Phony Paris Climate Accord

If the promises made in Paris were pretty tepid, the performance of nations in meeting them has been equally bad. From New York Magazine:

Remember Paris? It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed — defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it — and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.

This week, the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions grew 1.7 percent in 2017, after an ambiguous couple of years optimists hoped represented a leveling off, or peak; instead, we’re climbing again. Even before the new spike, not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfill the commitments it made in the Paris treaty. To keep the planet under two degrees of warming — a level that was, not all that long ago, defined as the threshold of climate catastrophe — all signatory nations have to match or better those commitments. There are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines. This puts Donald Trump’s commitment to withdraw from the treaty in a useful perspective; in fact, his spite may ultimately prove perversely productive, since the evacuation of American leadership on climate seems to have mobilized China, eager to claim the mantle and far more consequential to the future of the planet because of its size and relative poverty, to adopt a much more aggressive posture toward climate. Of course those renewed Chinese commitments are, at this point, just rhetorical, too.

Of course, if the Paris Accord are something between a “farce” and a “fraud,” that doesn’t mean that a strong accord that works would be a bad idea.

But it does mean that the media and politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama have been, either through ignorance or mendacity or ideological bias, lying to the American people.

You Seriously Need to Ask Yourself That

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

We are fully aware that “weather” is not the same thing as “climate” — something that climate alarmists will loudly insist upon when the weather is cold.

Unfortunately, when it gets warm, or when there is a hurricane, or even when there are wildfires, the alarmists entirely forget that dictum. All of a sudden what’s happening right now is the “new normal” and clear evidence of a climate apocalypse. Which is why they fully deserve to be taunted during freezing weather.

Virtue Signalling: Marquette President Lovell Signs Letter on “Climate Change”

Global warming (euphemistically now called “climate change”) is a trendy issue among liberal, secular-leaning Catholics who aren’t comfortable with the Church’s position on issues like abortion, gay marriage, or the transgender agenda.

In a lot (probably most) cases they “aren’t comfortable” because, in their hearts of hearts, they are pretty much secular liberals, with perhaps just a bit of a residue of Catholic piety.

Thus is comes as no surprise that an organization called Catholic Climate Covenant has written a “Letter to President Trump and Members of United States Congress.” It demands “[o]n behalf of people who are poor and vulnerable and future generations” that the U.S. “fund the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; honor U.S. commitments to the Green Climate Fund; and meaningfully participate in the deliberations of the UNFCCC.”

It then piles on some religious rhetoric:

Catholic leaders across the nation and world have explicitly and consistently affirmed climate change as a moral issue that threatens core Catholic commitments, including to: protect human life, promote human dignity, exercise a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable, advance the common good, live in solidarity with future generations, and care for God’s creation which is our common home [italics in original].

Of course, Michael Lovell, President of Marquette, signed it.

So why not? He has a right to his opinion, doesn’t he?

But Brian Rosenberg, President of Macalester College, admits that:

The first and ultimately most important reason [for a university president] to steer clear from politics is educational.

Colleges are meant to function as places where there can be free and open discourse and sometimes passionate disagreement about a very wide range of issues, including the political. To the extent that the president, as the most visible spokesperson for the university, takes a political stance, she or he runs the risk of biasing or even limiting the expression of views by others on campus.

Rosenberg goes on to say that public statements are fine “when politicians actively undermine the core values by which our institutions live,” which he sees as justifying bashing Donald Trump. But stretching this dictum to rationalize popping off on any controversial issue is going way too far.

Further, it is controversial whether the Earth faces a climate catastrophe. Alarmists insist that “the debate is over.” But that’s untrue; indeed it’s pretty much a flat out lie. And it’s used to try to shut up and stifle dissenting opinions. No university president should sign onto the shutting down of debate. Especially when he is no expert on the issue at hand.

Who Signed the Statement

But the key to what is really going on is found in the list of presidents who signed the statement.  What kind of company does Lovell keep?

We can identify the institutions who are most committed to a real Catholic identity by consulting the Cardinal Newman Society’s list of “recommended” colleges and universities. These are institutions that take their Catholic identity very seriously and have resisted secularizing influences. Seventeen institutions are listed there, and the president of only one of them (Mount Saint Mary’s) signed the letter.

