From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

BY CHRIS MORRISON

The recent and concerning collapse of the once revered scientific process in large parts of the climate change and medical community is detailed in a highly critical ‘open review’ paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Someday, charge the authors, there will need to be an inquiry into how so many scientific bodies abandoned core principles of scientific integrity, took strong positions on unsettled science, took people’s word for things uncritically, and silenced those who tried to continue the scientific endeavour.

Universities have abandoned their historical role of open and disinterested enquiry on behalf of humanity, and “should be sanctioned for this by revoking their charitable status”. Group-think that maintains prevailing fads and supresses dissent on behalf of alleged ‘consensus’ is the opposite of the central purpose of universities. Mainstream media have long been uncritical receptacles for alarmist ‘clickbait’ political scare stories, and this, it might be added, encourages self-promotion among aggressive publicity-hungry scientists. There are many errors and deceptions and much censorship, state the authors, blighting the complete story being told in an unbiased manner. Singling out the behaviour of state broadcaster the BBC, they note: “Any reasonable observer will wonder whether Ofcom [the state regulator] is asleep at the wheel, not requiring the BBC to correct the errors it has been made aware of by experts, nor return to some form of neutrality.”

The report is mainly written by Professor Michael Kelly, the former Prince Philip Professor of Engineering, Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, and Clive Hambler, Science Lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford. There is also economic input from Professor Roger Koppl from Syracuse University. The full GWPF report is due to be published in December and the paper is currently open for review, comments and contributions from other academics. The GWPF notes habitual attacks on its work from activists, and its ‘open review’ policy is explained here.

The realisation that genuine free speech and scientific enquiry is being replaced by strict politicised requirements to adhere to orthodoxy and pre-set narratives grows with every appalling ‘climategate’-style scandal. Regular readers will need little reminding of the recent retraction of the Alimonti et al. paper by Springer Nature following a year-long campaign by a small group of activist scientists and journalists. The paper, whose lead author was Professor of Physics Gianluca Alimonti, reviewed past weather trends and found no data to support the politically-termed ‘climate emergency’. World headlines have also been devoted to the astonishing story of Dr. Patrick Brown of Johns Hopkins University, who blew the whistle on his recent paper published in Nature on California wildfires. He said he wrote it according to the approved script boosting the role of ‘climate change’ and downplaying any natural causes and the horrendous role played by arsonists.

The full publication of the GWPF paper will add to the growing concern and alarm about the science advice given to governments and the media for onward distribution to the public. The corruptions involved in this process are seemingly built into the current system. Trillions of dollars now back the Net Zero collectivisation project across the world, and most scientists, largely paid for by politicians and wealthy green elites, are fully onboard the gravy train.

The GWPF authors aim to push back by maximising the diversity of advice, challenging advice through opposing ‘red’ teams, ensuring a reasonable level of accountability for scientists to discourage hype, and protecting scientists from career damage if they rationally disagree with mainstream views. Institutions should not take official positions on scientific issues, “since this stifles diversity of thought, freedom of speech and the reliability of advice”. Scepticism must be recovered as a respectful term for scientific behaviour from its present position as an insult, “and reinstated as a core duty of universities and learned societies”, demand the authors.

The authors are particularly dismissive of the role of computer models in the recent Covid pandemic and the promotion of climate change alarm. In the U.K., the “gross misuse” of Covid computer models in the absence of robust data to measure them against is noted. Along with a “paucity of challenge” to scientific advice, this may have contributed to “death tolls, economic decline and societal ills”.

On the climate side, the models have produced temperature forecasts two to three times higher than the actual data eventually showed. What is worse is that the results are getting more inaccurate. If the models were actually modelling the evolving climate, the gap would be narrowing. The inaccuracy is a “major embarrassment” and would not be tolerated in any other field of science, and certainly not in engineering. Separation of human-induced warming from natural temperature variation is far more difficult than that portrayed by the UN-funded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC), since experimentation and replication is “simply not possible”. The inability to model significant parts of the atmosphere are “fatal flaws” in any system that is supposed to be predicting future climate change.

Yet, as regular readers will again recall, computer models play a vital part in promoting the unhinged Thermogeddon fantasies of people like the UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘global boiling’ Guterres. The UN-backed IPCC seems addicted to using computer models incorporating a ‘pathway’ of 5°C global warming within less than 80 years. Over 40% of its impact predictions are based on this forecast, despite an admission it is of “low likelihood”. According to a recent Clintel report, over 50% of clickbait climate science papers incorporate this pathway in a seemingly desperate attempt to attract the attention of activists writing in the mainstream media.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.

