Team of Scientists' Open Letter To U.S. Senators: 'Claim of consensus is fake'  

Plus: Science group 'reviewing its stance on global warming' after 160 physicists sign petition

Marc Morano - Climate Depot, Nov 2

The following letter signed by five physicists was sent to all 100 U.S. Senator's on October 29, 2009. The letter is reproduced in full below: 

A GAGGLE IS NOT A CONSENSUS

 

You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a “consensus” of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe.

We do not seek to make the scientific arguments here (we did that in an earlier letter, sent a couple of months ago), but simply to note that the claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no. 

We know of no evidence that any of the “leaders” of the scientific community who signed the letter to you ever asked their memberships for their opinions, before claiming to represent them on this important matter. 

We also note that the American Physical Society (APS, and we are physicists) did not sign the letter, though the scientific issues at stake are fundamentally matters of applied physics. You can do physics without climatology, but you can't do climatology without physics. 

The APS is at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the Society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you. 

Professor Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

Professor Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Professor Will Happer, Princeton University

Professor Larry Gould, University of Hartford

Dr. Roger Cohen, retired Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil 

List of 160 signers of the APS petition available at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/3606/Team-of-Scientists-Open-Letter-To-US-Senators-Claim-of-consensus-is-fake

Maldives President Ignores Science In Favour Of Lucrative False Sea Rising Scaremongering.
Oct 20 2009

On Oct. 17, Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, an island country off the coast of India, held a meeting of his Cabinet underwater to dramatize the risks he says his country faces from rising sea levels caused by global warming.  Yesterday, Swedish scientist Nils-Axel Mörner, a specialist in sea level changes, wrote Mr. Nasheed the following letter: 

Open Letter

October 20, 2009

To: President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives

From: Nils-Axel Mörner, Stockholm, Sweden

Mr. President,

You have recently held an undersea Cabinet meeting to raise awareness of the idea that global sea level is rising and hence threatens to drown the Maldives. This proposition is not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments.

Therefore, I am most surprised at your action and must protest its intended message.

In 2001, when our research group found overwhelming evidence that sea level was by no means in a rising mode in the Maldives, but had remained quite stable for the last 30 years, I thought it would not be respectful to the fine people of the Maldives if I were to return home and present our results in international fora.

No New Taxes Except A Carbon Tax For Irish 2010 Budget


Irish Times Oct 13 2009

The Irish Department of Finance spokesman said: “The Minister stated in an interview with Matt Cooper (Radio Talk Show) on 17th September last that in the next budget there would, ‘be no new taxes except a carbon tax’, which was agreed as part of the initial programme for government.


http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/1013/1224256509516.html

What Happened To Global Warming? 

By Paul Hudson 
Climate correspondent, BBC News, Oct 9 2009 

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.
But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.
And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.
He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.
He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.
If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

 

Meet The Man Who Has Exposed The Great Climate Change Con Trick

James Delingpole July 2009

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’

This no-nonsense approach may owe something to the young Ian’s straitened Sydney upbringing. His father was crippled with MS, leaving his mother to raise three children on a schoolteacher’s wage. ‘We couldn’t afford a TV — not that TV even arrived in Australia till 1956. We’d use the same brown paper bag over and over again for our school lunches, always turn off the lights, not because of some moral imperative but out of sheer bloody necessity.’

One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’ 

Click Link to Continue interview:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/3755623/part_3/meet-the-man-who-has-exposed-the-great-climate-change-con-trick.thtml 

Infamous 'Hockey Stick' Graph Under Fire

US Congressional inquiries on 'hockey stick' graph claim it is fundamentally flawed, writes Christopher Booker. 

By Christopher Booker
Published: 5:05PM 12 Sep 2009

A number of readers wrote in to express surprise at the recent letter from the US scientist Dr Michael Mann claiming that his famous "hockey stick" graph, showing temperatures having suddenly soared at the end of the 20th century to unprecedented levels, had been endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences. Neither of the two Congressional inquiries involving the NAS did anything of the kind. Both found that the computer model used to create Dr Mann's "hockey stick", completely rewriting climate history, was fundamentally flawed.

This is one reason why, despite all the efforts made to defend Dr Mann's graph by his academic colleagues (describing themselves as the Hockey Team), I have described it as "one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science".

Now the Hockey Team have done it again. As part of the general drive to hype up panic over global warming in the run-up to December's Copenhagen conference, several of them are among the authors of a paper, published in the September 4 issue of the US journal Science, which claims to rewrite the climate history of the Arctic. As in the original version, the new hockey stick-shaped graph produced by their computer model shows temperatures gently declining for 900 years, then suddenly shooting up in recent years to record levels.

As usual, there are several odd features of their model, which is largely based on data from Professor Philip Jones's Climate Research Unit in Norwich – the data he refuses to publish because it is a state secret. But perhaps the oddest aspect of all is the contrast between this new study and the comprehensive record of Arctic temperatures compiled by the Danish Meteorological Institute from 1959 to the present day.

Anthony Watts's Watts Up With That blog (see the blog posting on September 4) created an animated graphic showing the DMI's temperature changes over the past 50 years. Far from confirming the hypothetical upward spurt claimed by the Hockey Team's computer, the most remarkable feature of the actual record is that it shows no significant change whatever.
The unshakeable faith in computer models shown by the scientists who programme them would be the envy of any religious sect in the world.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6179713/New-hockey-stick-graph-