Perhaps some of the others disagree that a climate catastrophy is on the horizon. Or perhaps they don’t think it appropriate to speak on an issue on which they have no expertise. Or perhaps they feel no need for virtue signaling to impress secular elites.

The list of presidents who did sign is laced with the more secular institutions: DePaul, Fordham, Georgetown, Loyola (four different ones), Saint Louis University, Notre Dame, Xavier (Ohio).

Also interesting is the number of nuns who signed (the older orders have been a source of secular political activism in recent years, witness the “Nuns on the Bus”). And of course, the there are usual suspects among leftist activists (the Executive Director of Pax Christi, who happens to be a nun).

Speaking for the Poor

Particularly ironic is the claim to be speaking for the “poor and vulnerable.” In poor countries, the necessary path to raising people out of grinding poverty lies in more energy. And reasonably priced energy. Solar Panels and windmills aren’t going to do it.  At least, not for decades.

Ignoring this fact makes it easier for climate change crowd to feel very moral. And when we add Catholic rhetoric, secular-leaning Catholics not only get to feel moralistic but get to (for a change) claim they are doing something “Catholic.” For people like Michael Lovell, the temptation has to be overwhelming.

Paris Climate Accords: Nations Failing to Meet Goals

From Nature:

All major industrialized countries are failing to meet the pledges they made to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, warn David G. Victor and colleagues.

Beyond US President Donald Trump's decision in June to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a more profound challenge to the global climate pact is emerging. No major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges to control the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change.

Wishful thinking and bravado are eclipsing reality. Countries in the European Union are struggling to increase energy efficiency and renewable power to the levels that they claimed they would. Japan promised cuts in emissions to match those of its peers, but meeting the goals will cost more than the country is willing to pay. Even without Trump's attempts to roll back federal climate policy, the United States is shifting its economy to clean energy too slowly.

The Paris agreement offered, in theory, to reboot climate diplomacy by giving countries the flexibility to set their own commitments. As of July 2017, 153 countries have ratified the agreement — 147 of which have submitted pledges to reduce emissions, also known as nationally determined contributions. The idea is that as each country implements its own pledge, others can learn what is feasible, and that collaborative global climate protection will emerge. That logic, however, threatens to unravel because national governments are making promises that they are unable to honour.

So Donald Trump is supposedly derelict in pulling out of the Paris Accords. Other, more enlighten nations, not only stayed in, but chided Trump for pulling out.

So we guess rhetoric is more important than reality. If you virtue signal frequently and loudly enough, people won’t notice that you aren’t doing what you promised.

But that’s generally true of environmentalism.

Blaming “Climate Change” for Hurricane Harvey

When activists quit saying “global warming” and started saying “climate change” the purpose was clear. “Global warming” means the earth is getting warmer. But “climate change” can mean about any weather that happens. Drought. Floods. Hot weather. And (yes) cold weather.

And so the activists blame Hurricane Harvey on “climate change.”

But the science says otherwise. From the Wall Street Journal:

Activists, journalists and scientists have pounced on the still-unfolding disaster in Houston and along the Gulf Coast in an attempt to focus the policy discussion narrowly on climate change. Such single-issue myopia takes precious attention away from policies that could improve our ability to prepare for and respond to disasters. More thoughtful and effective disaster policies are needed because the future will bring many more weather disasters like Hurricane Harvey, with larger impacts than those of the recent past.

For many years, those seeking to justify carbon restrictions argued that hurricanes had become more common and intense. That hasn’t happened. Scientific assessments, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government’s latest National Climate Assessment, indicate no long-term increases in the frequency or strength of hurricanes in the U.S. Neither has there been an increase in floods, droughts and tornadoes, though heat waves and heavy precipitation have become more common.

Prior to Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm, the U.S. had gone a remarkable 12 years without being hit by a hurricane of Category 3 strength or stronger. Since 1970 the U.S. has only seen four hurricanes of Category 4 or 5 strength. In the previous 47 years, the country was struck by 14 such storms. President Obama presided over the lowest rate of hurricane landfalls—0.5 a year—of any president since at least 1900. Eight presidents dealt with more than two a year, but George W. Bush (18 storms) is the only one to have done so since Lyndon B. Johnson. The rest occurred before 1960.

