Mr. President, a phrase has been used recently called ``the tipping point.'' The American people will very soon be asked to support a type of global warming cap-and-trade bill, legislation that has already had a hearing in the Environment…
Mr. President, a phrase has been used recently called ``the tipping point.'' The American people will very soon be asked to support a type of global warming cap-and-trade bill, legislation that has already had a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee. There are a couple other bills in the background.
These bills come at a time when the science is overwhelmingly taking away the basis for alarm. I am going to use terms this morning. The alarmists are the ones who are mostly out in California, the far-left extremists, the Hollywood elitists, and others who feel this is a great alarm, the world is coming to an end--the same ones who said that another ice age was coming back in the middle 1970s. So we need to know what terms we are using.
An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and data-error discoveries in the past several months have prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic manmade global warming--I am using their terms now, the scientists' terms--``bites the dust'' and the scientific underpinnings for alarm are ``falling apart.''
I have addressed this subject on this floor about a dozen times since 2003.
But I want to talk to you today about something that is really kind of unprecedented; that is, to talk only about things that have happened this year, or mostly in the last 7 months, that people are just not aware of.
The media is very much opposed to the idea there might be another side to the global warming story. So we are going to be talking about a ``tipping point'' in a little different relationship than you have been hearing about it recently. I will detail how even committed leftwing scientists now believe the environmental movement has been ``co-opted'' into promoting global warming as a ``crisis,'' and I will expose the manufactured facade of ``consensus.''
The interesting thing is that everything I am going to be using is going to be what has happened just in the last 6 months. I will also address the economic factors of the so-called solutions to global warming and how they will have no measurable impact on the climate. But these so-called solutions will create huge economic harm for American families and the poor residents of the developing world who may see development hindered by unfounded climate fears.
We are currently witnessing an international awakening of scientists who are speaking out in opposition to former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, the Hollywood elitists, and the media-driven ``consensus'' on manmade global warming.
We have witnessed Antarctic ice grow to records levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s. We have witnessed NASA temperature data errors that have made 1934--instead of 1998--the hottest year on record in the United States. We have seen global average temperatures flat line since 1998 and the Southern Hemisphere cool in recent years.
When they talk about global warming, I have always conceded that the Northern Hemisphere is going through a warming period, as it did a cooling period back in the 1970s. But the Southern Hemisphere actually has been getting colder. This is all new stuff, as I say, in the last few months. These are new developments. They are but a sample of the new information coming out that continues to debunk the United Nations, former Vice President Al Gore, and the media-promoted ``consensus'' on global warming. But before we delve into these dramatic new scientific developments, it is important to take note of our pop culture propaganda campaign aimed at children, the most vulnerable of all of us.
In addition to Gore's entry last year into Hollywood fictional disaster films, other celebrity figures have attempted to jump into the game. Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio decided to toss objective scientific truth out the window in his new scarefest ``The 11th Hour.'' DiCaprio refused to interview any scientists who disagreed with his dire vision of the future of the Earth. In fact, his film reportedly features physicist Steven Hawking making the unchallenged assertion that:
The worst-case scenario is that Earth would become like its
sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees
centigrade.
I guess these worst-case scenarios pass for science in Hollywood these days. It also fits perfectly with DiCaprio's stated purpose of the film. DiCaprio said on May 20 of this year:
I want the public to be very scared by what they see. I
want them to see a very bleak future.
While those who went to watch DiCaprio's science fiction film may see his intended ``bleak future,'' it is DiCaprio who has been scared by the bleak box office numbers, as his film has failed to generate any significant audience interest.
Children are now the No. 1 target of the global warming fear campaign. DiCaprio announced his goal was to recruit young, eco- activists to the cause. ``We need to get kids young,'' he said, in a September 20 interview with USA Weekend.
Hollywood activist Laurie David, who is Vice President Gore's coproducer of ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' recently coauthored a children's global warming book with Cambria Gordon for Scholastic Books, entitled ``The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming.'' David has made it clear that her goal is to influence young minds with her new book when she recently wrote an open letter to her children stating: ``We want you to grow up to be activists.'' Apparently, David and other activists are getting frustrated by the widespread skepticism on climate as reflected in both the United States and the U.K., according to the latest polls. It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to believe their increasingly shrill and unscientifically unfounded rhetoric, so they have decided to go after the kids.
But David should worry less about recruiting young activists and more about scientific accuracy. A science group found what it called a major ``scientific error'' in David's new kids' book on page 18. According to a Science and Public Policy Institute release on September 13--and I am going to quote right now--this is very significant:
The authors (David and Gordon) present unsuspecting
children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph
that reverses the relationship found in the scientific
literature. The manipulation is critical because David's
central premise posits that CO2 drives
temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous
that CO2 changes have historically followed
temperature changes.
That is the reverse of the reality.
David has now been forced to publicly admit this significant scientific error in her book.
A Canadian high school student named McKenzie was shown Gore's climate horror film in four of her classes. Her response was:
I really don't know why they keep showing it. It scares me.
In June, a fourth grade class in Portland, Maine's, East End Community School issued a dire climate report: ``Global warming is a huge pending global disaster'' read the elementary school kids' report, according to an article in the Portland Press Herald on June 14 of 2007. Remember, these are fourth graders issuing a dire global warming report.
This agenda of indoctrination and fear aimed at children is having an impact.
Nine-year-old Alyssa Luz-Ricca was quoted in the Washington Post, on April 6 of 2007, as saying: ``I am worried about it because I don't want to die.''
The same article explained: ``Psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.''
