America's Highest Ranked Climate Charlatans: Obama and Kerry

FNF

In the May 27 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Bast, the president of the free-market think tank, the Heartland Institute, and Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama, teamed out to write about “The Myth of the Climate Change 97%.” While demolishing this Big Lie, they noted that “Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.”

Obama’s and Kerry’s problem, along with all the other climate change charlatans, is that is the Earth is now into its 17^th year of a natural cooling cycle based on lower radiation from the Sun, itself in a natural cycle. It is the Sun, not mankind that determines the climate of the Earth.

The Petition Project in which 31,073 U.S. scientists, over 9,000 of whom have a Ph.D. in a scientific field, participated says “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

“The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of ‘settled science’ and an overwhelming ‘consensus’ in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists.”

Chatting With ‘A Climate Heretic’

Quadrant Online (Australia)
Doing science by consensus is not science at all, says the climatologist all the alarmists love to hate. Not that the enmity bothers Judith Curry too much -- and certainly not as much as the debasement of impartial inquiry by which the warmist establishment keeps all those lovely grants coming"

I’ll see your 97 percent, and raise you 3 percent

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
But I think a more significant statistic — one that doesn’t rely on opinions, but on facts — is that 100% of climate scientists don’t know how much of the warming in the last 50-100 years is natural versus human-caused.
They dance around this issue with weasel words and qualitative language. Because they don’t know. They can say “most” warming is human caused…but how do they know that? They don’t.
You see, we have no idea how much natural climate variations figure into the climate change equation.
For example, this proxy reconstruction of past temperatures suggests climate change is the rule, not the exception:

Bast and Spencer on Consensus

JunkScience / Wall Street Journal
Opinion
The Myth of the Climate Change ’97%’
What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?
By Joseph Bast And Roy Spencer
May 26, 2014
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”
Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research. ....[snip]....We could go on, but the larger point is plain. There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem."

Key to the modern world – the sinister groupthink

Christopher Booker, Telegraph

Some time back, a reader drew my attention to the book in which, 40 years ago, a Yale professor of psychology, Irving Janis, analysed what, with a conscious nod to George Orwell, he called “groupthink”. It is a term we all casually use (which even he derived from another writer), but he identified eight symptoms of groupthink. One is the urge of its victims to insist that their view is held as a “consensus” by all morally right-thinking people. Another is their ruthless desire to suppress any evidence that might lead someone to question it. A third is their urge to stereotype and denigrate anyone who dares hold a dissenting view. Their intolerance of “independent critical thinking”, as Janis put it, leads them to “irrational and dehumanised actions directed against outgroups”.

Of course, there is nothing new about this. Hostility to heretics and dissenters has characterised the more extreme forms of religious and political belief all down the ages. But as someone who tends often to come to views differing from those held by many other people – what Ibsen called that “majority” that is “always wrong” – I am quite sensitive to the power and prevalence of groupthink in our own time. It is particularly evident in views widely held on several subjects I regularly write about here, from climate change and “renewable energy” to everything its acolytes like to describe as “Europe”. It is their groupthinking intolerance that prompts them to stereotype anyone daring to disagree with their “consensus” as “deniers”, “flat-Earthers”, “creationists”, “xenophobes”, “homophobes”, “bigots”, “racists” or “fascists”.

But another characteristic of groupthink that Janis doesn’t fully explore in his book is that those caught up in these mindsets have never actually worked out their thinking on the subject for themselves. They have taken on their belief-system, and the reasons for supporting it, ready-made and wholesale from others. That is why it is impossible to have any intelligent dialogue with, say, zealots for man-made climate change or the European Union, because they have not really examined the evidence for themselves but have come to a set of opinions that are skin-deep and second-hand. They can only parrot the mantras they have picked up from others."

Britain's potential new oil bonanza revealed: 4.4BILLION barrels found beneath The Weald in Sussex Hampshire and Kent - but will the Greens let us get at it?

Daily Mail

Official analysis by British Geological Survey reveals billions of barrels

Report was commissioned by Department for Energy and Climate Change

It estimates that there are 4.4billion barrels-worth of oil under Weald Basin

How much of it may be recoverable is not yet known - test drilling will tell

New discovery is a tenth of what has been extracted from North Sea

Report says it's unlikely there's any shale gas potential in the area

Discovery will have implications for politicians and Britain's energy market

New plans to allow energy firms to drill in exchange for £20,000 per well

Green MP Caroline Lucas says fracking on huge scale will be 'disastrous'

WSJ corrects John Kerry: "worst that can happen" is spending trillions of dollars on a problem that we can't do anything to stop

The Hockey Schtick
"If we make the necessary efforts to address this challenge—and supposing I'm wrong or scientists are wrong, 97% of them all wrong—supposing they are, what's the worst that can happen?" Mr. Kerry said. "We put millions of people to work transitioning our energy, creating new and renewable and alternative; we make life healthier because we have less particulates in the air and cleaner air and more health; we give ourselves greater security through greater energy independence—that's the downside."

So the "downside" of addressing climate policy is more jobs, cleaner air, more energy security, and we save the planet too. Makes you wonder why there aren't already 100 Senate votes for this miracle. Perhaps that's because the "energy policy" Mr. Kerry is talking about includes vast new political control over the economy, starting with taxes and limits on carbon energy, subsidies for his favored energy sources, and new and costly regulations on much of the American Midwest, South and West.

