So who are the real deniers? And where are their paychecks coming from? And how can the public simply put blind faith in blanket statements about 'scientific consensus'...?
First, the good news: The global warming alarm is officially over. Of course, for the more perceptive among you this is not news at all. The 18 year 8 month long pause in global "warming" (which, after a brief El Nino break, could be back by December). The demonstrable lack of a CO2-induced tropical hot spot. Record-breaking gains in Antarctic sea ice. Record-breaking lack of hurricanes making landfall. The demonstrably incorrect claim about "hotspots of acceleration" of sea level rise. And on and on and on and on ad infinitum.
But the latest nail in the coffin of the global warming scam comes via a savage takedown of one of the main pillars of global climate modeling. The pillar is referred to as "climate sensitivity" and measures the expected change in equilibrium temperature in a doubling of radiative forcing (like atmospheric CO2 concentration). In other words, Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) estimates how much equilibrium temperature changes if you have a sustained doubling in CO2 (from 350 parts per million, for instance, to 700 ppm). This is obviously one of the core ingredients of any global climate model, but curiously the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that is supposedly synthesizing the best scientific data on climate to come to a "consensus" about climate change has been getting less and less sure about ECS as time goes on.
As a presentation at the London Climate Change Conference earlier this month demonstrates, this is likely due to the fact that four specific mathematical errors have been found in existing ECS models, and once the errors have been corrected it turns out that actual ECS is between 1.3 and 1.7 degrees Celsius, far lower than the IPCC currently predicts (between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius). Keep in mind that the whole Paris climate conference nonsense last month was centered around the pledge to keep carbon dioxide emissions down in order to prevent a 2 degree temperature rise. Well, guess what: that mission is already accomplished. Humans could double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the moment and still not reach 2 degrees of temperature rise. And that's using the climate scaremongers' own data. (Those interested in checking out the math for themselves are invited to watch the presentation or view the equations for themselves.)
But now for the bad news: this will not change anything with regard to the Paris climate accord hoopla, the warnings of impending apocalypse, or the cries that "Something must be done!" to stop this non-crisis. And by "something" it is of course understood that lots of money should be thrown at the problem. Lots and lots of money.
As we have discussed in these pages before, the burgeoning climate control industry with all of its green energy offshoots and green finance spiderwebs represent a $100 trillion boondoggle that dwarfs all previous boondoggles (even the Pentagon's ongoing missing trillions fiasco) by orders of magnitude. Yet curiously, there is no skeptical coverage of the potential swindle represented by this unimaginable transfer of wealth. Instead, all of the media coverage is focused on the other side of the issue: who funds those who critique this (demonstrably incorrect) "consesnsus" on global warming?
In 2006, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a documentary that was meant to bring an increasingly skeptical public back on board with the idea of manmade global warming. Airing on The Fifth Estate, an influential and respected investigative journalism program, "The Denial Machine" attempted to throw mud at any scientist who dared to question the so-called 'consensus' on manmade global warming by implying all such scientists were secretly funded by oil companies.
Unfortunately for the pushers of the manmade global warming scare the truth is almost exactly the opposite. Rather than a vast, oil company-funded conspiracy, skepticism of the climate swindle is confined to a few marginalized scientists who are increasingly forced to work pro bono in order to work at all. On the other hand, there is no shortage of money for promoters of the official line that we are all about to die in a ecological catastrophe (unless you give all your money to the banksters and give up all your rights, of course).
For a case in point about how these eco-catastrophists are generously rewarded for their Chicken Little pronouncements, let's cast an eye back on Climategate, the release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in 2009. Although best known for the "hide the decline" email and other emails discussing how they couldn't understand their own climate models or data and how they could keep dissenting viewpoints out of the published literature, the emails also show how the CRU researchers were being well-funded for making up scare stories about the CO2-induced end of the world. This was part of a process where public grants would routinely go to the researcher with the most dire predictions about the ravages of global warming. Call it "The Alarmist Machine."
