RUTHFULLY YOURS

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been doing the leftist media interview circuit recently, pressing his peculiar thesis that professional (i.e., paid) scientists are a superior class of humans whose conclusions are intrinsically beyond reproach and must therefore be accepted blindly by unscientific lunks like you.

In each of these interviews, a non-climate scientist asks a series of predetermined questions designed to elicit rehearsed responses from the non-climate scientist Tyson, the upshot of which is that (a) people who question man-made global warming are anti-scientific fools driven by irrational agendas; (b) scientific consensus is not the product of the social and political pressures of academic life working on the minds of the career-motivated, publication-obsessed majority of scholarly mediocrities, but rather consensus is the very definition of Objective Truth; and (c) anyone who questions a scientific consensus poses a threat to the survival of democracy.

For an example of (a), here is Tyson’s explanation of why some people continue to question the alleged scientific consensus on global warming:

What’s happening here is that there are people who have cultural, political, religious, economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another.

In other words, non-scientists who have the audacity to cite scientific results falling outside the consensus as grounds for questioning global warming are just people with agendas who are refusing to accept the settled science, for anti-scientific reasons. This doesn’t account for the actual scientists who produced those dissenting results or hypotheses. Are they also to be dismissed as mere “deniers,” since their views do not match the consensus?

Tyson’s answer appears to be yes, as he offers this interesting definition of “objective truth,” answering to talking point (b), above:

For an emergent scientific truth to become an objective truth – a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it – it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence. If you want to find the three percent of the papers or the one percent of the papers that conflicted with this, and build policy on that – that is simply irresponsible.

So according to Tyson, science is ultimately defined not by superior individual minds defying accepted views – i.e., standing against a consensus. No, science is rather defined by consensus itself, for consensus alone establishes objective truth, which “is true whether or not you believe in it.” (Funny – I always thought Nature or God established objective truth, but apparently, in our nihilistic progressive age, that task has devolved to the collective of university professors.)

And what is a scholarly consensus? It is “a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences.” Tyson conveniently leaves out the most important factor: “all beginning from the same underlying premises.”

The left’s response to the natural disasters in Florida was to raise again the bogeyman of man-made global warming. The left blames every natural disaster or significant change in weather on man-made global warming. So if the weather is unseasonably hot, man-made global warming is the culprit, but if the weather is unseasonably cold, the man-made global warming is to blame as well. The “science” of the left simply plugs in man-made global warming to every natural disaster or significant change in the weather.

This is anti-science in its purest form. Totalitarianism – and the left is utterly totalitarian – always claims to base its actions upon “science.” So the Nazis insisted and persuaded many scientists involved in genetics, psychology, biology, and so forth to agree with Nazi racial policies as “scientific,” and almost everything that happened was accounted for by the Nazis as part of racial “science.” So the Soviets coerced all scientists to accept as an overarching “science” Marxism, and so geneticists and physicists were sent to the Gulag or worse if their scientific discoveries conflicted with Marxist “science.”

The settled “science,” which is to say anti-science, is screeched by the left despite the fact that more than 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from more than 100 nations signed the Heidelberg Appeal, which explicitly challenged politically correct science and warned against “irrational ideology” and “pseudoscientific arguments of false and nonrelevant data.”

Even more interesting is the Oregon Petition from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which explicitly stated that there was “no convincing scientific evidence” of global warming and noted that rising carbon dioxide is beneficial to plants and animals. This petition has been signed by more than 30,000 scientists in America.

The left assumes global warming when a truly scientific analysis of the data could mean a stable climate, a cooling climate (which is what the great scientist Sir Fred Hoyle believed was the case at the end of the last century), or global warming. The left not only prostitutes science into insisting upon man-made global warming, but ignores any explanation for climate change, assuming that climate change is real, which conflicts with its politically correct theory of man-made global warming.