I was told by the parent of an elementary school kid last spring-- this is kind of interesting because we had a 3-hour discussion with Al Gore, and afterwards, after it was over, a lady came up to me and she was from Maryland. She was a mother of an elementary school student, and she said they were required to actually watch this film, ``An Inconvenient Truth'' about once a month at school, and her child would come home and have nightmares about drowning in the film's predicted scary sea level rise.
The Hollywood global warming documentary ``Arctic Tale'' ends with a child actor telling kids: ``If your mom and dad buy a hybrid car, you'll make it easier for polar bears to get around.''
Unfortunately, children are hearing the scientifically unfounded doomsday message loudly and clearly. But the message kids are receiving is not a scientific one, it is a political message designed to create fear, nervousness, and ultimately recruit them to liberal activism.
There are a few hopeful signs. A judge in England has ruled that schools must issue a warning before they show Gore's film to children because of scientific inaccuracies and sentimental mush. This is a court. It is a judge in the U.K. Before they see it, they have to sign a disclaimer. In addition, there is a new kids' book called ``The Sky's Not Falling! Why It's OK to Chill About Global Warming.'' The book counters the propaganda from the pop culture.
The chart here shows ``The Sky's Not Falling!''
Objective, evidence-based science is beginning to crush hysteria. My speech today and these reports reveal that recent peer-reviewed scientific studies are totally refuting the ``Church of Manmade Global Warming.''
Meteorologist Joseph Conklin, who launched the skeptical Web site climatepolice.com in 2007, recently declared the ``global warming movement is falling apart.'' All the while, activists such as former Vice President Al Gore repeatedly continue to warn of a fast- approaching climate ``tipping point.''
I agree with Gore in this respect. Global warming may have reached a ``tipping point.'' The manmade global warming fear machine crossed the tipping point in 2007--this year. That is the reason today I am talking about things that are happening this year, things in the last 6 months. I am convinced the future climate historians will look back on 2007 as the year the global warming fears began to crumble. The situation we are now in is very similar to where we were in the late 1970s, when the coming ice age fears began to dismantle. Remember, it was Newsweek magazine which in the 1970s first proclaimed that meteorologists were almost unanimous in their view that a coming ice age would have negative impacts. It was also Newsweek in 1975 which originated the eerily similar ``tipping point''--they called it a tipping point at that time--rhetoric they are using today, except it was an ice age at that time.
Newsweek wrote on April 28, 1975, about coming ice age fears. They said:
The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they
find it to cope with climatic change once the results become
grim reality.
Of course, Newsweek essentially retracted their coming ice age article 29 years later in October of last year, 2006. People don't see the retractions, they get the hysteria of the moment.
Today, the greatest irony is that the U.N. and the media's climate hysteria grows louder as the case for alarmism fades away. While the scientific case grows weaker, the political and rhetorical proponents of climate fear are ramping up to offer hefty tax and regulatory solutions, both internationally and domestically, to solve the so- called crisis.
Skeptical climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball, formerly of the University of Winnipeg in Canada, wrote about the current state of the climate change debate earlier this month. This is a quote, I say to my colleagues:
Imagine basing a country's energy and economic policy on an
incomplete, unproven theory--a theory based entirely on
computer models in which one minor variable (CO2)
is considered the sole driver for the entire global climate
system.
How minor is that manmade CO2 variable in the atmosphere?
Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo, the first director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, explained in August how minuscule mankind's CO2 emissions are in relation to the Earth's atmosphere. This is what he said, and keep in mind we are talking about a guy who was the first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel.
If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual
anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be
equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.
We use terms such as ``anthropogenic''--and many Members of this body are not sure that manmade gases are anthropogenic gases--and those who want to blame man for all of these problems that they try to make us believe are happening are saying anthropogenic gases are the problem.
Here are scientists who are totally debunking this.
Now, there are four essential components to debunking climate fears. Debunking catastrophic manmade global warming fears can be reduced to four essential points. Now, what I am going to do is read these points and go back and elaborate on each one.
First, recent climate changes on Earth lie well within the bounds of natural climate variability. Even the New York Times concedes this. U.N. temperature data shows that the late 20th century phase of global warming ended in 1998; new data for the Southern Hemisphere shows that a slight cooling is underway.
By the way, when we talk about IPCC, that is the United Nations; they are synonymous. That is where all this stuff started. A lot of things come from the United Nations. Currently, we are looking at a treaty called the Law of the Sea Treaty. It started in the United Nations--not in America's best interests. But the first thing we are going to do is talk about the recent climate changes on Earth, and we are going to talk about how they lie within natural variability.
The second thing we will talk about is almost all current public fear of global warming is being driven by unproven and untestable computer model fears of the future, which now even the United Nations concedes that the models--these are computer models; that is what all this stuff is based on--they do not account for half of the variability in nature and, thus, their predictions are not reliable. Even the United Nations agrees with that.
The third thing is debunking the relationship that the more CO2 you have, the warmer the world is. That is very simplistic and it is untrue. Scientists are reporting in peer-reviewed literature that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will not have the catastrophic impact doomsters have been predicting. In fact, climate experts are discovering that you cannot distinguish the impact of human-produced greenhouse gases from natural climate variability. That is extremely significant and something that has come around in the last 6 or 7 months.
The fourth thing we will talk about is consensus. We hear so much about consensus. The more things that come out of science, where the scientists are saying, wait a minute, we were wrong. In a minute, I will be naming names of scientists who were marching the streets with Al Gore 10 years ago who now say they were wrong. When you talk about that today, those who are promoting this type of fear from the left, they use the word ``consensus.'' The climate change ``consensus'' exists. Well, it does not exist. Instead, the illusion that it does has been carefully manufactured for political, financial, and ideological purposes.