As this hacked spreadsheet demonstrates CRU Director Phil Jones himself received a mind-boggling 22 million dollars in grants for his work over the past 20 years. Sadly, the leaked data also shows just how willing these scientists were to lie and cheat in the pursuit of those funds.
One of the most outrageous emails (1056478635) features one CRU scientist openly advising a colleague to cook the books from their last research grant in order to receive more money from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration):
Ninh
NOAA want to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN.
How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious. Politically this money may have to go through Simon's institute but there overhead rate is high so maybe not!
Best wishes
Mick
The contempt shown for the taxpayers who are funding and supporting these research efforts through institutions like the NOAA is appalling. Certainly any researchers who are found to have participated in such duplicity should never receive another cent of taxpayer money again.
But the chicanery does not end there. In a well-researched article on American Thinker, Marc Sheppard points out that while the alarmists imply that the skeptics are being secretly funded, it is in fact the climate scientists who are being funded by the energy companies. The fact that CRU members received significant funding from renewable energy companies, however, and not Big Oil, presumably puts their motives beyond reproach.
Of course, this is not to say that these practices are confined to a few 'bad apples' in the scientific community. As skeptical scientists have been pointing out for years, scientific studies about doomsdays and catastrophes—no matter how unlikely the predictions or how shakey the underlying assumptions—tend to get greater funding and grant money than studies that show there is no such disaster on the horizon. This is the inherent bias toward alarmist science and the inherent danger of The Alarmist Machine: not that there is some vast, secret conspiracy funding these alarmist scientists, but that this is a natural and predictable result of the funding process itself. Even rational people can be stampeded into throwing money hand over fist at a team of scientists who are promising to save the world from disaster, especially when those rational people are blatantly misled by an unquestioning media that unproblematically reports on highly problematic science. And all the while the scientific economy is shifted until the entire process becomes one of scientists competing to come up with the most panic-inducing findings.
As someone who spent his entire scientific career fighting the alarmists—first the ones who were whipping up hysteria over the coming ice age and then the ones (sometimes the same ones) who were whipping up hysteria over global warming—Dr. Tim Ball is no stranger to the "Denial Machine" smear. In fact, he was one of the scientists singled out in the CBC documentary. He doesn't tow the global warming line, therefore he must be funded by Big Oil. It doesn't seem to bother the producers of the documentary that they offer not one shred of evidence for that assertion: the logic of the situation demands it, so it must be true.
For someone who supposedly receives secret backdoor money from the Exxon bigwigs, Dr. Ball lives a remarkably low-key life. When I met him for an interview in Victoria earlier this year, he was neither lighting cigars with Big Oil-supplied $100 bills nor driving a gas-guzzling SUV. Instead he was on foot and he took me on a walking tour of the beautiful B.C. capital, regaling me with stories about the town's history and demonstrating a genuine enthusiasm for the local tradition and culture of his adopted hometown. We passed several hours talking about the history and philosophy of science, and what strikes one about him when engaged in such a conversation is that he has read, researched, and retained a voluminous amount of material, not just on his specialty of climatology, but of scientific history generally. It is not surprise, then, that his take on the climategate scandal is one of the most thoughtful (and damning) yet.
So here we have a tale of two groups. One consists of retired professors like Dr. Ball and groups of scientists like those at the London Climate Conference who receive almost no press coverage, are forced to convene conferences in small lecture halls, and who very visibly miss out on all the glitz and glamour of the disgustingly opulent IPCC conference circuit. On the other hand, we have the scientists who are quite obviously being given exceedingly large grants to continue their research that we now know is quite obviously denying science (like the ECS swindle).
So who are the real deniers? And where are their paychecks coming from? And how can the public simply put blind faith in blanket statements about 'scientific consensus' and 'listening to the experts' again, especially when there are literally trillions of dollars hinging on the science skewing towards the alarmists?