A subversive physicist and climate change

Freeman Dyson was a famous English physicist born in 1923 and died two years ago at the age of 96. He studied at Cambridge University where at the end of the war he graduated in Mathematics.

His friend, the neurologist and writer, Oliver Sacks said of Dyson: "Freeman's favorite word about science and creativity is the word subversive. He feels it's not important to be orthodox, but subversive, and that's what he's done all his life." life."

He moved to the United States, establishing himself at Birmingham University first, then at Cornell University, and finally in 1953 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would remain for 60 years.

Dyson was one of the main personalities in physics worldwide, he participated in several projects of great importance such as the Orion Project and the Triga nuclear reactor. He also worked on a variety of topics in mathematics, including topology, analysis, number theory, and random matrices. His contributions to physics are innumerable. I invite the audience to consult his copious trajectory in the encyclopedias available on the Internet. In this video we will specifically refer to his views on climate change.

First part

In one of his many lectures, Freeman Dyson recounted that in the 1960s, fluid dynamics expert Syukuro Manabe was running global climate models on

the supercomputer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton.

The models were executed with carbon dioxide with variable amounts in the atmosphere and in the output of the computer the models of it showed an increase in the average temperature of the soil, something that 50 years later was renamed global warming.

Munabe told everyone not to believe the numbers. But the politicians in Washington believed. They wanted numbers, he gave them numbers, so naturally they believed in numbers.

It was not unreasonable for politicians to believe in Manabe's figures. Politics and science are two very different games. In science, you're not supposed to believe the numbers until you've carefully examined the evidence. If the evidence is doubtful, a good scientist will suspend judgment. In politics, you're supposed to make decisions. Politicians are used to making decisions based on shaky evidence. They have to vote yes or no, and they usually don't have the luxury of suspending judgment. Manabe's numbers were clear and simple. They said that if carbon dioxide increases, the planet will heat up. So it was reasonable for the politicians to believe them. Believing for a politician is not the same as believing for a scientist.

Manabe's numbers were unreliable because his computer models did not actually simulate the physical processes taking place in the atmosphere. He over and over again said that his purpose when he ran computer models was not to predict the weather but to understand it. But no one listened. Everyone thought he was predicting the weather, everyone believed his numbers. And here we are still.

Second part

Earth's biosphere contains four carbon reservoirs: the atmosphere, the ocean, vegetation, and soil. All four reservoirs are of comparable size, so the problem of climate is inevitably mixed with problems of vegetation and soil. The intertwining between the four reservoirs is so strong that it makes no sense to consider only the atmosphere and the ocean. Computer models of the atmosphere and ocean, even if they can be made reliable, give at best a partial view of the problem. The large effects of vegetation and soil cannot be calculated, but must be observed and measured.

The way the problem is usually presented to the public is seriously misleading. The public is led to believe that the carbon dioxide problem has only one cause and one consequence. The only cause is the burning of (fossil) fuels, the only consequence is global warming. In reality there are multiple causes and multiple consequences. Atmospheric carbon dioxide driving global warming is just the dog's tail. The dog wagging its tail is global ecology: forests, farms, and swamps, as well as power plants, factories, and automobiles. And the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has other consequences that may be at least as important as global warming: increasing crop yields and forest growth, for example. To handle the problem intelligently, we need to understand all the causes and all the consequences.

Third part

To sum up what we've learned since then, Dyson gives us some good news and some bad news. The good news is that a lot of effort is finally being put into local observations. Local observations are laborious and time-consuming, but they are essential if we are ever to have an accurate picture of the climate. The bad news is that the climate models that so much effort goes into are not reliable because they still use simulation factors instead of physics to represent important things like evaporation and convection, clouds and rain.

In addition to the general prevalence of misleading factors, the latest and largest climate models have other flaws that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Niño. Since El Niño is an important feature of the observed climate, any model that cannot predict it is clearly flawed. Bad news doesn't mean climate models are useless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools to understand the climate. They are not yet adequate tools to predict the weather. If we patiently persevere in looking at the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we will be able to both understand and predict. Until then, we must continue to warn politicians and the public: do not believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.

Freeman J. Dyson, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, received the 1999 APS Joseph Burton Forum Award and is the author of several books on science for the general public. The most recent is The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, which will be published this year.

 Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Now? 

The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heat wave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees. Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weather proof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.

To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly. Within days of the June heat wave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change”.

World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website  Climate.gov , and featured by CBS, CMBC. Scientific Amewrican, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.

The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media. Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”

“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.” In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.

