Timothy Birdnow

Last night on the Larry Elder show a man called in to disagree with host Larry about "climate change". The man - well spoken and polite but of a mind to filibuster - was likely what Rush Limbaugh calls a "seminar caller" in that he followed the rules set down for dealing with hostiles in these seminars/talking points memos sent out by the Left. The subject was global warming (or as he called it climate change) and the caller made the following points:

1.There is an almost universal consensus. In fact, the caller claimed to be a regular attendee of climate change conferences and said there is not just a 96% agreement but that agreement is universal.

2. He disagreed with Larry Elder, who had made an issue of Roger Revelle turning against the theory. His point was that if Darwin changed his mind and disagreed with evolution it would not change the fact, and just because an elder scientist changed his mind it doesn't change the reality.

3. He reiterated that no credible scientists disagreed with the theory.

He made these points and would not allow Elder to offer any rebuttal, something he didn't really need to do because Elder, who did wind up making some adequate points, was clearly outmatched here. It's unfortunate he took this call because he did not have the facts at his command at that moment.

Elder did ask the caller what he thought of the Heartland Institute, and the caller apparently was unfamiliar with it, but he dismissed it as an advocacy group (which it is). Elder ended the call at that point, dismissing the caller as uninformed.

As I say, it was unfortunate because I was shouting out answers like an unruly child; I soo wish I had been on the line at that point.

Here is what Elder should have said:

1. First, this was called global warming until the planet failed to warm and then proponents of this theory created the sneakier "climate change" precisely to obfuscate the fact that the Earth hasn't warmed since 1998. Science is about facts and not opinions or uninformed projections and the facts are against the theory. The Greenland ice sheet - one of the pillars of global warming hysteria, is at near record highs. Antarctic ice is at record highs. There has been no increase in earth's albedo despite the fact that a warmer world should see increased cloud cover. There is little tropospheric warming. Planetary temperatures have not been measured to have risen in a statistically significant fashion in at least 19 years. There has been no statistically significant increase in the Earth's albedo in recent years (a measure of increased cloud cover). The deep oceans are not holding substantial amounts of extra heat as would be necessary to explain the "missing heat".

And let us not forget that there has been underhanded things done to manipulate the data sets. NOAA and NASA have both been caught tampering with data sets to promote global warming theory. There is a lot of money involved. So too was Michael Mann with his "Nature trick" to "hide the decline".

What do the warm-mongers have on their side? Computer simulations and largely anecdotal evidence and a whole lot of conjecture.

Second, the 97% number is ultimately based on a study by a global warming activist, an historian (and not a statistician) named Nancy Oreskes. It was soundly debunked by another historian, the head of what is now called the Global Warming Policy Institute, Benny Peiser. But Peiser couldn’t get his work published in a peer-reviewed journal (thanks, we now know, to efforts by Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, and the rest of the "hockey team" who were shown in hacked e-mails to be conspiring to control what went into peer reviewed journals.) Here is more on the false consensus. See this also. And there was a survey conducted by the U. of Illinois that wound up surveying fewer than seven hundred scientists with the vast  majority not bothering to respond. This claim is a testament to Joseph Goebbles who said that if you repeat a lie long enough it becomes the truth.

It's easy to get almost unanimous consensus on this. If you do what the people who have conducted these studies did you are assured. Ask "is the climate changing" and "is human activity responsible" and any good scientist has to agree. Climate always changes and, yes, man is responsible for some of it. Roger Pielke Sr. has often discussed land use change; cut down a forest and what happens? a black top parking lot is hotter than a copse of trees.

But to believe in the alarmist view? I know plenty of scientists who disagree; Pielke Sr., his son Pielke Jr., Roy Spencer, John christie, Patrick Michaels, Tim Ball, Judith Curry, Joanne Simpson, S. Fred Singer, the late Frederick Seitz, Freeman Dyson, David Bellamy, Piers Corbin, Richard Lindzen, Phillip Stott, Sally Baliunis, William Happer, Willie Soon, David Legates, Nicollo Scafetta, George Taylor, and a host of others. Strange that this caller couldn't seem to locate any. But then, he attended climate conferences where the livelihood of everyone present was utterly dependent on the money flowing into climatology. Climatology was a sleep poor cousin to meteorology until the 1980's when this War of the World's scare took off.

And yes, Roger Revelle, the creator of this, did indeed disavow it later. Revelle understood that at best this was a curiosity, with a minimal warming of at most 2* (thanks to the logarithmic nature of energy absorption as the IR wavelength would become saturated). This is as important as the Pope saying there is no God. While he may have been senile or whatnot, it still is a very damaging claim.

I wish Larry Elder would have said all that.

As I said earlier, I suspect the caller was a "seminar caller", a guy armed with talking points. Elder should have been ready for him; after all, his call was screened.

This issue should be dead by now. They Gang Green have been caught with their paws in the cookie jar repeatedly, and the average person can see that there is no major changes occurring. You can only cry wolf so often.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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