So the left ignores dramatic changes in global climate about which we have abundant evidence, scientific and documentary, based upon people living in these periods. During the Roman Warm Period, the climate was 2℃ to 6℃ hotter than it is today. The Dark Age Cold Period saw a significantly cooler climate than today. The Medieval Warming Period, which lasted centuries, saw the climate 3℃ warmer than it is today, and the Little Ice Age, which ended shortly before the American Civil War, saw temperatures 2℃ lower than today.

None of these climatic changes in temperature can be explained by human activity, and all of them produced changes greater than what the Chicken Little leftists claim will produce the end of civilization.

The left also ignores explanations for any global warming that do not involve human activity. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research in Denmark, proposes a new theory for possible global warming and a new discipline, cosmoclimatology. Svensmark shows how cosmic rays have affected the climate on Earth over thousands of years. Perhaps even more persuasive, Svensmark notes that the climate changes of Mars track very closely the climate changes on Earth and that these changes fit closely into his theory that climate change is caused by cosmic rays and other forces of nature operating outside Earth. This does not preclude global warming; rather, it finds that natural forces, cosmic forces, in this case, account for global warming and not human activity.

UNITED NATIONS—U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said the Paris climate agreement is a key part of promoting global security and prosperity in what appeared to be a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s pledge to leave the accord.

Mrs. May, in her remarks to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, said global commitment to a rules-based system is critical as nations face threats such as North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons programs and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people.

“It is this rules-based system which we have developed, including the institutions, the international frameworks of free and fair trade, agreements such as the Paris Climate Change accord and laws and conventions like the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which enables the global cooperation through which we can protect those values,” she said.

The Trump administration had sent signals over the weekend that it was exploring ways to remain in the 2015 pact, but the White House said Monday that the U.S. will leave the deal “unless we can re-engage on terms more favorable to the United States.”

In her address to the U.N. on Wednesday, Mrs. May said that the U.K. is committed to being a global player but didn’t specifically mention its planned exit from the European Union.

“Both globally but also in our own continent of Europe, the U.K. will remain steadfast in our commitment and responsibility to ensure the security and stability of our allies as we have done for generations,” she said.

Mr. Maue, a research meteorologist, is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

“The historical record books contain dozens of devastating hurricane landfalls over the past century, any of which, if repeated, would be catastrophic regardless of additional climate-change effects. To prepare for the next hurricane, the U.S. needs the best weather forecasts, evacuation plans and leadership. These plans should be built on sound science, not speculation, overselling or exaggeration. Hurricane science in this political climate already has enough spin.”

As soon as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma made landfall in the U.S., scientists, politicians and journalists began to discuss the role of climate change in natural disasters. Although a clear scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that climate change influences hurricanes in the long run, its effect upon any individual storm is unclear. Anyone trying to score political points after a natural disaster should take a deep breath and review the science first.

As a meteorologist with access to the best weather-forecast model data available, I watched each hurricane’s landfall with particular interest. Harvey and Irma broke the record 12-year major hurricane landfall drought on the U.S. coastline. Since Wilma in October 2005, 31 major hurricanes had swirled in the North Atlantic but all failed to reach the U.S. with a Category 3 or higher intensity.

Even as we worked to divine exactly where the hurricanes would land, a media narrative began to form linking the devastating storms to climate change. Some found it ironic that states represented by “climate deniers” were being pummeled by hurricanes. Alarmists reveled in the irony that Houston, home to petrochemical plants, was flooded by Harvey, while others gleefully reported that President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago might be inundated by Irma.

How to put these two hurricanes into proper context? An informative website from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, synthesizes reams of research literature on the links between hurricanes and global warming. Over the next century, climate models generally indicate fewer but stronger storms—between 2% and 11% greater average storm intensity—with substantially increased rain rates. Against the background of slow sea-level rise, explosive coastal population growth will overwhelmingly exacerbate any hurricane’s damages. In the aggregate, the global-warming signal may just now be emerging out of our noisy observational records, and we may not know certainly for several decades. These conclusions are hardly controversial in the climate-science community.