Inconveniently for World Weather Attribution, an atmospheric scientist with extensive knowledge of the Pacific Northwest climate was actively running weather models that accurately predicted the heatwave. Cliff Mass rejected the notion that global warming was to blame for the scorching temperatures. He calculated that global warming might have been responsible for two degrees of the near 40-degree anomaly. With or without climate change, Mass wrote, the region “still would have experienced the most severe heat wave in the past century”.

Mass has no shortage of credentials relevant to the issue: A  professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington,  he is author of the book “The weather of the Pacific Northwest”.

Mass took on the World Weather Attribution group directly: “Unfortunately, there are serious flaws in their approach.” According to Mass, the heatwave was the result of “natural variability.” The models being used by the international group lacked the “resolution to correctly simulate critical intense, local precipitation features,” and “they generally use unrealistic greenhouse gas emissions.”

WWA issued a “rebuttal” calling Mass’ criticisms “misleading and incorrect” But the gauntlet thrown down by Mass did seem to affect WWA’s confidence in its claims. The group, which had originally declared the heatwave would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” altered its tone. In subsequent public statements, it emphasized that it had merely been making “best estimates” and had presented them “with the appropriate caveats and uncertainties.” Scientists with the attribution group did not respond to questions about Mass’s criticisms posed by RealClearInvestigations.

But what of the group’s basic mission, the attribution of individual weather events to climate change? Hasn’t it been a fundamental rule of discussing extreme temperatures in a given place not to conflate weather with climate? Weather, it is regularly pointed out, refers to conditions during a short time in a limited area; climate is said to describe longer-term atmospheric patterns over large areas.

Donald Trump once joked, on a cold day in 2017, that he could go for some global warming ... ... and his comment was denounced as "scientifically ridiculous" by Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University, above.  But today it's hardly unusual for climate advocates to conflate weather with climate.

Yale School of the Environment

When Donald Trump joked, on a cold day, that he could go for some global warming, he was chastised for confusing weather with climate. The director of Yale University's project on climate change communication, Anthony Leiserowitz, denounced Trump’s comment as "scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false."

"There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is," Leiserowitz added. "What's going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what's going on with the planet."

Until recently, at least, climate scientists long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming. Typically, that argument is used to respond to those who might argue a spate of extreme cold is reason to doubt the planet is warming. Using individual weather events to say anything about the climate is “dangerous nonsense,” the New Scientist warned a decade ago.

Perhaps, but it happens all the time now that climate advocates have found it to be an effective tool. In 2019, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that three-fourths of those polled said their views about climate change had been shaped by estreme weather events”. Leah Sprain, in the book “Ethics and Practice in Science”.,” says that even though it may be legitimate to make the broad claim that climate change “may result in future extreme weather,” when one tries “arguing weather patterns were caused by climate change, things get dicey.” Which creates a tension: “For some communicators, the ultimate goal – mobilizing political action – warrants rhetorical use of extreme weather events.” But that makes scientists nervous, Sprain writes, because “misrepresenting science will undermine the credibility of arguments for climate change.”

Which is exactly what happened with the World Weather Attribution group, according to Mass: “Many of the climate attribution studies are resulting in headlines that are deceptive and result in people coming to incorrect conclusions about the relative roles of global warming and natural variability in current extreme weather,” he wrote at his blog. “Scary headlines and apocayptic attribution studies needlessly provoke fear”.

 

Sweltering in Portland.

(AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

Covering the back-and-forth between the World Weather Attribution and Mass, the Seattle Times labeled the local atmosphere academic a “controversial figure” The newspaper noted that “Mass has sometimes gotten into very public disputes with other scientists.” He has also been critical of the news media — “including the Seattle Times,” wrote the Seattle Times — for what he says is alarmist coverage of the climate. The Seattle Times did not respond to questions from RCI.

The newspaper was not wrong that Mass has disagreed with his fellow climate scientists. He didn’t hesitate to take on any and all comers at the Real Climate blog. But he doesn’t think that should make him controversial. “Science is all about conflict,” Mass has said. “Somebody has an idea; and then someone else criticizes it.”

Mass also counts as “controversial” because he spoke out last summer against the rioting and looting taking place nightly in Seattle. A recurring segment he had on Tacoma public radio was canceled after Mass – on his own blog, not on the radio —  likened the shattering of glass in Seattle to the shattered glass of Kristallnacht, the Nazi anti-Semitic pogrom.

The blogging professor laments that atmospheric sciences have been “poisoned” by politics. “It’s damaged climate science,” he told RCI.