First posted on ClimateREALISM

On September 8^th, 2023, The New York Times (NYT) ran an article titled “DeSantis, Leading a State Menaced by Climate Change, Shrugs Off the Threat.” If DeSantis is, in fact, shrugging off the threat of climate change, he is right to do so. Data shows that the extreme weather events that DeSantis is dealing with not historically unique or even rare, but rather they are part of normal weather during the hurricane season in Florida. In other words, recent hurricane activity in the state under DeSantis’ administration are not indicative of climate change. Also, concerning Florida sea level rise in some areas, that is due to local conditions like land subsidence and rapid water withdrawals from local aquifers, not climate change.

The NYT article opined:

Now running for president five years later, the Florida governor no longer repeats his previous view that humans affect the climate, even as scientists say that the hurricanes battering his state are being intensified by man-made global warming. Those storms include Hurricane Idalia, which killed three people this month, and last year’s catastrophic Hurricane Ian, which killed 150 Floridians.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has promised to ramp up domestic oil and gas production and fight against mandates on the introduction of electric vehicles — the kinds of steps that could worsen the sea-level rise that is flooding coastal cities in Florida and around the world. Mr. DeSantis says he is simply being realistic about the country’s economic and national security needs.

The NYT is wrong to blame climate change for Hurricanes Idalia and Ian. Climate Realism provided data-based rebuttals to the Hurricane Ian claims here. Climate at a Glance provides a solid refutation to the false claims that climate change is increasing hurricanes overall – the data says otherwise.

Most importantly, Florida, America’s most hurricane-prone state, recently underwent its longest period in recorded history without any hurricanes. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in their AR6 report, Chapter 11, Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate there is no detection or attribution of a climate change signal in hurricane data.

Data shows no link between climate change and hurricanes, but more importantly, individual hurricanes are weather events, and not climate events, which further refute NYT’s claims. Weather is not climate, and the two operate on completely different timescales.

On the issue of Hurricane Idalia, the NYT noted, “Mr. Biden seemed to weigh in last weekend during a visit to Florida after Idalia. “Nobody intelligent can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” he said.”

But DeSantis fired back with: “The idea that we’ve not had powerful storms until recently, that’s just not factually true,” he said, adding that Democrats were trying to “politicize the weather.”

In the conflict between data, which clearly demonstrate that hurricanes aren’t getting worse and alarming but patently false claims made by the likes of the NYT and President Biden that hurricanes are worsening, science says follow the data not assertions made in furtherance of a political agenda.

On the issue of sea-level rise, one of the most commonly cited issues about Florida is flooding in Miami. The NYT itself has posted several stories on this topic, and they all missed the main cause for the problem, which isn’t rising seas due to climate change, but land subsidence.

Much of Miami was built on reclaimed swamp land, and then built up with modern infrastructure. That extra weight causes a sinking of the land, known as subsidence, allowing seawater to seep in when the surfaces sink to near sea-level. It also means that during strong rainfall events, and hurricane storm surge, areas of Miami that have subsided don’t drain as they did years before, resulting in flooding.

This is clearly addressed in the scientific paper Land subsidence contribution to coastal flooding hazard in southeast Florida, published in Proceedings of IAHS in 2020.

Governor DeSantis seems to be better informed on the issue of climate change and Florida than either the NYT or Biden, sticking to reality, supported by what the data says, rather than responding to the clearly false claims of worsening weather and sea-level rise for the state.

In short, DeSantis is right to “shrug off” the climate hype and focus instead on the real problems facing Florida. Doing so might reduce the chances of sea water incursion and subsidence, and minimize damage done by hurricanes undoubtedly instore for the state in the future. Ending fossil fuel use in the vain quest to control the climate will do neither.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

From the DAILY CALLER

NICK POPE
CONTRIBUTOR

In order to facilitate electric vehicle (EV) production, the U.S. is seeking to spend taxpayer dollars to develop cobalt supply chains from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country which is known for high prevalence of unsafe child labor in its mines, many of which are controlled by Chinese interests, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are jointly committing $23 million in taxpayer funds to U.S. firms and other mining companies to integrate local Congolese operations and “artisanal” mines into their supply chains, as well as to improve labor standards for miners in the DRC, which are essentially nonexistent in most cases, according to the WSJ. Chinese-controlled interests dominate the DRC’s cobalt industry, refining about 75% of the global cobalt supply and manufacturing approximately 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which are cobalt-intensive products that power EVs.

