By Matt Patterson
Special to the Examiner.
Earth is not warming. According to Big Green enviros, only Luddites and lunatics would believe such a ludicrous statement.
Hadley 15 year global temperature pliot Enlarged
And this from Dr. Roy Spencer:
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for January, 2012 took a precipitous plunge, not totally unexpected for a La Nina January (click here for the full-size version):
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
Here are the monthly stats:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2011 1 -0.010 -0.055 +0.036 -0.372
2011 2 -0.020 -0.042 +0.002 -0.348
2011 3 -0.101 -0.073 -0.128 -0.342
2011 4 +0.117 +0.195 +0.039 -0.229
2011 5 +0.133 +0.145 +0.121 -0.043
2011 6 +0.315 +0.379 +0.250 +0.233
2011 7 +0.374 +0.344 +0.404 +0.204
2011 8 +0.327 +0.321 +0.332 +0.155
2011 9 +0.289 +0.304 +0.274 +0.178
2011 10 +0.116 +0.169 +0.062 -0.054
2011 11 +0.123 +0.075 +0.170 +0.024
2011 12 +0.126 +0.197 +0.055 +0.041
2012 01 -0.093 -0.059 -0.127 -0.138
Progress continues on Version 6 of our global temperature dataset. You can anticipate a little cooler anomalies than recently reported, maybe by a few hundredths of a degree, due to a small warming drift we have identified in one of the satellites carrying the AMSU instruments.
Well, now government scientists must be added to the long list of the so addled. Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horse’s mouth, a new report from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies titled “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects:”
“Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.”
But don’t worry. Even as climate scientists—and an ever-gullible media—are forced by new data to admit that the Earth is not warming, they take pains to assure us that the Earth is still warming.
The Associated Press was typical in its contortions, as in this Jan. 20 statement: “The world last year wasn’t quite as warm as it has been for most of the past decade, government scientists said Thursday, but it continues a general trend of rising temperatures.”
Not as warm, but still a “general trend” of rising temperatures. Got that? No? Well, don’t worry. The high priests of warming have apparently assumed a plane far above our mere mortal logic.
Besides, it all depends on how you define “trend,” doesn’t it? If you go far enough back, you can prove any trend you like about global temperatures. If you start at about 650 million years ago, when the Earth was covered pole to pole in ice, you can say current data show we are in a “general trend” of rising temperatures. If you go back to 1998, not so much.
It is cute, in a pathetic kind of way, to watch the global warming cult try and fudge and spin this fact like nobody’s business. Here’s another hilarious example, from the same AP story:
“‘It would be premature to make any conclusion that we would see any hiatus of the longer-term warming trend,’ said Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. ‘Global temperatures are continuing to increase.’”
Yes, it would be premature to draw a conclusion (that global warming is not happening) based on current data (that global temps are lower today than in 1998). That’s what we foolish mortals do.
Government scientists, and the functionaries and bureaucrats they serve, however, know better. Aren’t we lucky?
In another sickening example, NASA scientists admit that while the new data is “suggestive of a slowdown in global warming, this apparent slowdown may largely disappear as a few more years of data are added.”
An apparent slowdown that may disappear. Talk about covering your bases. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
One can understand this disappointment. Lucrative climate-scaremongering careers are at stake. So it is no surprise that many cling to the hope that maybe we will burn up after all, that maybe this new data is just a fluke, a blip, a natural respite from man’s descent into an unnatural global conflagration.
The truth is this: There is no such thing as an “average” global temperature. The history of our planet is a history of wildly fluctuating temperatures, locally and globally, from season to season, century to century, epoch to epoch.
Only a generation as narcissistic as the baby boomers would assume that the temperature they were accustomed to as they came of age in the mid-20th century is the “correct” or “average” global temperature, which must be maintained in perpetuity no matter the costs.
Again, from NASA: “Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.” Now there’s an inconvenient truth for you.
Matt Patterson is the Warren Brookes fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and senior editor at the Capital Research Center.
By Michael A Lewis
Some one or some organization is attempting to influence the upcoming annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS).