And not just politics – Mass also says that the accepted tenets of global warming have become a sort of religion. Consider the language used, he says, such as the question of whether one “believes” in anthropogenic climate change. “You don’t believe in gravity,” he says. The religious metaphor also explains why colleagues get so bent out of shape with him, Mass says: “There’s nothing worse than an apostate priest.”

That goes even for those who are merely mild apostates. Mass doesn’t dispute warming, he merely questions how big a problem it is. “We need to worry about climate change,” he has said. “But hype and exaggeration of its impacts only undermine the potential for effective action.”

Reality Check

By Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations
August 17, 2021

Climate, Caution, and Precaution

One of the arguments frequently applied to the climate debate is that the “Precautionary Principle” requires that we take action to reduce CO2. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Precautionary Principle, which means something very different from the kind of caution that makes us carry an umbrella when rain threatens. Some people are taking the Precautionary Principle way too far …

The nature of the Precautionary Principle is widely misunderstood. Let me start with the birth of the Precautionary Principle (I'll call it PP for short), which comes from the United Nations Rio de Janeiro Declaration on the Environment (1992). Here's their original formulation:

“In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capability. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

This is an excellent statement of the PP, as it distinguishes it from such things as carrying umbrellas, denying bank loans, approving the Kyoto Protocol, invading Afghanistan, or using seat belts.
The three key parts of the PP (emphasis mine) are:
A threat of serious or irreversible damage.

 A lack of full scientific certainty (in other words, the existence of partial but not conclusive scientific evidence).

The availability of cost-effective measures that we know will prevent the problem.

Here are some examples of how these key parts of the PP work out in practice.
We have full scientific certainty that seat belts save lives, and that using an umbrella keeps us dry. Thus, using them is not an example of the PP, it is simply acting reasonably on principles about which we are scientifically certain.
There are no scientific principles or evidence that we can apply to the question of invading Afghanistan, so we cannot apply the PP there either.
Bank loans are neither serious nor irreversible, nor is there partial scientific understanding of them, so they don't qualify for the PP.
The Kyoto Protocol is so far from being cost-effective as to be laughable. The PP can be thought of as a kind of insurance policy. No one would pay $200,000 for an insurance policy if the payoff in case of an accident were only $20, yet this is the kind of ratio of cost to payoff that the Kyoto Protocol involves. Even its proponents say that if the states involved met their targets, it would only reduce the temperature by a tenth of a degree in fifty years … not a good risk/reward ratio.
Finally, consider CO2. The claim is that in fifty years, we'll be sorry if we don't stop producing CO2 now. However, we don't know whether CO2 will cause any damage at all in fifty years, much less whether it will cause serious or irreversible damage. We have very little evidence that CO2 will cause “dangerous” warming other than fanciful forecasts from untested, unverified, unvalidated climate models which have not been subjected to software quality assurance of any kind. We have no evidence that a warmer world is a worse world, it might be a better world. The proposed remedies are estimated to cost on the order of a trillion dollars a year … hardly cost effective under any analysis. Nor do we have any certainty whether the proposed remedies will prevent the projected problem. So cutting CO2 fails to qualify for the PP under all three of the criteria.

On the other side of the equation, a good example of when we should definitely use the PP involves local extinction. We have fairly good scientific understanding that removing a top predator from a local ecosystem badly screws things up. Kill the mountain lions, and the deer go wild, then the plants are overgrazed, then the ground erodes, insect populations are unba-lanced, and so on down the line.
Now, if we are looking at a novel ecosystem that has not been scientifically studied, we do not have full scientific certainty that removing the top predator will actually cause serious or irreversible damage to the ecosystem. However, if there is a cost-effective method to avoid removing the top predator, the PP says that we should do so. It fulfills the three requirements of the PP — there is a threat of serious or irreversible damage, we have partial scientific certainty, and a cost-effective solution exists, so we should act.
Because I hold these views about the inapplicability of the precautionary principle to CO2, I am often accused of not wanting to do anything about a possible threat. People say I'm ignoring something which could cause problems in the future. This is not the case. I do not advocate inaction. I advocate the use of “no-regrets” actions in response to this kind of possible danger.
The rule of the no-regrets approach is very simple — do things that will provide real, immediate, low-cost, tangible benefits whether or not the threat is real. That way you won't regret your actions.
Here are some examples of no-regrets responses to the predicted threats of CO2. In Peru, the slums up on the hillside above Lima are very dry, which is a problem that is supposed to get worse if the world warms. In response to the problem, people are installing “fog nets“. These nets capture water from the fog, providing fresh water to the villagers.