Without data to support their wilder claims, climate partisans have now resorted to shouting that every extreme weather event was somehow “made worse” by the emission of greenhouse gases. Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt directed researchers “to shed some of the fussy over-precision about the relationship between climate change and weather.”

Turning away from empirical science—or “fussy over-precision”—comes with risks. But whatever one’s views on climate, there should be broad agreement today that bigger disasters are coming. Some may blame greenhouse gases while others may believe it to be some sort of karmic retribution. But there is a simpler explanation: Because the world has experienced a remarkable period of good fortune when it comes to catastrophes, we are due.

A good roundup of attempts by the activists to exploit the tragedy in Texas can be found here.

Climate Change Hysteria Going Overboard

From Jonah Goldberg in National Review:

One of the hallmarks of the “Ugly American” is the habit of thinking foreigners will understand what you’re saying if just shout it louder and louder.

The Ugly Environmentalist does something similar. He exaggerates the challenge of global warming by using ever more hysterical rhetoric, thinking that if the last doomsday prediction didn’t work, this one will.

For instance, Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicist, recently said that the consequences of Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord were monumental: “Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees (Celsius), and raining sulfuric acid.”

As Nathan Cofnas notes in the Weekly Standard, this is nuts. The share of the atmosphere taken up by that vile gas carbon dioxide (which just happens to sustain all plant life) is 400 parts per million. It’s been much higher than that in the past without boiling the oceans or raining acid from the sky. Cofnas also mentions that Venus is nearly 26 million miles closer to the sun, and that the share of carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere is 965,000 parts per million, or about 2,412 times greater than Earth’s.

And that’s Hawking, a serious scientist (at least in his own field). Journalists, always looking for novelty and drama, can be worse. A recent New York magazine cover story on climate change assured readers that all of the previous climate-change alarmism was too tepid. Basically, by the end of the century, the living will envy the dead and much of the planet will be uninhabitable or a reenactment of a Mad Max movie.

The more you sound like some cowbell-wielding street preacher wearing a sandwich board that says “The End Is Nigh!” the more likely it is that people will ignore you. Particularly if your last few terrifying predictions didn’t pan out.

But this focus on how using scare tactics doesn’t persuade skeptics overlooks another problem. What about the people it does persuade? If you honestly believe that climate change will end all life on earth (it won’t) or lead to some dystopian hell where we use the skulls of our former friends and neighbors to collect water droplets from cacti, what policies wouldn’t you endorse to stop it?

There’s a rich school of journalistic and academic nonsense out there about how democracy may not be up to the job of fighting climate change, and why people who question climate change must be silenced by the state. It’s remarkable how many of the people who rightly recoil in horror at the idea of using, say, the war on terror to justify curtailing civil liberties have no such response when someone floats similar ideas for the war on climate change.

The environment editor for the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian, Damian Carrington, recently wrote a piece fretting about how having kids doesn’t help fight climate change. Jill Filipovic, a feminist writer, endorsed the article. “Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet,” she wrote on Twitter. “Have one less and conserve resources.”

I found this interestingly dumb. Filipovic is precisely one of those writers you’d expect to go ballistic if some conservative Christian opined about the reproductive choices women should make. But if it’s in the name of the environment? Let’s wag those fingers, everybody!

But is that really the point? Or worse? Could it be that the “climate change” crowd is so keen on this issue, and so given to hysterics, because deep down they want an excuse to dictate people’s lifestyles? Not only could it be, it is.

Gender Studies in Academia: No Parody Needed

From the Washington Free Beacon:

That the scientific method and zoos are sexist, that menstrual periods are a social construct, and that Pilates teaches white privilege are just a few subjects of gender studies papers that inspired the biggest hoax since the Sokal affair.

It did not take James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian long to get their fake paper that claimed “the penis is conceptual” and causes climate change published. A reading of over a dozen gender studies papers provided to the Washington Free Beacon by Lindsay makes it easy to understand why.