According to Urging American Meteorological Society to Get Tougher on Climate Change, a program called Forecast the Facts is attempting to lobby the AMS to change their 5-year policy on climate change to a new policy “drafted by a panel of [unidentified] experts” (emphasis added). The “Campaign Director” is identified as Daniel Souweine.
The Forecast the Facts web site turns out to be a product of “Citizen Engagement Laboratory (CEL).”
And who is the Chief of Staff of CEL? You guessed it: Daniel Souweine.
The web site describes CEL as: “a non-profit, non-partisan organization that uses digital media and technology to amplify the voices of underrepresented constituencies. We seek to empower individuals to take collective action on the issues that concern them, promoting a world of greater equality and justice in the process.”
The CEL web site lists 350.org as a “Partner,” which describes itself as: “building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.”
Sounds like birds of a feather, even though they are both attempting to lobby a major national organization to change a policy that affects all of its members… from the top down. Hardly grass roots organization. And hardly on behalf of “underrepresented constituencies.”
Evidently, grassroots meteorologists are insufficiently toeing the line when it comes to laying weather patterns at the feet of “global warming.” Someone unnamed wants them to publicly join the global warming bandwagon in blaming human CO2 emissions for observed climate change, ignoring the uncertainty of climate science, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, insisting on one single simplistic explanation for climate change.
TeeVee weather presenters, even those who are qualified meteorologists, are the most visible source of public information about weather and climate. They appear daily to billions of people, and whether or not it is a good idea, their “opinions” about climate change carry a lot of weight in popular culture. It’s no wonder that those whose interests are served by spreading fear of climate change in support of a predetermined economic outcome are after these “grass roots” who fail to tremble in fear of natural climate phenomena.
This is not grass roots, this is Big Money come to the service of shadowy figures in the background of international politics and economics. Who profits from fear of climate change? Who is funding this program to gag independent meteorologists and TeeVee weather presenters?
This is part of a concerted behind-the-scenes program funded by monied interests to subvert all elements of environmental awareness and activism to the cause of money and power, political and economic influence. Global warming hyperbole has been used to discredit free-thinking, independent scientific research, free expression, free thought and free action. The individuals and corporations funding this movement are laying the ground work for society controlled by corporate-government-military oligarchies to maintain the economic and political status quo.
Follow the money…
Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
A campaign starting this weekend will urge meteorologists to cite man-made climate change when they report on strong storms and flooding.
“Forecast the Facts” - a campaign by the League of Conservation Voters, 350.org and Citizen Engagement Lab—aims to persuade the American Meteorological Society to adopt an official position linking higher instance of extreme weather events to emissions of heat-trapping gases.
The groups will deliver petitions to the society next week during its annual meeting in New Orleans.
The campaign ultimately hopes to persuade weather forecasters to discuss climate change when they report on the weather, campaign director Daniel Souweine said.
“The aim of the campaign is really to shift how TV meteorologists report on climate change,” he said.
Meteorologists usually don’t mention man-made climate change in reports on extreme weather, the activists say, even though many scientists say human emissions are making those events more common.
Souweine said many TV weather forecasters doubt climate change is occurring or that it’s linked to human activities.
A survey by George Mason University found 26 percent of meteorologists believe man-made climate change is “a scam.” Seventy-eight percent of respondents said reporters should provide “balance” when discussing climate change, treating it as a political issue, and two-thirds said weather broadcasts are not an appropriate place to discuss the issue.
Souweine said meteorologists should begin reporting that climate change is a scientific consensus, even though he acknowledges that no individual storm or drought can be linked to the phenomenon.
“We think it’s important to tell their viewers what is behind those phenomenon,” he said. “We think that is actually their professional responsibility.”
AMS did not immediately return calls for comment. PDF with comments.
And SEPP reports: New Tactics: Global warming alarmists have taken a new tactic in their efforts to brand global warming skeptics as anti-science. Skeptics, such as SEPP, insist that climate change is natural and normal and that the UN IPCC has failed to produce rigorous scientific research demonstrating that carbon dioxide emissions are causing unprecedented and dangerous global warming. The models used failed to predict current temperature trends, thus the results are nothing but speculation.