---

NOTE BY FAEC: The same system is used since many years ago in the arid region in the northern part of Chile, Coquimbo, Iquique, Chungungo, and also in many other parts of the world as Hawaii, South Africa, the Arabian countries, Croatia, India, etc, before the global warming hype was in full rage. Tough in Iquique rains no more than 5 mm/year, the intense nocturnal humidity carried by winds from the Pacific Ocean run uphill in the coastal sand dunes meeting mesh barriers where it condenses and the resulting water is conveyed by ducts an channels to big reservoirs.

In India's Ladakh region, they have the same problem, lack of water. So they have started building “artificial glaciers".These are low-cost shallow ponds where they divert the water during the winter. The water freezes, and is slowly released as the “glacier” melts over the course of the following growing season.
These are the best type of response to a possible threat from CO2. They are inexpensive, they solve a real problem today rather than a half century from now, and they are aimed at the poor of the world.
These responses also reveal what I call the “dirty secret” of the “we're all gonna die in fifty years from CO2? crowd. The dirty secret of their forecasts of massive impending doom is that all of the threatened catastrophes they warn us about are here already.
All the different types of climate-related destruction that people are so worried will happen in fifty years are happening today. Droughts? We got 'em. Floods? There's plenty. Rising sea levels? Check. Insect borne diseases? Which ones would you like? Tornados and extreme storms? We get them all the time. People dying of starvation? How many do you want? All the Biblical Plagues of Egypt? Would you like flies with that?
Forget about what will happen in fifty years. Every possible climate catastrophe is happening now, and has been for centu-ries.
So if you are truly interested in those problems, do something about them today. Contribute to organizations developing salt resistant crops. Put money into teaching traditional drought resisting measures in Africa. Support the use of micro-hydroelec-tric plants for village energy. The possibilities are endless.
That way, whether or not the doomsayers are right about what will happen in fifty years, both then and now people will be better prepared and more able to confront the problems caused by the unpleasant vagaries of climate. Fighting to reduce CO2 is hugely expensive, has been totally unsuccessful to date, will be very damaging to the lives of the poorest people, and has no certainty of bringing the promised results. This is a very bad combination.
Me, I don't think CO2 will cause those doomsday scenarios. But that's just me, I've been wrong before. If you do care about CO2 and think it is teh eeeevil, you should be out promoting your favorite no-regrets option. Because whether or not CO2 is a danger as people claim, if you do that you can be sure that you are not just pouring money down a bottomless hole with very poor odds of success. That's the real Precautionary Principle.

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Source: WattsUpWithThat.com
January 2nd, 2010

Reproduced from 

http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/ENGLISH.html

What the heck is happening?

An Avaaz campaign appears requesting signatures to continue the fight against climate change

What is that? How can a campaign against climate change be carried out? It is completely absurd.

Climate change is what has been happening in the atmosphere for 4.5 billion years. The weather, and concomitantly the climate, change incessantly. Geology is dedicated (among other things) to studying climate change. Personally it is what I have been doing now for 50 years.

How do you fight climate change? It is as absurd as starting a campaign to avoid the evolution of species or repeal the law of gravity.

Now, if what they are talking about is "global warming", it is something else. In this there may be controversy. And indeed there is. Many think, including institutional and academic officialism, that there is global warming and that it is promoted by "man" (they like to say "man" to refer to our species).

Others, including me, think that it is NOT sufficiently proven that there is global warming. Indeed, there are environmental effects of human action, Many and it will be necessary to avoid and fight against them (water pollution, air pollution and many others).

BUT THE GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT TESTED.

I don't like fighting an enemy that is NOT known if it exists.

(Remember: climate change does exist and always existed, but we do not know what type and at what speed it is happening)

Unfortunately, Donald Trump is (he said) an enemy of the measures taken to combat climate change.

Obviously he does not care if there is climate change or global warming or whatever, what matters is that a series of billionaire corporate projects that for various environmental reasons are not blocked.

But personally, I don't care what Donald Trump thinks or does, until proven otherwise we will have to continue investigating a few things that arouse many uncertainties:

1) What role do solar radiation variations play in climate changes (heating, cooling, rains, storms, etc.)?

2) What role does CO2 play, and in particular anthropogenic CO2 emissions in atmospheric dynamics?

3) What role does water vapor play in thermal balance and atmospheric dynamics?

3) What role do aerosols play in thermal balances and atmospheric dynamics?

4) What is the long-term trend of ocean levels?

5) What is the long-term trend of ocean temperature (and concomitantly, tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures)?

These questions have not been settled. At the official level, it is insisted on maintaining that everything is resolved and that there is scientific unanimity. But it's not like that. Neither is everything resolved nor is there scientific unanimity.