“We, like many, have been seeing stories and examples of ridiculous papers coming out of the far-left activist wing of academia, fields like gender studies, women’s studies, and so on, based upon what’s sometimes called ‘critical race and gender theory’ or ‘radical constructivism,’” Lindsay said.

He first pointed to an infamous taxpayer-funded paper published last year that studied the “relationship between gender and glaciers.” One goal of the study was to “improve human-ice relations.”

“As many did, we strongly suspected the feminist glacier study was a hoax,” Lindsay said. “But the journal and author stood by it.”

Lindsay said he and Boghossian decided after the feminist glacier study that it was plausible to hoax the gender studies field, as Alan Sokal did in the 1990s. Sokal successfully submitted a paper that claimed gravity is a social construct.

Lindsay, a scholar and author, also said they witnessed many examples of gender studies proponents bullying other academics skeptical of their work, mostly by accusing their critics of racism and sexism.

“Thus we thought a hoax might be worth doing, not just possible,” he said.

“Eventually, we settled on the idea that the penis isn’t real, but that it causes all of our worst problems,” Lindsay said. “By tacking on the popular idea from radical constructivism that pretty much everything is a social construct, we were off to the races.”

Aside from the gender glaciers study, Lindsay pointed to dozens of examples of papers published in respected journals that sound like hoaxes, but are in fact real. The Twitter account @RealPeerReview highlights outrageous examples on a daily basis.

Among the examples Lindsay cited included a paper published in a top-ranked gender studies journal last fall that claimed menstrual periods are a social construct.

“Despite a great deal of feminist work that has highlighted its social construction, menstruation seems a self-evidently ‘natural’ bodily process,” wrote Karen Ann Hasson, in her paper “Not a ‘Real’ Period? Social and Material Constructions of Menstruation.” “Yet, how menstruation is defined or what ‘counts’ as menstruation is rarely questioned.”

Questionable research in gender studies goes back decades. A commonly cited paper by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” was published in 1987.

West and Zimmerman call gender a “routine accomplishment,” an “achieved property of situated conduct,” and a “powerful ideological device.”

“We contend that the ‘doing’ of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production,” they wrote.

Another paper published in the Women’s Studies International Forum in 1995 claims the scientific method itself is sexist and needs to be changed for feminists.

Donna M. Hughes wrote about a need for a “feminist critique of the scientific method,” because science is “sexist, racist, heterosexist, and classist.”

“Biological determinism has long been shown to be sexism, racism, and heterosexism at work under the guise of science,” she wrote. “The objectivity of science has long been suspect or rejected.”

Betsie Garner and David Grazian borrowed from West and Zimmerman for a paper published in 2016 that claims zoos are sexist.

An alligator’s sharp teeth reinforces “hegemonic norms of masculinity” to boys, according to Garner and Grazian, who scold parents for engaging in dangerous stereotypes in conversations with their children at the zoo.

One example derides a mother for telling her child that it is surprising that the male peacocks are the ones with the “pretty, bright feathers.”

A dad is rebuked for calling a white bear a “little sissy” for not running and jumping, “demeaning the bear as too weak and feminine to uphold masculine ideals of agility and drive,” the authors write.

“The Essence of the Hard On: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Cultural Construction of ‘Erectile Dysfunction’” was cited by Lindsay and Boghossian in their hoax.

The paper, written by Annie Potts in 2000, argues that curing erectile dysfunction reinforces hegemonic masculinity.

“This article employs feminist poststructuralist discursive analysis to investigate the effect of the metonymic relationship between the penis and the phallus on the cultural construction of male ‘sexual dysfunctions,’” Potts wrote.

Another paper claims fat men’s penises might not exist.

“Fat male sexuality: The monster in the maze,” published in July 2016, argues, “fat male sexuality paradoxically doesn’t exist” because of their depiction in the media. The first reference cited is Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, but lists the year 1992, instead of 1999, when the movie actually was released.

Other examples include donated blood is a social construction, how the Pilates exercises “Single Leg Stretch” and “Leg Circles” teach white privilege, and that male lactation is possible through social construction.

The article “The Lactating Man,” published in May 2016, presupposes that the idea that “lactation and breastfeeding are typically viewed as inherently female activities,” may be wrong.