These four basic points form the foundation of the rational, evidence-based approach to climate science that has come to be called global warming skepticism.
Let's talk about the first one, essential point No. 1, that the Earth's climate is within the natural variability. On April 23, 2006, the article in the New York Times by Andrew Revkin stated--and I am quoting now from the New York Times:
Few scientists agree with the idea that the recent spate of
potent hurricanes, European heat waves, African drought and
other weather extremes are, in essence, our fault--
Manmade gases.
There is more than enough natural variability in nature to
mask a direct connection, scientists say.
The Times is essentially conceding that no recent weather events fall outside the range of natural climate variability. On a slightly longer time scale, many scientific studies have shown the medieval and earlier warm periods were as warm or warmer than the Earth's current temperature--when there were no influences that were due to manmade gases. There were no SUVs around at that time.
Now, everything is blamed on global warming. Right now, the fires that are finally subsiding out in California, the disaster that has taken place, the first thing they say is it is due to global warming. It has nothing to do with global warming. When Al Gore made his global warming speech a year ago in February in New York--and coincidentally, it was on a day that set a new cold record for all time throughout the history of New York--a 2006 National Academy of Science, NAS, report discredited the now infamous ``hockey stick'' temperature graph. The study was created by the U.N. IPCC lead author Michael Mann. They took the temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and showed that they were flat for 1,000 years. They then started spiking in the 20th century and causing them to go up. On this graph, this is the blade of the hockey stick.
The problem is, they didn't take into consideration things such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. The NAS found evidence of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, which is on the lower chart. It also expressed little confidence in Mann's conclusion that the 1990s were the hottest decade of the last millennium, and even less confidence that 1998 was the hottest year. In fact, we will show in a minute that NAS has come around and said we were wrong, that 1998 wasn't the hottest year; 1934 was.
There have been recent studies refuting claims that the 20th century has seen unprecedented warmth. A June 29, 2007, paper by Gerd Burger of Berlin's Institute of Meteorology in the peer-reviewed Science Magazine challenged a
2006 study that claimed the 20th century had been unusually warm.
Ivy League geologist, Dr. Robert Giegengack, the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, noted on May 27, 2007 that extremely long geologic timescales reveal that ``only about 5 percent of that time has been characterized by conditions on Earth that were so cold that the poles could support masses of permanent ice.''
Giegengack added:
For most of Earth's history, the globe has been warmer than
it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been
cooler.
That is the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. These guys know what they are talking about, and they have been ignored.
Greenland has actually cooled since the 1940s. In fact, the current temperatures in Greenland--a ``poster boy'' for climate change alarmists--are cooler. It wasn't too long ago that there was a delegation from the Senate that went to Greenland. They came back with all these statements, but I cannot figure out where they came from because that is not what the facts show. Even though Greenland has been a ``poster boy'' for climate alarmists, it is now cooler there than the temperatures were in the 1930s and 1940s. It is cooler there now. You heard correctly.
Greenland reached its highest temperatures in 1941, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. Keep in mind that 80 percent of the manmade CO2 came after these high temperatures. Eighty percent came after the 1940s. That is a very interesting thing because, if you look at it, you would say if 80 percent of the CO2 came after the 1940s, would that not precipitate a warming period--if they are right-- in terms of CO2 affecting warmer climate change? That didn't happen. That precipitated a cooler period.
According to a July 2007 survey of peer-reviewed literature on Greenland:
Research in 2006 found that Greenland has been warming
since the 1880s, but since 1955, temperature averages at
Greenland stations have been colder than the period of 1881-
1955. Another 2006 peer-reviewed study concluded the rate of
warming in Greenland from 1920 to 1930 was about 50 percent
higher than the warming from 1995 to 2005.
That is the time they say this crisis is taking place.
One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior
higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations.
In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland's
ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea
level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific
studies.
That is not me saying this; these are scientists. These are scientific facts you will not hear from the U.N. scientists, Gore, or the hysterical liberal left.
Yet despite all of this evidence, the media and many others still attempt to distort the science in order to create hysterical fears about Greenland.
Environmental activist Robert Corell, who works for Teresa Heinz Kerry's foundation, the Heinz Center, recently tried to stir alarm by stating:
I spent four months on the [Greenland] ice cap in 1968 and
there was no melting at all.
If Corell, a former fellow with the American Meteorological Society, had desired to give a balanced historical view, he would have noted that Greenland in the 1930s and 1940s was much warmer. This is typical of how many activists mislead the public by presenting utterly meaningless bits of information and avoiding inconvenient facts. Corell is also on record for giving former Vice President Gore's 2006 science fiction film two thumbs up for accuracy.
Keep in mind, he is paid by the Heinz Foundation.
Corell's assertion in a September 8, U.K. Guardian article that the earthquakes triggered by melting ice are increasing in Greenland was rebuffed by the University of North Carolina's Jose Rial. Rial is a prominent climatologist/seismologist working on glacial seismic activity in Greenland.
Corell's erroneous claim prompted Rial to take the unusual step of writing a letter to the U.K. Guardian:
I also know there is no evidence to suggest that these
quakes ``are happening far faster than ever anticipated.''
[As Corell claimed].
Rial wrote that in a September 13 letter. He criticized the newspaper for presenting a ``sky-is-falling'' alarmist perspective, and he added:
It will take years of continued surveying to know whether
anything here [in Greenland] is ``accelerating'' toward
catastrophe, as the article [featuring Corell] claims.