Therefore it is not appropriate to start any campaign.

Finally, I don't care what Donald Trump and his billionaire friends think about it.

Danilo Anton

Climate Change: An Expensive Hoax

Activists Live in a Neverland of Climate Prediction

For many, 2015 was the year the United Nations and governments around the world abandoned rational thought about climate change. Rather than focus on preparing for the very real problems of a continually changing climate, they concentrated instead on the politically correct, but scientifically impossible goal of “stopping climate change.” The whole lot of them seem to have been transported to Neverland.

Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie tells us that Neverlands are found in the minds of children. There, with the assistance of fairy dust, Peter Pan can fly and teach children to ignore their common sense and soar as well. Peter claims greatness, is able to feel danger when it is near, and can even imagine things into existence. There is almost nothing the hero of Neverland cannot do, provided he stays childlike and forgets everything he learned about the real world.

Reality for the UN and most politicians is now more determined by what Al Gore and other equally imaginative climate activists say than what real world science and observational evidence actually shows. December’s United Nations climate conference in Paris is a case in point.

Sounding more like an episode out of Barrie’s fairy tale than a serious meeting of world leaders, politicians pledged to prevent “global temperature” from rising more than two degrees Celsius. That we are as yet unable to meaningfully forecast climate decades in advance, let alone control it, didn’t matter. They simply ignored the fact that every climate prediction the UN has ever made has turned out to be wrong. Humankind has a global thermostat, they imagine.

Delegates believed that scientists have Peter Pan–like powers to sense climate danger decades in advance. They dream that today’s global climate models (GCM), simulations that utterly failed to forecast the current 18-year “pause” in warming, provide lawmakers with the “unequivocal” knowledge they need to enact trillion-dollar energy policies.

To back up their extraordinary claims, we are told that there is an “overwhelming consensus” of scientists who agree with the UN’s position. Thousands of well-qualified skeptics are simply imagined out of existence.

On December 7, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released the report “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” Authored by climatologist Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona, geologist Dr. Robert Carter, former head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia, and physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, emeritus professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and NIPCC founder, the new report totally refutes the claims of climate alarmists. For example, the NIPCC report states:

• “There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.”

• “Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late-20th-century surface warming lay outside normal natural variability.”

• “No evidence exists that … [a future warming of 2°C] would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.”

• “No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”

• “GCMs systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to CO2.”

• “Significant correlations exist between climate … and solar activity over the past few hundred years…Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions.”

• “Melting of Arctic sea ice and polar icecaps is not occurring at ‘unnatural’ rates.”

• “Sea-level rise is not accelerating.”

• “No convincing relationship has been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in extreme weather events.”

The naïve crusade to stop the world’s climate from changing would be laughable were it not for the cost. The November 2015 report of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative shows that $395 billion was spent in 2014 on climate finance. Of this, only 6 percent went to adaptation, helping vulnerable people adapt to real climate change today. The rest of the over $1 billion a day was spent on mitigation, trying to affect events that may, or may not, someday happen. Opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are beginning to regard letting people suffer today so as to possibly help those yet to be born as immoral.

After drinking the poison Captain Hook had intended for Peter Pan, Tinker Bell survived only because children across the world clapped loudly to show their belief in fairies. Activists clearly believe that the climate scare will also survive as long as politicians keep clapping. Its time they stopped and let this, the most expensive hoax in the history of science, die.

Monday, January 4, 2016

by TOM HARRIS

Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition. The NIPCC reports may be viewed at climatechangereconsidered.org.

Reproduced from:  https://www.independent.com/news/2016/jan/04/climate-change-expensive-hoax/

My opinion on climate change: the facts of reality.

 1) The biosphere, that is, an area of ​​the planet Earth where vital processes predominate, is a thin layer of just over 10 kilometers thick. In astronomical and geological terms it is a fragile environment that needs to be systematically and preventively observed by the human societies that inhabit it.

2) Precisely, the growing and cumulative presence of human societies in the biosphere is producing effects at local and regional levels. There are modifications of ecosystems, bodies and water courses and the composition and behavior of the atmosphere in their lower layers.

3) On a global level, there are also effects although it is much more difficult to identify and evaluate them.

4) The composition of the atmosphere is undergoing variations, one of the most important is the increase in CO2 that went from 0.03% to 0.04% in the last 100 years.

5) This increase may be due to the widespread use of mineral fuels, although it may also be partly due to volcanic emissions and the release of dissolved CO2 in the oceans.