In an effort to distort issues, organizations such as the self-styled National Center for Science Education (NCSE) are attempting to lump skepticism about global warming with skepticism about evolution. The subjects are separate and distinct, and any rational discussion needs to separate them. To SEPP, this is but one more example how desperate the global warming alarmists have become over their failure to conduct the necessary research.
The web site of NCSE states: “To ensure the accuracy of the models at projecting future climate trends, the models are often run backwards in time to “retrodict” past climate changes, and then compared with paleoclimate observations. The models through this process have become remarkably accurate and give the climate research community confidence that the future projections are robust.” [Boldface added.] The climate models are failing the most critical test - the ability to predict the current temperature trend of no increase. Please see links under ”Expanding the Orthodoxy.”
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False Positives: No matter how scrupulously conducted, sometimes studies will produce a false positive by sheer random chance. There is no way of knowing when this will occur. As reader Tom Sheahen pointed out, Judith Curry had an interesting post on false positives on her web site, linked in TWTW last week and this week.
To help assure that false positives do not enter into government policy requires demanding repetitive, rigorous, transparent studies. Of course, this is of little use when agencies, such as the EPA in its new mercury rules, pick and choose the studies they wish to use and discard the rest without written justification. Please see link under “Seeking a Common Ground.”
James Taylor, Forbes
As 2011 comes to a close, climate science celebrates an important landmark. It has now been 33 years, or a third of a century, since sensors aboard NASA and NOAA satellites began measuring temperatures throughout the earth’s lower atmosphere.
For 33 years, we have had precise, objective temperature data that do not require guesswork corrections to compensate for uneven thermometer placement and non-climate surface temperature biases such as expanding urban heat islands and land-use changes. The satellite data, moreover, tell us the earth is warming at a more modest, gradual, and reassuring pace than was foretold by United Nations computer models.
The satellite sensors became operational at a time that is very convenient for those who believe humans are causing a global warming crisis. Global temperatures declined from the mid-1940s through the late 1970s. As a result, the sensors coincidentally began measuring global temperatures at the very beginning of our most recent global warming trend. Had the sensors been in place 33 years earlier, during the 1940s, the overall pace of warming shown by the satellite sensors would be less than half what is shown by the post-1978 temperature data.
Even so, the measured temperature trend is quite modest. John Christy, who along with Roy Spencer oversees the NASA satellite sensor program, reports temperatures have warmed at an average pace of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade since the satellite sensors became operational. This is merely half the pace predicted by computer models utilized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Christy appears to be making a generous concession regarding the warming that has occurred. The temperature data seem to show warming closer to 0.3 degrees over the 33 year period, or 0.09 degrees Celsius per decade. But why quibble over the difference? A warming of 0.14 degrees per decade, or 1.4 degrees per century, is still significantly less than predicted by UN climate models and far from an impending global warming crisis.
Importantly, the satellite sensors show less warming in the lower troposphere (approximately 10,000 feet above the earth’s surface) than is reported by surface temperature readings. Global warming theory holds that one of the fingerprints of human-induced global warming is more rapid warming in the lower troposphere than at the surface. The reason for this is carbon dioxide molecules reside in the lower troposphere and have their greatest heat-trapping effect there.
As a result, if global temperatures are rising as a result of human carbon dioxide emissions, the satellite sensors should report more warming in the lower troposphere than is actually occurring at the surface. In essence the satellite sensors should report a warming trend somewhat more severe than is actually occurring at the surface of the earth.
Surface temperature measurements, however, indicate more rapid warming at the surface of the earth than in the lower troposphere. According to James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute, temperatures at the surface of the earth rose twice as fast during the past 33 years as the satellite data show. Surface temperatures compiled by the UK’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit reflect a similar warming trend.