Another paper published in April examines racism and sexism against squirrels using “feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies.”

Yet another gender studies paper published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies in 2013 explores the “conundrums for masculine lesbians” due to “heterosexism and patriarchy” that forces expectations of pregnancy on women.

Wikipedia is also sexist, because it “excludes and silences feminist ways of knowing and writing,” claims another paper. The federal government has also invested in this topic, spending $202,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist in 2013.

Syllabi used in STEM courses are also sexist, according to one paper that urges science professors to use “less competitive teaching methods and grading profiles that could improve the experience of female students.”

Lindsay said the most alarming paper he has encountered was published last year.

The paper, written Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, favorably compares feminists to viruses like HIV and Ebola, who should infect other fields of scientific study with liberal ideologies.

“The truly scary papers are the ones from radical constructivist schools that seek to replace science with feminist science,” Lindsay said. “It’s very concerning.”

Nearly 15,000 students graduate with cultural and gender studies degrees each year.

This is all part of the decent of academia into politically correct madness. How can such stuff become so prevalent?

Start with the general leftist bias of academia. This extends to all disciplines, but some disciplines are more “undisciplined” than others. Physicists can hardly claim the universe is “socially constructed,” since that would render their own discipline useless and meaningless.

But academics in the humanities and social sciences can proclaim things they study to be mere social constructions. As a rule, the more hard data dominates a discipline, the less politically correct it is. Economics is pretty politically incorrect, but sociology and anthropology are very politically correct. Political science occupies a middle position.

Add to this the ability of a particular kind of theory, if it gains a certain number of adherents, to become a little academic cottage industry. The theorists can start their own journals. Referee each others journal submissions. Assign each others articles and books to their classes. Provide references to help each other get promotion and tenure.

If a particular approach becomes sufficiently prevalent in a particular discipline, its practitioners can take over established journals, professional associations, and hiring in departments all over the country.

And of course, any new approach benefits from “freshness” and novelty. If English professors have been saying similar things about Shakespeare for a couple of hundred years, it can seem an exciting innovation to talk about him in terms of “patriarchy” and “white privilege” and “heteronormativity.” Since there is no hard data your theory needs to explain, you can say pretty much anything you want. If it resonates with the dominant ideology in the discipline, you will prosper professionally.

All of this, of course, is a recipe for intellectual corruption, as the leftist biases of academics are amplified into runaway anti-male sexism, and anti-white racism, producing the sort of studies discussed above.

Global Warming Crusader Mentality

From Real Clear Politics:

Today’s news tells of another mistake of exaggerated climate science prediction.

I’m not getting in the foxhole with the warriors on either side of the raging climate war. But I think there’s something more alarming going on than the spike in CO2 level charts.

Our global system of air currents, ocean currents, cloud patterns, resonant temperature cycles, energy storage and release mechanisms, and further processes is mind-bogglingly complex.

Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s not a failure of science; it’s just the reality of how tough the problem is.

Predictions are made by building models using the smartest simplifications we have thought of and running them on the most powerful computers ever built. Basically, it’s the best we can do right now.

But there is a major failure of science going on.

The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make.

It seems that there can be no moderate and honest discussion of this issue. Skeptics are singled out in creepy enemies lists. Actually, we’re now supposed to call them deniers, as though they were disputing the existence of HIV or the holocaust. Numerous scientists, as well as senators, anti-vaccination Kennedys, and clickbait purveyors have even called for the imprisonment and legal prosecution of those who disagree with them.

Climate science acts like it is fighting a holy war. There are only those who are just and those who must be silenced and stopped at all costs. Anyone who mounts reasonable logical, empirical, or skeptical challenges to the orthodoxy must be ruined, not by counterfactual evidence, but by vicious attack.

Weekly, we’re bombarded with doom-and-gloom future scenarios spit out of these models. The public is supposed to quiver in fear and to disregard and forget the many times that these predictions have failed.

Models told us that the years of 1998-2013 were supposed to show ever-increasing runaway warming. And yet, these years actually exhibited the famous “global warming hiatus.” An article published in Nature says that zero models predicted this.

