Guest opinion by Leo Goldstein

One of the most popular alarmist arguments is likening the “consensus climate scientists”  to medical doctors.  For example, this essay on “climate denial” from Andrew Winston at medium.com took part in the bashing of recently hired climate skeptic Brett Stevens at the NYT, saying:

Imagine your doctor tells you that you have dangerously high cholesterol and blocked arteries. She says you may drop dead soon. [Note: Based on comments/questions, I should clarify here. By “doctor”, I mean the entire medical establishment. So imagine you got not just a “second opinion,” but 100 opinions…and 97 say the same thing].You might have four basic reactions based on two dimensions, belief (or doubt) in the basic facts/science, and whether you commit to action or delay.

Refutation of this fallacy is confounded by the fact that there are two distinct problems: miscommunication of science and the intentional corruption of science. The former one has persisted for over 30 years while the latter one became noticeable in the late 90’s and has been growing ever since.

Most climate alarmists’ knowledge of science comes from TV shows like “The Big Bang Theory.”  But the differences between the relationships they have with medical doctors and the ones they have with putative climate scientists can be easily explained even to them.

1. A medical doctor is a highly-qualified professional.  Medical doctors must successfully complete a medical school, spend 3-7 years in residency actually treating patients, and be licensed by a state medical board composed mostly of proven doctors.

In contrast, anybody can call him- or herself a scientist and speak on behalf of science.  There are no licensing or certification requirements.  Enviro-activists and certain media personalities have been abusing this freedom for decades.  Unfortunately, a terminal degree and affiliation with a formerly prestigious university or institution cannot serve as evidence that a person is a scientist.

2. A medical doctor is accountable.  A doctor would lose patients or be fired if his or her advice isn’t sound.  A doctor can also be sued by a dissatisfied patient.  In a number of cases, doctors have been indicted.

A putative climate scientist can hardly even be criticized.  Remember how a mere investigation of the misconduct by Michael Mann caused pandemonium.  News media shouted about infringement of academic freedom (although the Constitution does not provide for any academic privileges, and the Article I, Section 9 might be interpreted to explicitly prohibit grant of such privileges).  Nevertheless, perceived academic immunity is widely abused by con scientists and leftist operatives in universities and research institutions.

3. Patients have direct bidirectional communication with their doctor.  “Direct” means that the patient usually speaks face-to-face with the doctor.  “Bi-directional” means the patient can ask the doctor questions and get answers.  Very few accept TV personalities’ talk as real medical advice.

The so-called “climate science” is usually communicated to the public in third person point of view like “The scientists say that …”, “Majority of peer-reviewed articles conclude …”, and even “Models show that …” These used to be typical introductory clauses before statements about alleged climate dangers.  Recently, climate alarmists dropped those qualifying statements together with any pretense for honesty.  They are actors, media personalities, politicians, and other people who are as far from science as one can be.  Communication with “climate science communicators” is always one-sided.  When faced with non-rehearsed questions they assuredly fail, causing laughs among climate realists.

4. One takes initiative to seek a doctor, rather than the other way around. Any unsolicited email offering a medical procedure or a wonder pill is sent straight to the spam folder.

But climate alarmism promoters always come unsolicited!  That started with James Hansen, who made a front page article in the NY Times in 1981 while the possibility of future harm from carbon dioxide release was being considered by the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee.  After that, every time real scientists rejected alarm in scientific proceedings, the environmentalists invited themselves to the media and shouted about impending catastrophe that could only be avoided if we repented and did whatever they told us to do.  Then, they chased out most real scientists from climate-related research and declared that there is scientific consensus in favor of alarmism.

5. Doctors do not demand patients to trust them.  They earn their trust.

Climate alarmists demand trust because they have earned mistrust.

I would like to finish by paraphrasing Edmund Burke:

Alleged science looks for defense from Washington when it fails in the real world.

Justin Trudeau, author Radio Television Malacañang (RTVM), source Wikimedia.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Auditor General Michael Ferguson has complained to the Canadian Parliament that the finance ministry refused to hand over documents required for him to complete an audit of Canadian fossil fuel subsidies.

Canada blocked climate change audit: official

May 16, 2017 by Michel Comte

Canada’s auditor general blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government Tuesday for effectively blocking an audit of efforts to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies in the fight against climate change.

…

But Ferguson said the finance ministry, which was tasked with identifying subsidies, refused to hand over key documents for analysis, citing cabinet confidentiality.