With temperature data indicating more warming at the earth’s surface than in the earth’s lower troposphere, one of the following must be true: (1) the surface temperature data is more corrupted by heat biases such as expanding urban heat islands and localized land-use changes than the IPCC admits, (2) the warming of the past 33 years is primarily the result of factors other than greenhouse gas emissions, or (3) longstanding, widely believed assumptions about greenhouse gas theory are wrong.
Regardless of which one or more of the three options are true, the satellite sensors have contributed greatly to our scientific understanding of the earth’s ever-changing climate. Thirty-three years and counting, we rightly celebrate the scientific advances provided by satellite temperature sensors.
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post
Never before has a Canadian politician challenged the hitherto saintly protectors of the environment in such direct language
Through most of 2011, Canadian energy officials in politics and industry watched with bewildered helplessness and some shock as Washington allowed environmentalists to seize control of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline issue. They stood by aghast as President Barack Obama, a captive of U.S. green activists and Hollywood movie stars, caved in to political pressure and postponed a decision to approve the project, a potential economic bonanza that promised to deliver thousands of jobs to Americans and billions of barrels of Canadian oil sands production to Texas.
No such green hijacking is going to take place in Canada, at least not without an official fight. On the eve of hearings, which begin Tuesday in Kitimat, B.C., into the $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline - to carry the same oil sands production from Alberta to the West Coast and on to China - the Harper government clearly aims to do what Barack Obama cannot or will not do in America, namely stand up to the growth-killing professional green movement. See more here.
Wind Power: Unreliable, Costly & Ineffective
Europe’s focus on wind power is crippling British energy users with additional costs as it is not a cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a report has found.
The EU has directed governments to generate 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, leading many to focus on wind. But wind power is unreliable and requires back-up gas power stations to maintain a consistent electricity supply, the Civitas think-tank study found.
It means energy users pay twice - once for the ‘window-dressing’ of renewables and again for fossil fuels the energy sector continues to rely on. The study, written by economist Ruth Lea, uses Government-commissioned estimates of the cost of electricity generation to calculate the most cost-effective technologies.
Gas-fired power is the most cost-effective in the short term, while nuclear power stations become the most cost-efficient in the medium term, more than twice as cost-effective as wind. The report concludes: ‘Wind power is expensive and yet is not effective in cutting CO2 emissions.
‘If it were not for the renewables targets, wind power would not even be entertained as a cost-effective way of generating electricity or cutting emissions. The renewables target should be renegotiated with the EU.’
The study attacks Government claims that wind power is one of the more cost-effective means of generating power. In fact, it says, it is ‘unreliable and requires conventional back-up capacity’.
The report also says wind power, backed by conventional gas-fired generation, can emit more CO2 than the most effective gas turbines running alone.
By Alan Caruba
To understand how the Environmental Protection Agency operates, one must first understand that it lies all the time. Its “estimates” are bogus. Its claims of lives saved are bogus.
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It thrives on scare-mongering to a public that is science-challenged, but the science remains and the EPA must be challenged to save the nation from the loss of the energy it needs to function. It must be challenged to unleash the huge economic benefits of energy resources - coal, oil, and natural gas - that can reverse our present economic decline.
The latest outrage is the MACT rule - an acronym for “maximum achievable control technology” intended to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. The rule is 1,117 pages long. Its purpose is to shut down coal-fired power plants that generate over fifty percent of all the electricity used daily in the United States of America.
The value of the total benefits asserted by the EPA is alleged to be $6 million. Not billion, but million. The MACT rule would force 14.7 gigawatts - enough power for more than eleven million households - to be “retired” from the power grip in the 2014-15 period when the rules take effect.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works says, “The economic analysis of the Obama EPA’s MACT paints a bleak picture for economic recovery as it will cost $11 billion to implement, increase electricity rates for every American, and, along with the Cross-State rule, destroy nearly 1.4 million jobs.”
MACT is all about mercury in the environment of the nation. On May 25, 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a brief opinion piece by Willie Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, co-authored by Paul Driessen, a senior policy advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. It was titled “The Myth of Killer Mercury.”
Here are a few of the facts it offered.
“Mercury has always existed naturally in the Earth’s environment. A 2009 study found mercury deposits in Antarctic ice across 650,000 years.”