Numerous modelers have told us that the Arctic polar ice would be completely gone by now. It’s still there. Many models now seem to skew in the opposite direction, predicting more ice than we see today.

Modeler Kerry Emanuel’s widely reported initial correlation of global warming with dramatically worse hurricane seasons has been strongly rebutted by multiple groups, leading him to reconsider.

The scientific failure here isn’t that models are inaccurate — it’s that the models are presented as undebatable apocalyptic predictors, harbingers of certain future catastrophe. Omens that compel us to rethink our lives. If we take issue with that, we’re heretics.

Given how fallible climate models are, why shouldn’t we be skeptical of the scary headlines? How good can your science be if you try to prove your point by ruining your detractors rather than through empirical success?

Climate scientists may win their war in a friendly press and with political parties aligned with their agendas. But they make enemies of those people who make logical and empirical evaluations of their results, those who don’t give in to pressure and political and professional expediency.

The crusader mentality of climate researchers leads them away from the factual debate and empirical accounting of sound science. We really deserve more from our publicly funded scientific establishments.

One is tempted to say that, regardless of the moralism and intolerance of global warming advocates, it’s still perfectly possible they are right.

And indeed, it’s possible.

But when people start acting like crusaders, wanting to punish heresy and silence dissent, they lose all credibility. If the Inquisition believed that by suppressing heresy it was saving souls from the Hell toward which the heretics were leading them, modern global warming crusaders believe they are saving humanity from a climate catastrophe.   That sort of thinking is a huge invitation to both intellectual and moral corruption.

Science Guy: Punish Climate Skeptics

Global Warming Fascism: Use Government to Shut Up Skepticism

From the Wall Street Journal, an article about the bullying and intimidation deployed against any group that takes a less than alarmist view of global warming.

Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin. As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.

Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.

Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels.

In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

The principle of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recognized in Dennis v. United States (1951), is that “speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.” For that principle to prevail—in something less than the 350 years it took for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its mistake in persecuting Galileo—the inquisition of those breaking from the climate “consensus” must be stopped.

No Hysteria Needed About Global Warming

The position on global warming (called “climate change” in order to make it more believable) that has gotten the most media attention can be called “climate alarmism.” It’s the idea that without immediate, radical and vastly expensive action, the planet will be destroyed. This is the position of Barack Obama.

At the opposite extreme are warming skeptics, who doubt that the modest run up of temperatures in the late 20th century was the result of human activity. They point out that the earth has been much warmer than it is now at other times in human history, long before the industrial revolution led to an increase in carbon dioxide levels.

In the middle are the “lukewarmers,” who think that human activity has contributed to some warming, but think it is much less than the alarmists believe. These people don’t object to “clean energy” (note the biased language, carbon dioxide is not dirty), but don’t think draconian limits on fossil fuels or vastly expensive government subsidies are needed.

Contrary to the alarmist notion that “the science is settled” in favor of the alarmist position, the very mainstream Scientific American recently published an essay supporting the lukewarmer position.

The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time.

This “lukewarm” option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa; that has slowed progress in bringing electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year from the effects of cooking over wood fires.

In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was predicting that if emissions rose in a “business as usual” way, which they have done, then global average temperature would rise at the rate of about 0.3 degree Celsius per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade). In the 25 years since, temperature has risen at about 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, depending on whether surface or satellite data is used. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, lowered its near-term forecast for the global mean surface temperature over the period 2016 to 2035 to just 0.3 to 0.7 degree C above the 1986–2005 level. That is a warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, in all scenarios, including the high-emissions ones.

At the same time, new studies of climate sensitivity—the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 0.03 to 0.06 percent in the atmosphere—have suggested that most models are too sensitive. The average sensitivity of the 108 model runs considered by the IPCC is 3.2 degrees C. As Pat Michaels, a climatologist and self-described global warming skeptic at the Cato Institute testified to Congress in July, certain studies of sensitivity published since 2011 find an average sensitivity of 2 degrees C.

Such lower sensitivity does not contradict greenhouse-effect physics. The theory of dangerous climate change is based not just on carbon dioxide warming but on positive and negative feedback effects from water vapor and phenomena such as clouds and airborne aerosols from coal burning. Doubling carbon dioxide levels, alone, should produce just over 1 degree C of warming. These feedback effects have been poorly estimated, and almost certainly overestimated, in the models.

