid rains. Free Market Alarmists fought that change, too, like they did addressing the Ozone. Same ole, same old free market fundamentalism at work. With scrubbers in place, the sooty period ended so more heat began to get through and become trapped once again by the increasing levels of CO2.
Climatologists were not predicting global cooling or an ice age. NASA projected that if we quadrupled Sulphate Aerosol pollution, we might trigger global cooling on a massive scale. All the research indicated oncoming global warming. We didn't increase aerosol pollution; we put scrubbers in which left CO2 in charge.
Of the many influences upon our planet, global climate has three main drivers; CO2, Solar activity, and Volcanoes. CO2 is a heat trapping gas, period. Yes, the heat that the CO2 is trapping may be reduced by Sulfate Aerosols, but CO2 traps heat that gets through, period. For a good refutation of the claim that CO2 isn't correlated with warming see this page.[1] What Ewing is missing are the external and internal variability factors (forcing) such as solar activity, volcanoes, warming seas, loss of carbon sinks, and the La Niña - El Nino cycle. This is why graphs that cover periods like this one illustrating warming 1880-2009 shows that claim it hasn't warmed since 1998 is false.[2] No matter what the variability factors are, nothing changes the heat trapping nature of CO2.
The same cherry picking has been done with the year 1934 in the USA. The year 1934 was a very hot year in the United States, but 2014, 2013, 2012, 2006, and 1998 were hotter. Year 1934 was not so hot over the rest of the planet, coming in at 51st hottest. After 2015, it may be 52nd. See Graph 1900-2010.[3] Climate Change is measured globally and not just in the atmosphere. The cherry picking Ewing does completely ignores the two layers of Ocean Heat Content down to 2000 meters. The rise has been enormous.[4] The decade of 2001 to 2010 is the hottest decade on record and 13 of the 14 hottest years on record happened in the 21st century.[5] 1998? Very funny!
Ewing claims of "wild predictions of climate doom: skyrocketing temperatures, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornados, vanishing polar ice caps, etc. that politicians used to try to generate fear and that "scientists" used to get more grant money". Nonsense when it comes to most scientists. The deniers are the ones in the pay of the industrialists and their groups like the Petroleum Institute and hack groups with scientific sounding names like Singer's group. Take Wei-Hock Soon, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who says its the Sun, not CO2 that is causing climate change. Soon has banked more than $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose this glaring conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. Like most of the deniers in the pay of the fossil fuel industry and right wing economic think tanks, Soon is not a climatologist; he is a liar for hire.
The alarmist calls came from the press and the politicians, not the climate scientists doing the studies. Most reports by the IPCC err on the side of caution, underestimating impacts while pundits, politicians and activists manufacture alarm. The alarmism I see is coming from the free market fundamentalists who wail and gnash their teeth that our way of life and our freedoms are in jeopardy if one takes climate change seriously. Its ideology driven drivel. Don does it. Russ does it. Tony does it. Its drivel.
And what is this about doubling CO2? That is in the future. In the 1880s it was 273ppm and now its closing in on 400ppm so where is the doubling? No, Don, the debate on climate change is pretty much settled among climate scientists. Like evolution, its now the details that are being explored, not the general consensus. What I am attempting to do is combat all the rubbish that free market fundamentalist groups, fake scientists, and liars for hire have spread. All movement in the polls is away from climate change denial. You have cited Dr. Philip Lloyd. One author who criticized the ICPP report? Now that carries a lot of weight! Like Fred Singer who was the lone dissenter on acid rain in a major study. Bjorn Lomborg, refuted daily, is another denier who is now at stage 3. These are the stages we see in deniers 1: Deny the problem exists. 2: Deny we’re the cause; its natural. 3: Deny it’s a problem; we can adapt. Stage 4: Deny we can solve it; its too big and too costly and THAT attacks our freedoms! Stage 5: It’s too late.
[1]http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation-intermediate.htm
[2]http://facweb.bhc.edu/academics/science/harwoodr/GEOG101/Study/images/1880_to_2010_Temperature.gif
[3] http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/co2_temp_1900_2008.gif
[4] http://skepticalscience.com/graphics/Nuccitelli_OHC_Data_med.jpg
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