“Mercury is found in air, water, rocks, soil and trees, which absorb it from the environment.”
There is “200,000,000 tons of mercury naturally present in seawater” that “has never posed a danger to any living thing.”
“U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons (of mercury) per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons; Chinese power plants eject 400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.”
“Since our power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other 99.5% in our atmosphere.”
This is the same EPA “logic” that insists on reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere when all life on Earth depends on it as plant food for all vegetation. More CO2 mean more crops for humans and livestock, healthier forests and jungles, and food for the Earth’s wildlife population.
In a foreword to “Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry”, Dr. Jay Lehr, the Science Director of The Heartland Institute, wrote, “This administration is pushing an unprecedented radical environmental agenda.”
The EPA, along with major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others, have engaged for decades in a massive propaganda effort to convince Americans they are imperiled by the nation’s air and water. It is a lie. As the author of “Regulators Gone Wild”, Rich Trzupeck notes, “Though our world is actually cleaner than ever, most Americans are convinced it is dirtier.”
“Toxicity,” wrote Trzupeck, “is a matter of dose, as sober scientists have observed since ancient times. A particular compound may kill you if you drink it, but a few parts per billion of the same compound can have no effect at all…one can find toxic air pollutants in the parts-per-billion level in human breath.”
The EPA’s latest rule, which will no doubt be subject to lawsuits, is a killer MACT. It is not about mercury or other trace gases. It is about deliberately depriving the nation of energy which in turn means less jobs, less growth, and a third world lifestyle being imposed on Americans by the radical environmentalists inside the Obama administration.
Remember that when you are in the election booth on November 6, 2012.
See also Dr Charles Battig WSJ editorial here.
By James Taylor, Forbes
If you found it difficult this year to save enough money to purchase Christmas gifts for your loved ones, just wait until 2012. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency yesterday announced new mercury restrictions on coal power plants that will impose anywhere from $10 billion (EPA’s estimate) to $200 billion (third-party estimates) in new costs on energy production. On a per household basis, that imposes anywhere from $100 to $2,000 in additional energy costs on the average U.S. household each and every year.
Although the new restrictions do not take effect until 2015, energy providers will have to take immediate action to meet the deadline. U.S. electricity prices have already increased by nearly 50 percent during the past decade, and EPA’s new restrictions will merely accelerate that trend. Start taking still more money out of next year’s Christmas envelope and transfer it over to the monthly electricity envelope.
Despite the high costs, perhaps the new restrictions would make sense if the United States faced a severe and worsening environmental mercury problem. Exactly the opposite is the case.
EPA reports that mercury emissions in the United States have declined by approximately 60% since 1990. The dramatic reduction in mercury emissions is consistent with the reduction in air pollution across the board. EPA reports that emissions of the Six Principal Pollutants it monitors have decreased by 67% since 1980. This trend will continue even without EPA’s new mercury restrictions, as natural gas continues to claim an ever-greater share of electricity output in the nation. Natural gas power is dramatically cleaner than coal power and cuts most emissions by 80 to 100 percent. Natural gas cuts mercury emissions by more than 90% in relation to coal.
Still further, there would be little reason for concern even if the dramatic and ongoing decline in mercury and other emissions were not already taking place. As scientist Willie Soon summarized in a Wall Street Journal article earlier this year, “To build its case against mercury, the EPA systematically ignored evidence and clinical studies that contradict its regulatory agenda, which is to punish hydrocarbon use.”
Soon presented more than 80 pages of research supporting his article, documenting that environmental mercury levels in the United States are far from being a serious health threat. Soon demonstrated how EPA conducted no original research and cherry-picked available studies to present the bleakest possible picture regarding environmental mercury and human health. In doing so, EPA relied on the studies with glaring scientific flaws while ignoring much more credible studies showing no serious health risks.