My own research, cited in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, found that during the past half-century tropical storms and hurricanes have not shown an upward trend in frequency or accumulated energy. Instead they remain naturally variable from year-to-year. The global prevalence of the most intense storms (Category 4 and 5) has not shown a significant upward trend either. Historical observations of extreme cyclones in the 1980s, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, are in sore need of reanalysis.

By focusing on whether climate change caused a hurricane, journalists fail to appreciate the complexity of extreme weather events. While most details are still hazy with the best climate modeling tools, the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive.

CONTINUE AT SITE

Reasons exist to have serious investigations of the whole of climate change (aka global warming) science.

Global warming inevitably rests on current temperatures setting records in geologic time, or at least since early human civilization. And this is where the 1998 Nature article by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcom Hughes depicting what has become known as the iconic “hockey stick” graph becomes critical. The “hockey stick” showed modern temperatures far hotter than in the year 1400.

The hockey stick graph was adopted into the third assessment report (2001) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and contradicted a chart that had appeared only eleven years before in an earlier IPCC assessment report. The hockey stick eliminated what had traditionally been considered the hottest era, the Medieval Warm Period.

As reasonably accurate thermometers were not developed until well into the 19th century, one would wonder how earlier temperatures were measured. The answer is the use of proxy data – namely, ice cores, tree rings, bee pollen, ocean and lake sediment. But a reasonable person would have to wonder by what standards these items are interpreted.

This leaves only modern thermometer data sets, the primary one being that of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP), “an estimate of global surface temperature change … using current data files from NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].” The entire 137-year monthly data set, from 1880 through June 2017, in degrees Celsius anomalies (deviations from the corresponding 1951-1980 means), updated monthly, is available in spreadsheet and text forms.

But the land and seas surface data from which the above is derived suffers serious flaws as far as indicating “global” warming. First of all, it is not, as implied, indicative of global surface temperatures. The NOAA website contains in the upper-left-hand corner a small and easily overlooked but important map denoting the location of land-based temperature measurement stations around the world and years of coverage, reproduced below. Not surprisingly, data for more than about 110 years exist only for the United States; Japan; southeastern Australia; and some areas in Europe, Asia, and India. Nearly all of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Asia contain only a few decades of weather data, from widely dispersed stations.

Call it Climate McCarthyism.

The question, “Do you believe in climate change?” is the new, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” Since Donald Trump’s election, climate activists, Democratic politicians, and the media have led a collective inquisition into administration officials, creating a blacklist of those who stray from the ideological groupthink on human-caused climate change.. These demagogues aim to make climate “denial” an offense that should prevent anyone from getting a job or receiving disaster relief. Even the Pope this week suggested political leaders who are climate deniers will face consequences.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was repeatedly subjected to climate interrogations during his confirmation process. CIA Director Mike Pompeo was grilled about his views on climate change by Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) during his confirmation hearing. Harris blamed climate change for rising instability in the world, and demanded to know where Pompeo stood on the issue.

Two major hurricanes have emboldened the climate inquisitors. During a White House briefing Monday about Hurricane Irma, Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert was asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta about the connection between climate change and national security. After Acosta falsely claimed that storms are more frequent and intense (no science supports this; the U.S. has just enjoyed twelve years without a major hurricane), he asked Bossert, “When you see three Category 4 hurricanes all on the same map at the same time, does the thought occur to you, ‘Jeez you know, maybe there is something to this climate change thing and its connection to powerful hurricanes?’” This is your average grade-school understanding of science.

Two new Trump appointees are now before the climate kangaroo court. Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla.), the president’s pick to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is being branded a climate denier as activists attempt to build opposition to his pending Senate confirmation. His offense? During a House speech in 2014, Bridenstine dared to blame natural forces — not human activity — for global warming and correctly said global temperatures had not risen in the past ten years.