The "worst that can happen" is that we spend trillions of dollars trying to solve a problem that we can't do anything to stop; that we misallocate scarce resources in a way that slows economic growth; that slower growth leads to less economic opportunity for Boston College grads and especially the world's poor, and that America and the world become much less wealthy and technologically advanced than we would otherwise. All of which would make the world less able to cope with the costs of climate change if Mr. Kerry is right."

Antarctica’s ice losses on the rise – with a sanity check

WUWT
....Three years of observations show that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year — twice as much as when it was last surveyed. See below for some sanity check calculations on why 159 billion tonnes really isn’t much more than a flyspeck in the scheme of things.   ..........
And so, the loss of 0.159 159 cubic kilometers of ice per year is apparently headline worthy, because at that rate of loss, it would take 169,811 years to lose all the 27 million cubic kilometers of Antarctic ice.
I’m pretty sure we’ll have gone through a few ice ages by then.
(Update: I made an error in the initial post with units, where I conflated kiloton/gigaton in one step, fixed)

Stavins and Tol on IPCC WG3

Judith Curry
.....True to its classic wicked messiness, there is no unambiguous way to separate natural from anthropogenic climate change, or to separate climate change impacts from other confounding factors, or to separate the solutions from the broader issues of population increase, underdevelopment, mismanagement, and corrupt governments."

FT: ‘No one trusts Washington on climate change’

WUWT
The Financial Times, a major international business newspaper, the main competitor to the Wall Street Journal, has just published an article, highlighting the insignificance of the impact Obama’s National Climate Assessment has had, on American public opinion.
According to the FT,

“Americans have been receiving such warnings for a decade. None has managed to rouse the country from its seeming indifference.”
“… the authors seem to have forgotten that weather is not the same thing as the climate.”.
“Former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman wrote recently of having watched a debate at which “all the Republican candidates chuckled at a question on climate change – as if they had been asked about their belief in the Tooth Fairy””

....
The Wall street Journal summed it up this way:
Obama’s Climate Bomb

He’s flogging disaster scenarios to promote his political agenda.

May 8, 2014 7:25 p.m. ET

Supervising the Earth’s climate—or at least believing humanity can achieve such miracles—may be the only political project grandiose enough for President Obama. So it shouldn’t surprise that after reforming health care and raising taxes, the White House is now getting the global-warming band back together, though it is still merely playing the old classics of unscientific panic.
On Wednesday the White House released the quadrennial National Climate Assessment, an 829-page report."

Climate change does produce one thing: Funding

St Louis Post-Dispatch

I laughed when I saw the climate change article on Page 1 of the Post-Dispatch on May 7.  Apparently President Obama wants us to start thinking about climate change because we’re not. Out of 15 things we think are important, climate change came out dead last. Silly us — we talk about how we’re going to get our kids to day care or why the furnace is making a funny noise when we should be discussing climate change. The nerve.
Interestingly, our air is cleaner now than it’s ever been and we have more energy than we've ever had, but the Obama administration is reducing our fuel sources to green energy. Green energy is fine as long as other people are paying for it. In Missouri, the demand for solar panels dried up as soon as the subsidy for them disappeared. California has mandated renewable energy, and their electric rates are already three times higher than ours and will climb another 46 percent. Is this what we want?
Concerning climate change, the majority of forecast calamities over the past half century including acid rain, the "population bomb," killer bees and the ozone hole have proved to be only moderate concerns. But they did produce one thing — funding. So now climate change is the new calamity — and funding source.
Rich Iezzi  •  St. Louis

Antarctic Sea Ice At Record Levels

CCNET

Antarctic sea ice has expanded to record levels for April, increasing by more than 110,000sq km a day last month to nine million square kilometres.
 

The National Snow and Ice Data Centre said the rapid expansion had continued into May and the seasonal cover was now bigger than the record “by a significant margin’’.

“This exceeds the past record for the satellite era by about 320,000sq km, which was set in April 2008,’’ the centre said.

Increased ice cover in Antarctic continues to be at odds with falling Arctic ice levels, where the summer melt has again pushed levels well below the average extent for 1981-2010. The centre said while the rate of ­Arctic-wide retreat was rapid through the first half of April, it had slowed.

The April Arctic minimum was 270,000sq km higher than the record April low, which occurred in 2007. The Antarctic sea ice extent anomalies were greatest in the eastern Weddell and along a long stretch of coastline south of Australia and the southeastern Indian Ocean. The centre said the increased ice extent in the Weddell Sea region appeared to be associated with a broad area of persistent easterly winds in March and April, and lower-than-average temperatures."

Big Green’s untold billions Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil

CFACT and the Washington Examiner

Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.
Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.
You don’t need expert skills to connect the dots linking Keystone XL to Alberta’s oil sands to climate change to Big Green.
On the other hand, you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with CFACT senior policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry — and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.
“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”
Driessen then identified the most-neglected of all money sources in Big Green: “The liberal foundations that give targeted grants to Big Green operations have well over $100 billion at their disposal.”

Got Warming ?

$2.6 Billion For Climate Research

NALOPKT
Sometimes I come across things by accident.
NOAA have this overview on their website of the recent National Climate Assessment. ......
The idea that this is some sort of “independent science report” is laughable. It is a political report through and through, written and overseen by the government for the government.
And the authors certainly are not going to put at risk any of that lovely $2.6 billion research money, are they?