So much for Greenland. Let's look at Antarctica for more evidence on the Earth's current climate. It is not changing in an alarming manner, and you need to look no further than the South Pole.
Scientists monitoring ice in Antarctica reported on October 1 that the ice has grown to record levels since 1979, when satellite monitoring began. So the ice levels have grown to record levels since that time, according to an announcement by the University of Illinois Polar Research Group Web site.
The Southern Hemisphere sea ice area has broken the
previous maximum of 16.03 million square kilometers and is
currently at 16.26 million square kilometers.
There is more. A February 2007 study reveals Antarctica is not following predicted global warming temperature or precipitation models. This is a quote from the scientists studying that:
A new report on climate over the world's southernmost
continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th
century did not climb as had been predicted by many global
climate models.
The study was conducted by David Bromwich, professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and research with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.
How inconvenient that the two poster children of alarmism--Greenland and Antarctica--trumpeted by Al Gore and the climate fear mongers have decided not to cooperate with the computer models.
There is much more evidence that the Earth is currently well within natural climate variability.
The Southern Hemisphere is cooling, according to U.N. scientist, Dr. Madhav Khandekar. Keep in mind this is a U.N. scientist, a retired environmental Canadian scientist, and an expert IPCC reviewer in 2007. He explained this on August 6, 2007, and these are all new scientific findings:
In the Southern Hemisphere, the land-area mean temperature
has slowly but surely declined in the last few years. The
city of Buenes Aires in Argentina received several
centimeters of snowfall in early July, and the last time it
snowed in Buenos Aires was in 1918. Most of Australia
experienced one of its coldest months in June of this year.
Several other locations in the Southern Hemisphere have
experienced lower temperatures in the last few years.
Further, the sea surface temperatures over world oceans are
slowly declining since mid-1998, according to a recent
worldwide analysis of ocean surface temperatures.
I don't think many people would disagree. The Southern Hemisphere is part of the globe, and it has been getting cooler over the past few years.
The media would not report on the historical perspective of Greenland, the ice growing in Antarctica, or the Southern Hemisphere cooling. Instead, the media's current fixation is on hyping Arctic sea ice shifts.
What the media is refusing to report about the North Pole is that according to a 2003 study by an Arctic scientist, Igor Polyakov, the warmest period in the Arctic during the 20th century was the late 1930s through the early 1940s. We are talking about the Northern Hemisphere now. Many scientists believe if we had satellite monitoring of the Arctic back then, it may have shown less ice than today.
According to a 2005 peer-reviewed study in the Geophysical Research Letters by an astrophysicist, Dr. Willie Soon, solar irradiance appears to be the key to Arctic temperatures. The study found Arctic temperatures follow the pattern of increasing or decreasing energy received from the Sun. That is a unique thought--that the Sun is causing warmth.
In another 2005 study published in the Journal of Climate, Brian Hartmann and Gerd Wendler linked the 1976 Pacific climate shift to a very significant one-time shift upward in Alaskan temperatures. These evidence-based scientific studies debunk fears of manmade warming in the Arctic and in Alaska.
I have covered the latest science on both poles. In the Southern Hemisphere, scientists are finding nothing to be alarmed about. It is important to point out that the phase of global warming that started in 1979 has itself been halted since 1998, which is nearly
a decade. In other words, the warming that took place, which I believe is from natural causes, stopped in 1998. It is not getting warmer anymore. You can almost hear my critics skeptical of that assertion.
According to the temperature data that the U.N. relies on, paleoclimate scientist Dr. Bob Carter, who testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, noted this on June 18 of this year, and this is significant:
The accepted global average temperature statistics used by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no
ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this
eight-year-long temperature stability has occurred despite an
increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4
percent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower
atmospheric satellite-based temperature measurements, if
corrected for non-greenhouse influences, such as El Nino
events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any
global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric
CO2 has increased by 55 parts per million (17
percent).
Yet it is true that 1998 was influenced by the warming effect of particularly strong El Nino. But lest you think Dr. Carter somehow misinterpreted the data, I have more evidence to bury any skepticism.
The U.K. Met Office, the British version of our National Weather Service, was finally forced to concede the obvious in August of this year: Global warming has stopped.
After the U.K. Met Office--a group fully entrenched in the global warming fear movement--was forced to acknowledge this inconvenient truth in August, they could not help but whip up a way to continue stoking manmade climate alarm.
How can you do that if you are saying it is no longer warming? This is how they did it.
Their response was to promote yet more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict ``global warming will begin in earnest in 2009'' because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.
What he is saying is, they are admitting--it hurts them to do this-- that the warming has stopped. But they say, well, it is going to start again in 2009.
Hyping yet more unproven computer models of the future in response to inconvenient real-world, evidence-based data is the only thing they have left for promoters of manmade climate doom. But it is a bit refreshing to hear climate doomsters be forced to utter the phrases such as ``natural climate variability,'' something they do not like to talk about and never have.
Meteorologist Joseph Conklin recently weighed in on these new developments.
Conklin wrote in August:
A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global
temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly
admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a
group of British scientists concluded the real global warming
won't start until 2009.
Here is somebody else talking about it.
This new claim that ``global warming will begin in earnest in 2009'' sounds like the reverse of the 1930s Great Depression slogan of ``Prosperity is just around the corner.'' Only in this instance the wording has been changed, ``A climate catastrophe is just around the corner.''
Again, I was quoting meteorologist Joseph Conklin.