The last IPCC report also included a table debunking many worries about “tipping points” to abrupt climate change. For example, it says a sudden methane release from the ocean, or a slowdown of the Gulf Stream, are “very unlikely” and that a collapse of the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets during this century is “exceptionally unlikely.”

If sensitivity is low and climate change continues at the same rate as it has over the past 50 years, then dangerous warming—usually defined as starting at 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels—is about a century away. So we do not need to rush into subsidizing inefficient and land-hungry technologies, such as wind and solar or risk depriving poor people access to the beneficial effects of cheap electricity via fossil fuels.

As the upcoming Paris climate conference shows, the world is awash with plans, promises and policies to tackle climate change. But they are having little effect. Ten years ago the world derived 87 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels; today, according the widely respected BP statistical review of world energy, the figure is still 87 percent. The decline in nuclear power has been matched by the rise in renewables but the proportion coming from wind and solar is still only 1 percent.

Getting the price of low-carbon energy much lower will do the trick. So we should spend the coming decades stepping up research and development of new energy technologies. Many people may reply that we don’t have time to wait for that to bear fruit, but given the latest lukewarm science of climate change, I think we probably do.

Global Warming/Climate Change: Extended Discussion

Talking to legendary Chicago talk show host Milt Rosenberg, two global warming skeptics (James M. Taylor and Steve Goreham) discuss the issues in depth.

Interestingly, proponents of man-made global warming refused to appear on the show, leaving Rosenberg to play the role of devil’s advocate. This, Rosenberg explains, is almost invariably the case as warming advocates imperiously insist that warming is “settled science” about which there is no legitimate doubt.

But public opinion polls shot there most certainly is doubt among the citizenry.

So if their case is so strong, why won’t the advocates avail themselves of the opportunity to convince doubters with their (supposedly) superior arguments? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the issue is way more complex than the warmists want the public knowing, and that they fear they would be on the defensive.

Instinctively, we should distrust people who refuse to argue their case. Their refusal implies that they live in a little bubble where everybody shares their assumptions, and they fear stepping out into the world where their assumptions will be challenged.

ABC in 2009: Global Warming Disaster by 2015

This from the Media Research Center. Of course, the fact that the media has puffed absurd scenarios doesn’t mean there is no man-made global warming. But numerous examples like this mean you can’t trust what the media tell you about the issue. Following is a part of the transcript of the segment from Good Morning America.

GMA
6/12/08
8:34am

CHRIS CUOMO: Now, we will have a dramatic preview for you of an unprecedented ABC News event called “Earth 2100.” We’re asking you to help create a story that is yet to unfold: What our world will look like in 100 years if we don’t save our troubled planet. Your reports will actually help form the backbone of a two-hour special airing this fall. ABC’s Bob Woodruff will be the host. He joins us now. Pleasure, Bob.

BOB WOODRUFF: You too, Chris. You know, this show is a countdown through the next century and shows what scientists say might very well happen if we do not change our current path. As part of the show, today, we are launching an interactive web game which puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.

[NOTE: ABC provides no graphics or identification for any of the following individuals/activists featured. Identifications taken discerned from web article.]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: The public is sleepwalking into the future. You know, sort of going through the motions of daily life and really not paying attention.

JAMES HANSEN (NASA/AL GORE SCIENCE ADVISOR): We can see what the prospects are and we can see that we could solve the problem but we’re not doing it.

[Graphic: Welcome to 2015]

PETER GLEICK (SCIENTIST/PACIFIC INSTITUTE): In 2015, we’ve still failed to address the climate problem.

JOHN HOLDREN (PROFESSOR/HARVARD UNIVERSITY): We’re going to see more floods, more droughts, more wildfires.

UNIDENTIFIED “REPORTER:” Flames cover hundreds of square miles.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: We expect more intense hurricanes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #5: Well, how warm is it going to get? How much will sea level rise? We don’t know really know where the end is.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE #2: Temperatures have hit dangerous levels.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE #3: Agriculture production is dropping because temperatures are rising.