…

“We found that Finance Canada still had not defined what an inefficient fossil fuel subsidy was, nor could the department tell us how many inefficient fossil fuel subsidies there could be,” Ferguson said in prepared remarks.

…

Read more: http://ift.tt/2pHHvpK

Prime Minister Trudeau is big on climate rhetoric, and frequently accuses his opponents of not taking climate change seriously, but his curious climate lapses have led to formerly enthusiastic climate activists attacking his government’s policies.

Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet

Bill McKibben

Donald Trump is a creep and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite when it comes to climate change.

Donald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away – especially now that he’s discovered bombs. But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything. Don’t believe me? Look one country north, at Justin Trudeau.

Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over.

But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington.

…

Read more: http://ift.tt/2omfui0

Prime Minister Trudeau has also been criticised for his extravagant lifestyle, his personal carbon footprint.

Normally greens seem to overlook the carbon sins of their leaders, for example greens never really kicked up a fuss about Al Gore’s $30,000 / year home electricity bill.

But Prime Minister Trudeau has taken blatant environmental hypocrisy to a new level – his utter disregard for his supporter’s sensibilities has really tested the limits of green tolerance for their carbon swilling leaders.

PM’s use of jet for family vacation emitted as much CO2 as average Canadian per year

Josh Dehaas, CTVNews.ca Writer

Published Friday, January 20, 2017 5:48PM EST

The use of a military jet for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s two-week family vacation on the Aga Khan’s private island pumped about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the average emitted per capita in Canada each year.

Trudeau’s use of the Challenger to fly his family and a nanny from Ottawa to Nassau, Bahamas over the New Year holiday and back consumed about 9,100 litres of jet fuel, according to the Department of National Defence.

Christopher Surgenor, who runs the environmental aviation website GreenAir, calculated that the trip would have therefore created about 23.3 tonnes of CO2.

…

http://ift.tt/2jJjybj

In a way all this is funny – watching Trudeau in action is like watching an out of control laboratory experiment, one of those weird chemical reactions which ends up fizzing all over the bench.

But in a broader context the rank hypocrisy displayed by politicians like Trudeau damages faith in democracy, and potentially undermines the stability of the Canadian state. I utterly disagree with many of Trudeau’s political positions, at least his stated positions, but Canadian voters should have received the government they thought they were electing. There is no point in voting, if you believe none of the politicians on offer will keep their promises.

Guest essay by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels

It’s hard to say how many punny posts we came up with using those words when Carol Browner was Bill Clinton’s EPA Administrator, but here we use it in the context of a recent Science paper by J-F. Busteri and 30 named coauthors assisted by 239 volunteers. It found, looking at global drylands (about 40% of land areas fall into this category), that we had undercounted global forest cover by a whopping “at least 9%”.

239 people were required to examine over 210,000 0.5 hectare (1.2 acre) sample plots in GoogleEarth, and classify the cover as open or forested. Thing of being condemned to looking at that many satellite views of real estate. Anyway, Here’s the resultant cool map:

This has been the subject of a jillion recent stories, blog posts, tweets and whatever concerning Bastin et al. So let’s add a bit more value here.

Last year, Zaichin Zhu and 31 coauthors published a remarkable analysis of global vegetation change since satellite sensors became operational in the late 1970s. The vast majority of the globe’s vegetated area is greening, with 25-50% of that area showing a statistically significant change, while only 4% of the vegetated area is significantly browning. Here’s the mind-boggling map:

Trends in Leaf Area Index, 1978-2009. Positive tones are greening, negative are browning, and the dots delineate where the changes are statistically significant. There is approximately 9 times more area significantly greening up than browning down.

Hope your sitting down for the money quote:

We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models show that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend…

And the other greening driver that stood out from the statistical noise was—you guessed it—climate change.

Now, just for fun, toggle back and forth between the two maps. As you can see, virtually every place where there’s newly detected forest is greening, and a large number of these are doing it in a statistically significant fashion. This leads to a remarkable hypothesis—that one of the reasons the forested regions were undercounted in previous surveys (among other reasons) is that there wasn’t enough vegetation present to meet Bastin’s criterion for “forest”, which is greater than 10% tree cover, and carbon dioxide and global warming changed that.

References:

Bastin, F-L., et al., 2017. The extent of forest in dryland biomes. Science 356, 635-638.

Zhu, Z., et al., 2016. Greening of the earth and its drivers. Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038