This is not to say that global average temperatures may not rise again--change is what the Earth naturally and continually does, and part of this is temperatures fluctuating both up and down. However, the awkward halting of global warming since 1998 despite rising emissions is yet another indication that CO2 levels and temperature are not the simple relationship many would have us believe.
Another key development in 2007 is the research led by metrologist Anthony Watts of surfacestation.org which has revealed massive U.S. temperature collection data errors biasing thermometers to have warmer readings.
Meteorologist Conklin explained on August 10--a couple months ago-- 2007:
The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center is in the middle of
a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul
of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization
has placed many sites--
Measuring sites he is talking about--
in unsuitable locations--on hot black asphalt, next to trash
burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot
chimneys and above outdoor grills. The data and approach
taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed.
If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization
and station siting, and land use change issues were
addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises
and falls with much less of any background trend.
That is all a quote by meteorologist Conklin.
Adding to the further chilling of warming fears is a NASA data error correction that made 1934 the warmest year, and not 1998. Always before, they had been talking about 1998. Now NASA has come back--and no one seems to be refuting this--and said it was 1934 that was the hottest year.
Perhaps the most humorous reaction to this inconvenient correction came from NASA's James Hansen who tried to minimize the data error in August when he wrote:
No need to read further unless you are interested in
temperature changes to a tenth of a degree over the U.S.
This comment was particularly outlandish, given that Hansen has become a media darling in recent years by hyping temperature differences of ``tenth of a degree'' to any reporter within ear shot.
I now move to central point No. 2, the unproven computer models that are driving climate fears.
It is hard to describe what a computer model is. But anytime you try to make a projection into the future, you try to have a model you can rely on instead of relying on data that is current and accurate. Even the New York Times has been forced to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that the Earth is currently well within natural climate variation. This inconvenient reality means all the climate doomsdayers have to back up their claims, their climate fears are unproven computer models predicting future doom. Of course, you can't prove a prediction of the climate in 2100 wrong today, which reduces the models to speculating on what could or might or may happen 50 or 100 years from now.
But prominent U.N. scientists publicly questioned the reliability of computer models.
Again, only a few months ago, in June of this year, in a candid statement, IPCC scientist--this is a U.N. scientist--Dr. Jim Renwick, a leading author of the U.N. IPCC 4th Assessment Report, publicly admitted that climate models may not be so reliable after all.
Renwick stated:
Half of the variability in the climate system is not
predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well.
Let me say that again. A U.N. scientist admitted ``half the variability in the climate system is not predictable. . . .''
In June, another high profile U.N. IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, echoed Renwick's sentiments about the climate models by referring to them as nothing more than ``story lines.''
Climate models made by unlicensed software engineers are of great concern to a lot of people. A leading scientific skeptic, meteorologist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently took the critique of climate computer models one step further.
Tennekes said in February of 2007:
I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the
design, development, and tuning of climate models are, in
fact, software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence
unqualified to sell their products to society.
Meteorologist Augie Auer of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, former professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wyoming, agreed, describing models this way:
It's virtual science, it's virtual reality.
Auer joked:
Most of these climate predictions are models, they are
about a half a step ahead of PlayStation 3.
I guess that is some kind of kid's video game.
They're really not justified in what they are saying. Many
of the assumptions going into [the models] are simply not
right.
Auer said this in May of 2007 in New Zealand in a radio interview.
Predictions simply cannot happen. Prominent scientist Professor Nils- Axel Morner also denounced computer models in August of 2007, saying:
The rapid rise in sea levels predicted by computer models
simply cannot happen.
They are not going to happen.
Morner is a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University. Morner, who was president of the Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution from 1999 to 2003, has published a new booklet refuting climate model claims of catastrophic sea level rise.
Physicist Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the former director of both the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute and International Arctic Research Center, told a congressional hearing in 2006 that highly publicized computer models showing a disappearing Arctic were nothing more than ``science fiction.'' Akasofu has twice been named one of the ``1,000 Most Cited Scientists.''
It gets kind of boring and hard to understand when I talk about the qualifications of these scientists. I have to say it because the other side is using people who are not of this caliber. This is what the real scientists are saying today.
Geologist Morten Hald, an Arctic expert at the University of Tromso in Norway, has also questioned the reliability of computer models that predict a future melting of the Arctic. He says:
The main problem is that these models are often based on
relatively new climate data. The thermometer has only been in
existence for 150 years and information on temperature which
is 150 years old does not capture the large natural changes.
Hald, who is participating with a Norwegian national team in Arctic climate research, made this statement in May of 2007.
Physicist Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, called himself a ``heretic'' on global warming and slammed computer models as unreliable. Keep in mind, I am talking about a professor emeritus at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University. These are smart guys. ``The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated,'' writes Dyson in his 2007 book called ``Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe'' published in August.
Dyson is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow in the Royal Society of London.
Dyson focuses on debunking climate model predictions of climate doom. There is no one more qualified than the man I just described. He said:
They do not begin to describe the real world that we live
in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that
we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist
to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models
than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really
happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why
the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
Gore was recently challenged to a bet on climate model accuracy. Internationally known forecasting pioneer, Dr. Scott Armstrong of the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School--that is the Wharton School of Economics--challenged Gore to a $10,000 bet in June over the accuracy of climate computer model predictions. Armstrong and his colleague, Professor Kesten Green of Monash University's business and economic forecasting unit in Australia, found ``claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying it will get colder.'' According to Armstrong, the author of ``Long-Range Forecasting,'' the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods, ``of 89 principles [of forecasting], the [UN] IPCC violated 72.'' That is the United Nations. They violated 72 of the 89 principles of forecasting.
Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonino Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, has also taken climate models to task.
According to an April 27, 2007 article, Zichichi, who has published over 800 scientific papers, said:
The mathematical models used by the [United Nations] IPCC
do not correspond to the criteria of the scientific method.
IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, ridiculed the United Nations process as ``dangerous scientific nonsense.'' Gray, the author of ``Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of Climate Change 2001,'' explained on April 10, 2007:
My greatest achievement was the second [U.N.] report where
the draft had a chapter ``Validation of Climate Models.'' I
commented that since no climate model has ever been
``validated'' that the word was inappropriate. They changed
the word to ``evaluate'' 50 times, and since then they have
never ``predicted'' anything. All they do is make
``projections'' and ``estimates.''
In fact, so much of climate computer modeling is based on taking temperature data from a very short timeframe and extrapolating it out over 50 or 100 years or more and coming up with terrifying, scary scenarios. There is often no attempt to look at the longer geologic record.
But much of this type of modeling has about as much validity as me taking my 5-year-old granddaughter's growth rate from the last 2 years and using that to project her height when she is 25. My projections may show she will be 12 feet high at that time. Yet that is exactly how many of these computer model fears of the future are generated for sea level rise estimates on ice melt projections in places such as Greenland and the Arctic and other locations.
Once again, computer model predictions are not evidence.
Earlier this month, yet another report was issued based on future computer models finding that polar bear populations are allegedly going to be devastated by 2050 due to global warming. The report was issued as part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service consideration of listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.
This is a classic case of reality versus unproven computer model predictions. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, whereas in the fifties and sixties, estimates were as low as 5,000 to 10,000 bears. We currently have an estimated four or five times more polar bears than 50 years ago.
We have a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain that noted the polar bear populations ``may now be near historic highs.''
Top biologists and wildlife experts are dismissing unproven computer model concerns for polar bears. Yet we still see the polar bears out there. Everybody feels sorry for the polar bears. There are some 13 populations of polar bears and all but 2 of them are thriving, many increasing rapidly.
In 2006, Canadian biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor, the director of wildlife research with the Arctic government of Nunavut, dismissed these fears with evidence-based data on Canada's polar bear populations.
``Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,'' Taylor said, noting that Canada is home to two- thirds of the world's polar bears.
In other words, they are in Canada under his jurisdiction.
Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are
stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct,
or even appear to be affected at present.
He added:
It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25
years based on media-assisted hysteria.
In September, Taylor further debunked the latest report hyping the fears of future polar bear extinctions. He said, ``I think it is naive and presumptuous,'' referring to the recent report on the U.S. Government warning that computer models predicted a dire future for the bears due to projected ice loss.
Taylor also debunked a notion that less sea ice means less polar bears by pointing out that southern regions of the bears' home with low levels of ice are seeing booming bear populations. He noted that in the warmer southern Canadian region of Davis Strait with lower levels of ice, a new survey will reveal that bear populations have grown from an estimated 850 bears to an estimated 3,000 bears. And despite the lower levels of ice, some of the bears measured in this region are among the biggest ever on record.
``Davis Strait is crawling with bears.'' I am quoting him again. ``It is not safe to camp there. They are fat. The mothers have cubs. The cubs are in good shape,'' he said, according to a September 14, 2007 article.
He added, ``That's not theory. That's not based on a model. That's just observation of reality.''
Other biologists are equally dismissive of these computer model-based fears. Biologist Josef Reichholf, who heads the Vertebrates Department at the National Zoological Collection in Munich, rejected climate fears and asserted any potential global warming may be beneficial to both humans and animals.
In a May 8, 2007 interview, Reichholf asked, ``How did the polar bear survive the last warm period?'' Reichfolf also debunked the entire notion that the warmer world will lead to a mass species extinction.
Warming temperatures promote biodiversity. The number of
species increases exponentially from the regions near the
poles, across the moderate latitudes and to the equator. To
put it succinctly, the warmer the region is the more diverse
are its species.
Botanist David Bellamy--this is kind of interesting because David Bellamy used to be on the other side. He was a famous U.K. environmental campaigner and former lecturer at Durham University and host of a TV series on wildlife. He also dismissed fears of a global warming driving polar bear demise.
Keep in mind, this is David Bellamy of the U.K., who was at one time marching down the streets hand in hand with Al Gore, saying the world is coming to an end.
Why scare the families of the world with tales that polar
bears are heading for extinction when there is good evidence
that there are now twice as many of these iconic animals . .
. than there were 20 years ago?
Bellamy asked on May 15. There are twice as many as there were 20 years ago.
Bellamy concluded:
The climate change people have no proof for their claims.
They have computer models which do not prove anything.
The bottom line is that the attempt to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is not based on any evidence that the polar bear populations are declining or in trouble. It is based on computer models fraught with uncertainties. I hope we made that point very clear. The truth is we clearly don't know enough about polar bear populations to make an argument about their listing. What we do know is their populations have dramatically increased over the past 30 or 40 years. It is about trying to bring about climate change regulation using the most powerful, development-stopping law of the land, the Endangered Species Act. Polar bears are being used to achieve long-sought leftwing environmental regulatory policies.
We had four essential points. The third essential point is debunking the relationship that the more CO2, a warmer world. The third critical point on global warming is to debunk the notion that the more CO2, the warmer the world as simplistic. Scientists and peer-reviewed scientists are increasingly revealing that catastrophic climate fears of rising CO2 are simply unsustainable.