6) C02 is a greenhouse gas that can have an effect by increasing the global temperature.

7) At the same time CÖ2 (which is not a contaminant but a nutrient) has the effect of increasing plant production with (positive) impact on natural vegetation and crops.

8) Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas (produces heating) much more than CO2, but when condensed in clouds, it generates the opposite effect. For that reason the dynamics of atmospheric water is extremely important in the definition of meteorological processes and climatic trends.

9) Human action has thrown huge amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere, especially in arid and industrial and urban regions.

10) Aerosols function as dew points of water vapor forming clouds, which are generally not rain clouds.

11) The clouds have a strong albedo (reflective capacity of radiation) so, as we indicated before, they produce cooling.

12) The combined impacts of aerosols and greenhouse gases are offset. It is difficult to know if the final effect is heating or cooling.

13) Glaciers are melting in some places (Antarctic Peninsula, Greenland) but ice is increasing in thickness in the center of Antarctica. The overall balance of ice melting is difficult to measure but is probably negative. It requires confirmation.

14) Ocean levels have been rising 2 mm per year measured by satellites. It can be estimated that this increase corresponds to about 20 cm per century. So there is no urgency to take radical measures on the coasts but long-term (centuries) decisions may be necessary.

15) These changes in ocean levels are difficult to perceive locally because there are continental areas that emerge and others that submerge for geological reasons.

16) On the other hand, geological records show that this rise is small compared to the rise in ocean levels at the end of the ice age about 11,000 to 10,000 years ago and in other geological periods.

17) Global warming is not proven. Urban areas have increased where there is indeed a rise in local temperature relative to adjacent rural areas. In less populated areas and oceans that warming has not been effectively measured. There may be some thermal variation but it is very difficult to register. The thermal behaviors at ground level are very variable depending on the relief and the atmospheric circulation. At the level of a few thousand meters (satellite measurements) it has not been proven.

18) The frequency or intensity of hurricanes has not increased.

19) All of the above does not mean that there is no climate change. Without a doubt there are a local and regional changes and surely there are also global changes but these last ones would be changes that require many decades and even centuries to register and evaluate,

20) On a scale of centuries, or perhaps millennia, then, human action can modify the atmosphere so as to make it detrimental to human life and some kinds of higher organisms.

21) The reduction of CO2 generation and the aerosol emission can be measures that could reduce the magnitude of these changes.

22) Pollution of inland waters and coastal areas has no major effect globally but can cause serious damage to aquatic life and the human societies that depend on it.

23) Other changes in the atmosphere (eg increased acidity expressed in acid rain, concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, etc.) have local or regional effect but their incidence at the level Global does not seem significant.

24) Based on the above, and particularly considering the geological record of paleoclimates, it can be presumed that global climate change would indeed be taking place but this change may be very slow (on a scale of many decades or centuries) and what is more significant, very difficult to measure.

25) In short, although there is no place for immediate alarm, it is necessary to define objectives and methods, based on scientific data (and not on catastrophic journalistic information) where political authorities can consider appropriate medium and long-term strategies.

26) In order to develop and implement them, a complex of corporate and political interests must be overcome to whom these strategies may harm.

27) In all of the above, we have not considered the implications that geopolitical and social inequalities would have on the development of possible strategies required, including land use changes (eg deforestation), increased runoff, decreased or increased evaporation and human migrations.

Danilo Anton

September 28, 2019

Climate Change: An Expensive Hoax

Activists Live in a Neverland of Climate Prediction

For many, 2015 was the year the United Nations and governments around the world abandoned rational thought about climate change. Rather than focus on preparing for the very real problems of a continually changing climate, they concentrated instead on the politically correct, but scientifically impossible goal of “stopping climate change.” The whole lot of them seem to have been transported to Neverland.

Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie tells us that Neverlands are found in the minds of children. There, with the assistance of fairy dust, Peter Pan can fly and teach children to ignore their common sense and soar as well. Peter claims greatness, is able to feel danger when it is near, and can even imagine things into existence. There is almost nothing the hero of Neverland cannot do, provided he stays childlike and forgets everything he learned about the real world.

Reality for the UN and most politicians is now more determined by what Al Gore and other equally imaginative climate activists say than what real world science and observational evidence actually shows. December’s United Nations climate conference in Paris is a case in point.

Sounding more like an episode out of Barrie’s fairy tale than a serious meeting of world leaders, politicians pledged to prevent “global temperature” from rising more than two degrees Celsius. That we are as yet unable to meaningfully forecast climate decades in advance, let alone control it, didn’t matter. They simply ignored the fact that every climate prediction the UN has ever made has turned out to be wrong. Humankind has a global thermostat, they imagine.