Although Bridenstine is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, a decorated naval aviator, and staunch supporter of space exploration, that’s not enough to satisfy the climate enforcers. Climate Hawks Vote, a PAC that has former Obama adviser Van Jones and environmental activist Bill McKibben on its advisory board, launched a petition campaign to stop Bridenstine’s Senate confirmation: “NASA needs to be run by someone who respects science. Not climate denier Jim Bridenstine.”

Vox’s David Roberts wrote (with zero self-awareness) that “it is difficult to appreciate just how deeply and ceaselessly bizarre US climate politics has become. Several bits of recent news — for instance, Trump’s nomination of a climate denier with no scientific credentials to lead NASA — serve to illustrate the point.” A Newsweek headline read, “Who is Jim Bridenstine, the climate-change denier Trump picked to head NASA?” The piece scoffs that Bridenstine is a “critic of climate science” for saying the scientifically accurate claim that “the climate has always changed.” Now, even repeating an historical, scientific fact amounts to misconduct in the eyes of the climate witch-hunters.

Sam Clovis, Trump’s nominee for a top scientific post at the Department of Agriculture, has been branded both a climate denier and “an unacceptable and illegal choice” by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal activist group. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Senator Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) urged Trump to withdraw Clovis’s nomination “because he is a proud ‘skeptic’ of climate change and wildly unqualified for the position of USDA Chief Scientist.” (Both Clovis and Bridenstine are under scrutiny for not having specific scientific degrees because of course scientists make the best managers.)

Climate change has been blamed for a dizzying array of absurd woes, from the dwindling number of customers at Bulgarian brothels to the death of the Loch Ness monster. Most of us can see through these silly headlines, but it’s far harder to parse the more serious claims when they’re repeated in good faith by well-meaning campaigners.

Consider the recent assertion by Unicef’s Bangladesh head of mission that climate change leads to an increase in child marriages. Between 2011 and 2020 globally, more than 140 million girls under the age of 18 will become brides, leading to curtailed education and reduced lifetime earnings, more domestic violence, more deaths from complications due to pregnancy and increased mortality for the young brides’ children. By all accounts, child marriage must be taken seriously.

In Bangladesh, nearly 75% of women between the ages of 20 and 49 reported that they were married before they turned 18, giving the country the second-highest rate of child marriage in the world. As the Unicef head tells it, climate change has been a major cause, as warmer weather has worsened the flooding, pushing people to the cities, leading to more child marriages.

This entire string of logic is wrong. The frequency of extreme floods in Bangladesh has increased, it’s true, but studies show their magnitude and duration have in fact decreased. And Bangladesh is far better at adapting today than it was a generation ago. In 1974, a flood killed 29,000 people and cost 7.5% of the country’s gross domestic product. A slightly larger flood in 2004 killed 761 people and cost 3.3% of GDP.

Nor is Unicef right to claim a connection between flooding and urbanization. A study published in the Journal of Biosocial Science found that living in cities doesn’t increase the likelihood of child marriages in Bangladesh. Rather, it was “significantly higher among rural women.” According to another study, published in the Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment, the average age of marriage in cities is 16.15 years, compared to 15.08 years in rural areas.

This isn’t surprising. Across the world, there’s a convergence between low urbanization rates and higher child-marriage rates. In Africa, the three worst countries for child marriage—Chad, Mali and Niger—also have the lowest levels of urbanization.

Given the weak links between warming, flooding, urbanization and the contrary link between urbanization and child marriage, climate policies would be the least effective in addressing the problem. Copenhagen Consensus research shows that we need to focus instead on nutrition and education, political opportunities for girls and women, and improving women’s rights to inherit and start a business.

A program in southern Bangladesh run by Save the Children, for example, has demonstrated the significant effects of even a modest financial incentive: The program regularly gave cooking oil to parents of unmarried girls between the ages of 15 and 17, conditional upon confirmation that the girls remained unmarried. The program found that these girls were up to 30% less likely to marry before the age of 16 and up to 22% more likely to remain in school. Each dollar spent on such conditional transfer programs does about $4 of social good.