Cobalt is one of the key materials needed to build batteries for EVs, a technology which the Biden administration is pursuing aggressively as a pillar of its sweeping climate agenda, according to the Cobalt Institute. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed stringent new tailpipe emissions standards in April which would effectively require American automobile manufacturers to have their new fleets be 67% EVs after model year 2032, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled a proposal to update the Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements that would, if finalized, amount to “an EV mandate,” Dan Kish, senior fellow for the Institute for Energy Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time. (RELATED: Chinese EV Company Buys Up Michigan Land For Battery Factory Despite Public Backlash)

People can’t afford EVs https://t.co/TUQVoIK032

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 18, 2023

Widespread adoption of EVs is set to facilitate the Biden administration’s goal of having the U.S. economy reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The idea behind the spending is to incentivize American technology companies and auto manufacturers to invest in establishing safer and more ethical Congolese supply chains which will in turn bolster their businesses, but corporate concerns regarding security and governance in the country persist.

Nearly a third of the DRC’s cobalt is extracted by “artisanal” miners, meaning that the unearthed material and the mines it comes from are not contracted to any particular corporation, according to the WSJ. Western countries have historically tried to not rely on artisanal miners, who generally sell their ores to local merchants who then sell the product to corporations and refiners.

Hundreds of thousands of people labor as artisanal miners in the DRC, a figure which is much larger than the number of people employed by more established operations which utilize heavy machinery, according to the WSJ. There were about 40,000 children laboring in unsafe Congolese cobalt mines as of 2021, according to the Wilson Center.

Previous attempts by Western institutions, such as a Swiss company, to organize the DRC’s artisanal mining have so far resulted in failure, according to the WSJ.

Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey introduced the Countering China’s Exploitation of Strategic Metals and Minerals and Child and Forced Labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo Act in June, which would prohibit the importation of all products containing cobalt and lithium extracted by child miners and victims of labor trafficking in the DRC if it becomes law.

The White House, USAID and DOL all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

When the Sun comes up on a cloudless day, everything is so clearly illuminated. I know this to be a consequence of incoming solar radiation. And when I sit in this sunlight, I know that it will warm me.

Physicists who study heat transfer can explain how the incoming radiation in the visible spectrum becomes long wave radiation in the infrared spectrum, and how increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide can potentially trap this energy increasing the average temperature of the Earth.

There are two issues that technocrats, convinced of a climate catastrophe, obsess over:

1. Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity – how much temperatures will increase assuming a doubling of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, and

2. Net Zero – how reducing emissions can keep climate change to within 1.5 degrees Celsius.

As an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University and an expert on radiative transfer that concerns, amongst other things, the absorption of infrared radiation by carbon dioxide, Will Happer has the competency to calculate Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity from first principles.

Indeed, Professor Happer is perhaps more qualified, better credentialed, than anyone I have ever meet, and ever likely to meet, when it comes to calculating the likely effect of a doubling of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s temperature.

Not that we have a doubling yet, but that this is something the technocrats obsess over.

In a submission he made last year with Richard Lindzen concerning proposed changes to legislation enabling the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to force companies to disclose information on their supposed climate-related business risks he wrote:

‘Our informed scientific opinion is that doubling CO2 concentrations will cause about 1 C or less of warming.’

Last night in Perth, the professor explained the physics that results in the more precise value of a 0.75 C increase, should there be a doubling of carbon dioxide and that after that, the effect of a doubling again would be miniscule because of saturation.

According to Professor Happer there will be NO climate catastrophe from increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide because of the structure of the atmosphere and laws of physics.

If you would like to attend one of his Australian lectures, Prof. Happer will be speaking in:

Melbourne at the Ritz-Carlton on 15 September,
Sydney at the Four Seasons on 18 September, and in
Brisbane at the Sofitel, on 20 September.

Each event will start at 5:30 pm and there will be a Q&A session following.

Tickets to any of the IPA lectures may be purchased from www.ipa.org.au/events.

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The photograph featured at the top of this blog post was taken in King’s park Perth, just yesterday when I had the privilege of discussing the work Professor Happer did on spectroscopy for the US military going back many years now and how it informed his more practical approach to measuring the contribution of carbon dioxide to equilibrium climate sensitivity.