Delegates believed that scientists have Peter Pan–like powers to sense climate danger decades in advance. They dream that today’s global climate models (GCM), simulations that utterly failed to forecast the current 18-year “pause” in warming, provide lawmakers with the “unequivocal” knowledge they need to enact trillion-dollar energy policies.

To back up their extraordinary claims, we are told that there is an “overwhelming consensus” of scientists who agree with the UN’s position. Thousands of well-qualified skeptics are simply imagined out of existence.

On December 7, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released the report “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” Authored by climatologist Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona, geologist Dr. Robert Carter, former head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia, and physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, emeritus professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and NIPCC founder, the new report totally refutes the claims of climate alarmists. For example, the NIPCC report states:

• “There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.”

• “Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late-20th-century surface warming lay outside normal natural variability.”

• “No evidence exists that … [a future warming of 2°C] would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.”

• “No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”

• “GCMs systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to CO2.”

• “Significant correlations exist between climate … and solar activity over the past few hundred years…Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions.”

• “Melting of Arctic sea ice and polar icecaps is not occurring at ‘unnatural’ rates.”

• “Sea-level rise is not accelerating.”

• “No convincing relationship has been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in extreme weather events.”

The naïve crusade to stop the world’s climate from changing would be laughable were it not for the cost. The November 2015 report of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative shows that $395 billion was spent in 2014 on climate finance. Of this, only 6 percent went to adaptation, helping vulnerable people adapt to real climate change today. The rest of the over $1 billion a day was spent on mitigation, trying to affect events that may, or may not, someday happen. Opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are beginning to regard letting people suffer today so as to possibly help those yet to be born as immoral.

After drinking the poison Captain Hook had intended for Peter Pan, Tinker Bell survived only because children across the world clapped loudly to show their belief in fairies. Activists clearly believe that the climate scare will also survive as long as politicians keep clapping. Its time they stopped and let this, the most expensive hoax in the history of science, die.

Monday, January 4, 2016

by TOM HARRIS

Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition. The NIPCC reports may be viewed at climatechangereconsidered.org.

Reproduced from:  https://www.independent.com/news/2016/jan/04/climate-change-expensive-hoax/

Climate Change: An Expensive Hoax

Activists Live in a Neverland of Climate Prediction

For many, 2015 was the year the United Nations and governments around the world abandoned rational thought about climate change. Rather than focus on preparing for the very real problems of a continually changing climate, they concentrated instead on the politically correct, but scientifically impossible goal of “stopping climate change.” The whole lot of them seem to have been transported to Neverland.

Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie tells us that Neverlands are found in the minds of children. There, with the assistance of fairy dust, Peter Pan can fly and teach children to ignore their common sense and soar as well. Peter claims greatness, is able to feel danger when it is near, and can even imagine things into existence. There is almost nothing the hero of Neverland cannot do, provided he stays childlike and forgets everything he learned about the real world.

Reality for the UN and most politicians is now more determined by what Al Gore and other equally imaginative climate activists say than what real world science and observational evidence actually shows. December’s United Nations climate conference in Paris is a case in point.

Sounding more like an episode out of Barrie’s fairy tale than a serious meeting of world leaders, politicians pledged to prevent “global temperature” from rising more than two degrees Celsius. That we are as yet unable to meaningfully forecast climate decades in advance, let alone control it, didn’t matter. They simply ignored the fact that every climate prediction the UN has ever made has turned out to be wrong. Humankind has a global thermostat, they imagine.

Delegates believed that scientists have Peter Pan–like powers to sense climate danger decades in advance. They dream that today’s global climate models (GCM), simulations that utterly failed to forecast the current 18-year “pause” in warming, provide lawmakers with the “unequivocal” knowledge they need to enact trillion-dollar energy policies.

To back up their extraordinary claims, we are told that there is an “overwhelming consensus” of scientists who agree with the UN’s position. Thousands of well-qualified skeptics are simply imagined out of existence.

On December 7, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released the report “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” Authored by climatologist Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona, geologist Dr. Robert Carter, former head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia, and physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, emeritus professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and NIPCC founder, the new report totally refutes the claims of climate alarmists. For example, the NIPCC report states:

• “There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.”

• “Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late-20th-century surface warming lay outside normal natural variability.”

• “No evidence exists that … [a future warming of 2°C] would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.”

• “No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”

• “GCMs systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to CO2.”

• “Significant correlations exist between climate … and solar activity over the past few hundred years…Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions.”