I never want to be disrespectful of Catholics and the Vatican, but this meddling is sheer Papal bull….rsk

Pope Francis warned Monday that history will judge the actions of leaders on climate change, saying the science is clear on the matter.

“These aren’t opinions pulled out of thin air. They are very clear. Then [world leaders] decide and history will judge those decisions,” Francis told reporters while on a trip to the South American country of Colombia.

The pope urged “those who deny this” to “go to the scientists and ask them” because “they speak very clearly.”

He brought up the topic of climate change as several major hurricanes hit the United States and the Caribbean. Climate scientists and environmental groups have used Hurricanes Harvey and Irma to point out that although global warming is not directly the cause of the storms, it is a factor making them much more devastating.

But bringing up climate change so quickly after the storms is misplaced and insensitive to the victims, according to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. He told CNN last week that the country’s focus should be on the immediate effects of the storms, not wading into a political debate over climate change.

“Here’s the issue. To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm, versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced,” Pruitt said. “All I’m saying to you is, to use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to the people in Florida.”

Francis has given a copy of his 2015 encyclical on climate change to President Trump. The papal document determined that climate change was a being caused by manmade activities and that world leaders were not moving fast enough to address it.

As the nation continues to debate the critical, constitutional question of who can be punched and who cannot be punched (I vote for permitting the punching of slow drivers in the left lane and anyone who drinks Riesling), it appears the “peaceful” Left has a much more expansive list of acceptable human-punching bags. Liberals encourage their mob to assault not only Nazis, white supremacists and conservative speakers on college campuses, they are now advocating violence against people who dare to challenge the reigning dogma on manmade climate change.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/07/weathering-the-punches/

Two destructive hurricanes in the span of one week have emboldened the climate bullies. One of the most unhinged is actor Mark Ruffalo, best known for his role as Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Marvel’s multi-billion-dollar-earning Avengers movie series. Ruffalo must think that playing a scientist on the silver screen imbues him with some special scientific powers and moral authority, much like Martin Sheen started to think he was the president because he played one on The West Wing. Ruffalo is an outspoken—albeit ignorant and misinformed—climate activist who continues to cling to the thoroughly debunked idea that the country can be fully powered by renewable energy sources. He is also a Trump-hater and progressive rabble-rouser.

On Wednesday morning, as Hurricane Irma began pounding Caribbean islands on its alarming path towards Florida, Ruffalo was less Bruce Banner and more Hulk:
Mark Ruffalo

✔ @MarkRuffalo

I know not all people in the GOP are deniers. But their leadership is and they are in part responsible for these disasters going forward. https://twitter.com/markruffalo/status/905408275734245377 …

(Ruffalo was subtweeting another noted climate expert, Star Trek actor George Takei.)

One could write this off as just another emotional rant from an uneducated Hollywood celebrity. But Ruffalo has quite a following, including 3.4 million Twitter followers and the media’s admiration. So it is not without consequence when the actor invites his minions to attack a Trump Administration cabinet official and anyone deemed a climate change denier. Considering one of Ruffalo’s fellow Bernie Bros tried to assassinate several Republican congressmen earlier this summer, nearly killing one of them, it’s outrageous for a top celebrity activist to fan the flames in this kind of political environment.

It’s also a bit ironic, since he routinely tweets about love, compassion, and tolerance. But Ruffalo’s hypocrisies don’t stop there. Ruffalo claims to be a feminist champion except for conservative women (you can read about that here.) He regularly protests the use of fossil fuels, blasts corporations like Exxon, and demands states such as New York stop fracking, but he works in the entertainment business, one of the most energy-intensive industries. He is also an ardent foe of genetically engineered crops, which have numerous environmental benefits including retaining carbon in the soil and withstanding climate impacts.

His movie character isn’t the only thing about him with a split personality.