In May 2007, the ``father of meteorology,'' Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, dismissed the rising CO2 fears very bluntly. He said:
You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as
doubling carbon dioxide.
Bryson has been identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. He explained that one of the reasons climate models are failing is because they overestimate the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Climatologist Dr. Ball described how CO2's warming impact diminishes. A quote from Dr. Timothy Ball:
Even if CO2 concentration doubles or triples,
the effect would be minimal. The relationship between
temperature and CO2 is like painting a window
black to block the sunlight. The first coat blocks most of
the light. The second and third reduce very little more. The
current CO2 levels are like the first coat of
black paint, Ball explained in June of 2007.
Environmental economist Dennis Avery, co-author with climate scientist Dr. Fred Singer of the new book ``Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 years,'' details how solar activity is linked to the Earth's natural temperature cycles. These two scientists are quoted as saying, in their book:
The Earth has warmed only a net of .2 degrees centigrade of
net warming since 1940. Human-emitted CO2 gets
blamed for only half of that--
Even those who are the hysterical people say only half of that would go to manmade gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, methane, as we talked about earlier.
--or one tenth of 1 degree centigrade of warming in 65 years.
We've had no warming at all since 1998. Remember, too, each
added unit of CO2 has less impact on the climate.
The first 40 parts per million of human-emitted
CO2 added to the atmosphere in the 1940s had as
much climate impact as the next 360 parts per million.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact for the promoters of climate doom is the abundance of new peer-reviewed papers echoing these many more scientists' skeptical views. Keep in mind, these are new studies, the debunking of alarmism that have been published since 2007.
That is this year, I say to the distinguished occupier of the chair, that we have been talking about, just what has happened in the last 6 or 7 months.
A new peer-reviewed study by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz, accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research, finds that even a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would not have the previous predicted dire impacts on global temperatures. In fact, this paper implies that we have already seen almost all of the warming from CO2 that mankind has put into the atmosphere.
The study is in agreement with the views of the 60 prominent scientists who advised the Canadian Prime Minister to withdraw from Kyoto in 2006. The 60 scientists noted global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remain impossible to distinguish from this natural ``noise.''
Astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson proclaimed in August of 2007 that the new Schwartz study means ``Anthropogenic--that is man-made global warming-- bites the dust.''
Those are their words, not mine.
American Enterprise Institute scientist Joel Schwartz also agreed. He said:
Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific
literature, this new study belies Al Gore's claim that there
is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate
catastrophism. Indeed, if [this study's] results are correct,
that alone would be enough to overturn, in one fell swoop,
the United Nations scientific consensus--I say in quotes--the
``environmentalists'' climate hysteria, and the political
pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become
so popular with the world's environmental regulators, elected
officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in
the mainstream media notice?
This is all a quote by the scientist.
A former Harvard physicist, Dr. Lubos Motl, said the new study has reduced proponents of manmade climate fears to ``playing the children's game to scare each other.''
Now, just look at a sampling of the recent peer review studies debunking the issues. There are many others I could talk about, but I am just going to name a few here, things all happening this year, 2007.
No. 1, an August 2007 peer-reviewed study Published in Geophysical Research Letters finds global warming over last century linked to natural causes. Excerpt: The study, by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was entitled ``Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts.'' The author's found that ``By studying the last 100 years of these [natural] cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.'' The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century.''
No. 2, a September peer-reviewed study counters global warming theory, by finding carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age. The study found: ``Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown. The lead author geologist Lowell Stott, explained: ``The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms.''
No. 3, an October 2007 study by the Danish National Space Center Study concluded: ``The Sun still appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change.'' This study was authored by Physicist Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen.
No. 4, a Belgian weather institute's August 2007 study dismissed the decisive role of CO2 in warming. Here is an excerpt about the study: ``CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive scientific study done by the Royal Meteorological Institute, which was published this past summer. Climate scientist Luc Debontridder explained: ``Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 percent of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it.''
No. 5, an August peer-reviewed study finds clouds may greatly reduce global warming. Paragraph No. 2, a new peer-reviewed--
I use ``peer reviewed'' quite often to show these are documented. These are studies that have been reviewed by the peers, by other scientists, and found to be true.
No. 5, an August peer-reviewed study finds clouds may greatly reduce global warming: Here is an excerpt about the study: ``This study published on August 9, 2007 in the Geophysical Research Letters finds that climate models fail to adequately take into account the effects of clouds. The study shows that tropical rainfall events are accompanied by a decrease in high ice clouds, thus allowing more infrared heat radiation to escape to space. Author Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville said: ``At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems. Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty.''
Spencer, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center where he received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, believes that the Earth self-regulates its own temperature.
In fact, for the amount of solar energy available to it,
our climate seems to have a ``preferred'' average
temperature, damping out swings beyond one degree or so. I
believe that, through various negative feedback mechanisms,
the atmosphere ``decides'' how much of the available sunlight
will be allowed in, how much greenhouse effect it will
generate in response, and what the average temperature will
be.
No. 6, a new peer-reviewed study finds that the solar system regulates the earth's climate--The paper, authored by Richard Mackey, is published August 17, 2007, in the Journal of Coastal Research. Here is an excerpt about the paper: ``According to the findings reviewed in this paper, the variable output of the sun, the 31 sun's gravitational relationship between the earth (and the moon) and earth's variable orbital relationship with the sun, regulate the earth's climate.''
No. 7, Chinese scientists Lin Zhen-Shan, and Sun Xian's 2007 study, published in the peer-reviewed Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, noted that CO2 impact on warming may be ``excessively exaggerated.'' Here is an excerpt: ``The global climate warming is not solely affected by the CO2 greenhouse effect. The best example is temperature obviously cooling however atmospheric CO2 concentration is ascending from 1940s to 1970s. Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated. It is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change,'' the two scientists concluded.