• “Melting of Arctic sea ice and polar icecaps is not occurring at ‘unnatural’ rates.”

• “Sea-level rise is not accelerating.”

• “No convincing relationship has been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in extreme weather events.”

The naïve crusade to stop the world’s climate from changing would be laughable were it not for the cost. The November 2015 report of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative shows that $395 billion was spent in 2014 on climate finance. Of this, only 6 percent went to adaptation, helping vulnerable people adapt to real climate change today. The rest of the over $1 billion a day was spent on mitigation, trying to affect events that may, or may not, someday happen. Opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are beginning to regard letting people suffer today so as to possibly help those yet to be born as immoral.

After drinking the poison Captain Hook had intended for Peter Pan, Tinker Bell survived only because children across the world clapped loudly to show their belief in fairies. Activists clearly believe that the climate scare will also survive as long as politicians keep clapping. Its time they stopped and let this, the most expensive hoax in the history of science, die.

Monday, January 4, 2016

by TOM HARRIS

Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition. The NIPCC reports may be viewed at climatechangereconsidered.org.

Reproduced from:  https://www.independent.com/news/2016/jan/04/climate-change-expensive-hoax/

Climate Change: An Expensive Hoax

Activists Live in a Neverland of Climate Prediction

For many, 2015 was the year the United Nations and governments around the world abandoned rational thought about climate change. Rather than focus on preparing for the very real problems of a continually changing climate, they concentrated instead on the politically correct, but scientifically impossible goal of “stopping climate change.” The whole lot of them seem to have been transported to Neverland.

Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie tells us that Neverlands are found in the minds of children. There, with the assistance of fairy dust, Peter Pan can fly and teach children to ignore their common sense and soar as well. Peter claims greatness, is able to feel danger when it is near, and can even imagine things into existence. There is almost nothing the hero of Neverland cannot do, provided he stays childlike and forgets everything he learned about the real world.

Reality for the UN and most politicians is now more determined by what Al Gore and other equally imaginative climate activists say than what real world science and observational evidence actually shows. December’s United Nations climate conference in Paris is a case in point.

Sounding more like an episode out of Barrie’s fairy tale than a serious meeting of world leaders, politicians pledged to prevent “global temperature” from rising more than two degrees Celsius. That we are as yet unable to meaningfully forecast climate decades in advance, let alone control it, didn’t matter. They simply ignored the fact that every climate prediction the UN has ever made has turned out to be wrong. Humankind has a global thermostat, they imagine.

Delegates believed that scientists have Peter Pan–like powers to sense climate danger decades in advance. They dream that today’s global climate models (GCM), simulations that utterly failed to forecast the current 18-year “pause” in warming, provide lawmakers with the “unequivocal” knowledge they need to enact trillion-dollar energy policies.

To back up their extraordinary claims, we are told that there is an “overwhelming consensus” of scientists who agree with the UN’s position. Thousands of well-qualified skeptics are simply imagined out of existence.

On December 7, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released the report “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” Authored by climatologist Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona, geologist Dr. Robert Carter, former head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia, and physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, emeritus professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and NIPCC founder, the new report totally refutes the claims of climate alarmists. For example, the NIPCC report states:

• “There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.”

• “Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late-20th-century surface warming lay outside normal natural variability.”

• “No evidence exists that … [a future warming of 2°C] would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.”

• “No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”

• “GCMs systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to CO2.”

• “Significant correlations exist between climate … and solar activity over the past few hundred years…Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions.”

• “Melting of Arctic sea ice and polar icecaps is not occurring at ‘unnatural’ rates.”

• “Sea-level rise is not accelerating.”

• “No convincing relationship has been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in extreme weather events.”

The naïve crusade to stop the world’s climate from changing would be laughable were it not for the cost. The November 2015 report of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative shows that $395 billion was spent in 2014 on climate finance. Of this, only 6 percent went to adaptation, helping vulnerable people adapt to real climate change today. The rest of the over $1 billion a day was spent on mitigation, trying to affect events that may, or may not, someday happen. Opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are beginning to regard letting people suffer today so as to possibly help those yet to be born as immoral.

After drinking the poison Captain Hook had intended for Peter Pan, Tinker Bell survived only because children across the world clapped loudly to show their belief in fairies. Activists clearly believe that the climate scare will also survive as long as politicians keep clapping. Its time they stopped and let this, the most expensive hoax in the history of science, die.

Tom Harris

Monday, January 4, 2016

Tom Harris is executive director of the  International Climate Science Coalition. The NIPCC reports may be viewed at climatechangereconsidered.org.