Given the long-term improvement in our nation’s air quality and the steep price of the new restrictions, the timing and rationale of EPA’s decision seem rather curious. However, environmental activist groups have long since abandoned sound science and cost-benefit analyses in their war on conventional energy. Oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro-power are the enemy. Anything short of wind and solar power, with a very few minor exceptions, are to be fought at all costs. And even wind and solar power are mere bridges to a future where energy usage is restricted to our most basic needs.
In the meantime, if global warming can justify shutting down coal power plants, then play up global warming fears. If flimsy mercury studies can justify shutting down coal power plants, then play up mercury fears. And if mercury emissions are already in rapid decline anyway, keep claiming our nation’s air quality keeps getting worse and hope that the truth doesn’t get out.
Merry Christmas, now give us more of your money.
By:Anthony J. Sadar
In his 2004 bestseller, “State of Fear,” the late Michael Crichton introduced a skeptical climate science character, Professor Hoffman, who said:
“I study the ecology of thought.... And how it has led to a State of Fear.” The professor went on to explain that the government practices “social control [which is] best managed through fear.”
After the U.N. packed up yet another global climate conference earlier this month, the perpetual state of fearful climate science came to mind. The fear this time is based on the current talking points from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that human-induced climate change is manifested in “extreme weather events.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is already exploiting this alarming message in a creative way. The EPA is preparing guidelines on reducing indoor air pollutants because people are expected to spend more time indoors due to the increased amount of severe weather resulting from climate change.
The pushing of this atmospheric angst is like operating a shady business or practicing an earth-first religion. An “authoritative” consortium such as the U.N.’s IPCC identifies an urgent condition (severe weather is caused by anthropogenic global warming), solutions are proposed (altering lifestyles, shuttering coal-fired power plants), services are offered (education, research, consulting, trading-companies for carbon credits), and oversight/enforcement is “required” (national and international bureaucracies).
Everyone seems to be cashing in on the doomsday predictions, from private companies and academic institutions to governments with their expanding power and work force.
Everybody wins ... well, not quite. The big losers are, as usual, the ones stuck paying the bill—the middle-class taxpayers, plus the world’s poor, who manage to get by-passed in massive wealth-transfer schemes. And certainly scientific practice itself ultimately loses.
The concept of one international, authoritative group assembled to be “the final word” on an emerging complex issue like climate change is arbitrary and arrogant, besides being somewhat foreign to authentic scientific practice, especially when the leaders of the group are promoting political agendas.
This arrangement also invites corruption, as dominant personalities and their ideas and agendas frequently emerge and are imposed upon group members.
For an excellent, in-depth example of this, see the just-released IPCC expose by investigative journalist Donna Laframboise titled, “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.”
Laframboise notes that it is “both peculiar and ironic that an organization that so vigorously claims to represent a worldwide scientific consensus has systematically ‘disappeared’ so many consensus views held by so many different kinds of researchers.”
She discovered that the IPCC “ignores the consensus among hurricane experts that there is no discernible link to global warming. It ignores the consensus among those who study natural disasters that there is no relationship between human greenhouse gas emissions and the rising cost of these disasters.
It ignores the consensus among bona fide malaria experts that global warming has not caused malaria to spread.” Laframboise concludes that in each case “the IPCC substitutes its own version of reality.” A version that “makes global warming appear more frightening than genuine experts believe the available evidence indicates.”
To prop-up this IPCC science-by-committee fear-mongering, those who know nothing about atmospheric science (like politicians, actors and PR spin doctors), but fawn over IPCC proclamations are unleashed to push the human climate change hypothesis, while those who are intimate with the field (like workaday practitioners in climatology and meteorology), but skeptical of IPCC assertions are ridiculed for being “global-warming deniers.”
Many of us with years of real-world experience in atmospheric science would agree that, ideally, the practice of such science is about freedom to creatively combine fundamental scientific knowledge with individual skills and perspective to aid the evaluation of natural conditions.
In this way, the advancement of the field can occur for the benefit of both people and the planet. But, over the past few decades, by maintaining a state of fear, climate science has deviated from this ideal, damaging an honorable scientific profession. And that is truly scary.
Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist specializing in air-pollution issues and primary author of Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry (CRC Press/Lewis Publishers, 2000).