Climate Change

The Other Climate Theory

In April 1990, Al Gore published an open letter in the New York Times "To Skeptics on Global Warming" in which he compared them to medieval flat-Earthers.

He soon became vice president and his conviction that climate change was dominated by man-made emissions went mainstream. Western governments embarked on a new era of anti-emission regulation and poured billions into research that might justify it. As far as the average Western politician was concerned, the debate was over.

But a few physicists weren't worrying about Al Gore in the 1990s. They were theorizing about another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from outer space, or "cosmic rays," whose atmospheric levels appear to rise and fall with the weakness or strength of solar winds that deflect them from the earth.

These shifts might significantly impact the type and quantity of clouds covering the earth, providing a clue to one of the least-understood but most important questions about climate. Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.

The global warmists’ dam breaks

A graph they'd prefer you not to notice.

Tucked away near the end of online supplementary material, and omitted from the printed CLOUD paper in Nature, it clearly shows how cosmic rays promote the formation of clusters of molecules (“particles”) that in the real atmosphere can grow and seed clouds. In an early-morning experimental run at CERN, starting at 03.45, ultraviolet light began making sulphuric acid molecules in the chamber, while a strong electric field cleansed the air of ions. It also tended to remove molecular clusters made in the neutral environment (n) but some of these accumulated at a low rate.

As soon as the electric field was switched off at 04.33, natural cosmic rays (gcr) raining down through the roof of the experimental hall in Geneva helped to build clusters at a higher rate. How do we know they were contributing? Because when, at 04.58, CLOUD simulated stronger cosmic rays with a beam of charged pion particles (ch) from the accelerator, the rate of cluster production became faster still.

2010 Was the Warmest Year on Record - rebuttal

Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.

Why Most Published Research Findings are False

Those aren’t my words — it’s the title of a 2005 article, brought to my attention by Cal Beisner, which uses probability theory to “prove” that “…most claimed research findings are false”. While the article comes from the medical research field, it is sufficiently general that some of what it discusses can be applied to global warming research as well.

I would argue that the situation is even worse for what I consider to the central theory of the climate change debate: that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere causes significant warming of the climate system. Two corollaries of that theory are that (1) the warming we have seen in recent decades is human-caused, and (2) significant warming will continue into the future as we keep using fossil fuels.

IPCC Green Doctor Prescribes End to Democracy to Solve Global Warming

Professor David Shearman, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences and Law School. Professor Shearman was an Assessor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report and the Fourth Assessment Report. (1)

Shearman has penned several books on global warming, such as ‘Climate Change as a Crisis in World Civilization: Why We Must Totally Transform How We Live’ and ‘The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy’. His argument is that overpopulation and industrialization are causing an ecological disaster which requires a total change of lifestyle for everyone on the planet. As democracy isn’t up to the challenge, an authoritarian government must (obviously) be imposed to save us from ourselves.

Let’s take a look at one of those books, ‘The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy’, which Shearman co-authored with Joseph Wayne Smith. (2)

The 12 C's of Climate Alarmism

Today's report about political developments surrounding the global warming issue is brought to you by the letter "C."

C is for "carbon dioxide." Environmental extremists and major news journalists call this gas that is exhaled by all animals, and that is food for plants, a dangerous pollutant. Yet we would all die without it. That makes me sad.
C is for "climate change." It used to be called global warming, which many activists with a socialist bent warned would bring more catastrophic weather events, elevating seas, and economic ruin. They said because humans continue to produce greater amounts of carbon dioxide -- a "greenhouse gas" -- that they are causing global temperatures to rise. They mostly blame the humans' burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil for increasing this dangerous CO2.

But now because the planet isn't warming in conjunction with these CO2 increases, the activists call it "climate change" instead. That way they can still justify trying to make us stop using fossil fuels, without regard for what the weather does.

Inconvenient nonsense infiltrates the classroom

IN 2006, former US vice-president Al Gore made a movie and companion book about global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. Gore undertook many speaking tours to publicise his film, and his PowerPoint slide show has been shown by thousands of his acolytes spreading a relentless message of warming alarmism across the globe.

But while audiences reacted positively and emotionally to the film's message - which was that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming - some independent scientists pointed out that An Inconvenient Truth represented well-made propaganda for the warming cause and presented an unreliable, biased account of climate science.

For nowhere in his film does Gore say that the phenomena he describes falls within the natural range of environmental change on our planet. Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.

The Nobel Divide and the Climate Divide

Here’s a look at new science revealing the deep internal biases shaping how people regard research on global warming, and a riff on how that’s reflected among winners of the physics Nobel Prize. (Can you guess which of the Nobelists pictured here are convinced that humans are, or aren’t, dangerously fiddling with the planet’s thermostat? Answers below.)

Fascinating new research highlighted by the National Science Foundation a few days ago provides support for something that many Dot Earth readers know all too well: Deep-rooted cultural predispositions powerfully shape people’s perceptions of scientific findings.

The paper, “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus,” was written by Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, University of Oklahoma political science professor Hank Jenkins-Smith and Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University, and is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Risk Research. The focus of the research was information and attitudes on climate change, nuclear waste disposal and data on the merits of concealed handguns. (The Cultural Cognition Project site has a lot more background.)

Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself

Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments – and people generally – should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict.” Yet, the Earth is still here. “It’s a survivor.”

Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.” For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.

Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future,” he says, “not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control.” Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.

A Green Retreat

Just three years ago the politics of global warming was enjoying its golden moment. The release in 2006 of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, had riveted global audiences with its predictions of New York and Miami under 20 feet of water. Within 12 months, leading politicians with real power were on board. Germany’s Angela Merkel, dubbed the “climate chancellor” by her country’s press, arranged a Greenland photo op with a melting iceberg and promised to cut Europe’s emissions by 20 percent by 2020. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called climate change a scourge equal to fascism, offered 60 percent by 2050. In December 2007, the world got its very first green leader. Harnessing the issue of climate change, Kevin Rudd became prime minister of Australia, ready to take on what he called “the biggest political, economic, and moral challenge of our times.” Now, almost everywhere, green politics has fallen from its lofty heights.