HEIDI CULLEN (WEATHER CHANNEL/CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERT): There’s about one billion people who are malnourished. That number just continually grows.

...

CUOMO: I think we’re familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That’s seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?

WOODRUFF: It’s very soon, you know. But all you have to do is look at the world today right today. You know, you’ve got gas prices going up. You got food prices going up. You’ve got extreme weather. The scientists have studied this for decades. They say if you connect the dots, you can actually see that we’re approaching maybe even a perfect storm. Or you have got shrinking resources, population growth. Climate change. So, the idea now is to look at it, wake up about it and then try to do something to fix it.

...

WOODRUFF: But the best of these regular reports that come from people that are watching, we’re going to put those on, all of this on our two-hour production that’s going to happen in the fall. And we just want more of these people to watch. And we’ve gotten already some remarkable interviews from these people. And just take a quick look.

UNIDENTIFIED TEENAGER: It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.

SECOND UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gas reached over $9 a gallon.

THIRD UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I’m scared [bleeped] right now, but I have to get this out.

WOODRUFF: So the producers actually work with those people that send in their ideas into the website. And then we’re just hoping that the goal is ultimately get these ideas very soon.

CUOMO: Lovely. Bob Woodruff. Thank you very much. You can find out much more about how you can be part of this exciting and important show. You can go to Earth2100.tv. Earth2100.tv or you can go to ABCNews.com.

Being the Mainstream Media, of course, means never having to say “we are sorry we lied to you.”

Global Warming: Arctic Summers Will Be Ice Free by 2013

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

Oops!

More Global Warming Fascism: Australia

Academia is more and more intolerant, and one of the tenets of the new orthodoxy is the idea that there is global warming, that human activity is the main cause of it, that it has potentially catastrophic consequences, and that radical policies have to be immediately enacted to deal with it.

Dissenting from any one of these propositions can lead to demands that you be fired, silenced, shunned and banned from public discourse.

And this indeed is exactly what happened at the University of Western Australia, where a climate change “contrarian” named Bjorn Lomborg was banned and denied a job because of his views.

We frankly wonder whether something like this could happen at Marquette. While faculty of natural science departments are mostly not into race, gender and sexual orientation political correctness, there is a certain kind of science political correctness. The prevailing attitude is “we scientists have discovered the truth, and don’t you dare doubt what we say.”

A writer for Reason makes some points that people in academia used to understand, but increasingly appear not to:

Learning is a process of testing, discussion, submitting your ideas to debate and standing by them as the brickbats of disagreement and counter-argument come flying in. This is why academic freedom is so important: the liberty to think and speak and argue is the only real way of getting to the truth of a matter, and in the process boosting our understanding of the world.

In the Lomborg scandal, this process was circumvented. Lomborg’s center was pre-emptively denied the right to put its case in Australian academia, by “passionate emotional” protesters who think they already know The Truth on climate change: that it’s happening, it’s terrible, and we will only alleviate its worst impacts by putting restraints on humanity’s material aspirations.

This isn’t learning, far less academic freedom in action. Rather, it echoes the old, pre-modern view of a university as, in essence, a bookish guardian of ecclesiastical authority. Only now it’s eco-authority that is protected from intellectual poking and awkward analysis, ringfenced from ridicule just as surely as the pointy-hatted overseers of universities in the pre-Enlightenment era also ringfenced ideas that they just knew were true.

Global Warming: Attacks on Scientists and the Corruption of Science

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Mark Steyn at Heartland Climate Skeptics Conference

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Obama Takes Action

Global Warming Alarmism: A Blast from the Past

From the New York Times:

PICKING up where a high-school chemistry class might end, “Nova,” the public-broadcasting science series, offers the nonmatriculating viewer an advanced course in worrying. The cause of the concern is all the carbon dioxide that’s being pumped into the industrialized and motorized air. The hourlong broadcast is called “The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect,” at 9 tonight on Channel 13.

The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life - animal, plant, human - will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth’s mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.

This described a NOVA documentary broadcast in 1986.

It seems the “big-league climatologists” were all wet. But we have no evidence that they have ever been called to account for the nonsense they were spouting

Global Warming Alarmism Explained