No. 8, a Team of Scientists Question The Validity of a ``Global Temperature''--The study was published in Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics. A March 18, 2007 article in Science Daily explained: ``Discussions on global warming often refer to `global temperature.' Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.
``It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth'', Bjarne Andresen says, an expert of thermodynamics. According to Andresen: ``The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless.''
No. 9, an April 2007 study revealed the Earth's climate ``seesawing'' during the last 10,000 years, according to Swedish researchers at Lund University. An excerpt of the study states: ``During the last 10,000 years climate has been seesawing between the North and South Atlantic Oceans. As revealed by findings presented by scientists at Lund University in Sweden, cold periods in the north have corresponded to warmth in the south and vice verse. These results imply that Europe may face a slightly cooler future than predicted by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
No. 10, a new peer-reviewed study on Surface Warming and the Solar Cycle published in Geophysical Research Letters by scientists from the University of Washington claims to be ``the first to document a statistically significant globally coherent temperature response to the solar cycle,'' according to an August 2, 2007 Science Daily article. The paper found ``that times of high solar activity are on average 0.2 degrees C warmer than times of low solar activity.'' Despite the fact that one of the co-author's protests this study being used to chill climate fears, this paper is an important contribution to establishing the solar climate link.
No. 11, in 2007, even the alarmist UN IPCC reduced its sea level rise estimates significantly, thus reducing man's estimated impact on the climate by 25 percent. Meanwhile, a separate UN report in late 2006 found that cow emissions are more damaging to the planet than all of the CO2 emissions from cars and trucks. Stating it in a different way, the gasses released by stock actually exceed the CO2 in the atmosphere from all the cars and trucks in the transportation sector.
No. 12, the UN Climate Panel has been accused of possible research fraud. Here is an excerpt: Douglas J. Keenan, a former Morgan Stanley [finance man] and current independent mathematical researcher, accused the UN of ``fabrications'' and ``discovered that the sources used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) have disregarded the positions of weather stations.'' Keenan has accused the UN of ``intentionally using outdated data on China from 1991 and ignoring revised data on the country from 1997.''
No. 13, a study in the summer 2007 American Association of Petroleum Geologists publication debunked global warming fears. The study by Geologist C. Robert Shoup, was entitled ``Science Under Attack.'' It concluded: ``The hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming does not yet meet the basic scientific standards of proof needed to be accepted as a viable hypothesis, much less as accepted fact.''
Again, I stress that these research studies are but a sampling of the new science flowing in that is starting to overwhelm the fear campaigns of the global warming alarmists.
I frequently get asked by warming activists whether I can name a single peer-reviewed study disagreeing with Gore or the UN Summary for Policymakers.
As you can see, the skeptic's cup overflows with recent scientific studies.
Everything I mentioned refutes that.
In addition to the above recent sampling of new studies, I also refer to the more than 100 scientific studies by more than 300 coauthors that are cited in the new book ``Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years'' by the climate scientist Dr. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery. The book details extensive research going back decades to reveal how solar activity is linked to the Earth's natural climate cycle. Again, we are talking about the sun, we are talking about natural variants.
Geophysicist Dr. David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma--very proud of him--explained in January of this year:
No one has ever died from global warming. What kills people
is cold, not heat. For more
than 150 years, it has been documented in the medical
literature that human mortality rates are highest in the
winter when temperatures are the coldest.
Perhaps the most scathing indictment of the ``more CO2 equals a warmer world'' simplicity comes from Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at--I call to the attention of the Presiding Officer--the University of Pennsylvania. Giegengack voted for Gore in 2000, says he would do so again. He is a Gore fan, but he is appalled by Gore's ignorance of climate science. Here is a guy who--he voted for him, and he would vote for him again. He says to his undergraduates: Every single one of you knows more about global warming than Al Gore.
This is the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, a very fine, well-known institution. Giegengack said:
Gore claims that temperature increases solely because more
CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun's heat. That's
just wrong. It is a natural interplay. It's hard for us to
say that CO2 drives temperature. It's easier to
say temperature drives CO2.
He said:
The driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al
Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It's the
temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the
CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the
temperature.
I do not think anyone refutes that anymore. If I said this a year ago, everyone would be up in arms. But now all of them are agreeing. It is the temperature that is controlling the CO2.
Now, this might be a bit technical, but what Giegengack is saying here is that it is temperatures that control CO2. This is crucial to the understanding of the reason why the scientific underpinnings of manmade global warming fears are utterly collapsing and the climate models are continuing to fail.
Let me repeat a key point Dr. Giegengack makes. He said: If we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it will not reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs.
There are various natural reservoirs such as oceans, soils, permafrost, et cetera. Giegengack is explaining the heart of the scientific skepticism about CO2's role in the Earth's climate system.
He is not finished. He said:
In terms of global warming's capacity to cause human
species harm, I don't think it makes it into the top 10.
[Giegengack said in an interview in the May/June 2007 issue
of the Pennsylvania Gazette.]
So it is entirely appropriate that a man who supports Gore politically may be putting the final nail in the coffin of manmade global warming fears.
The global warming scare machine is now so tenuous that other liberal environmental scientists and activists are now joining Giegengack and condemning the entire basis for manmade global warming concerns.
This is kind of interesting. I am going to be quoting Denis Rancourt, a professor of physics and an environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa. He believes that the global warming campaign does a disservice to the environmental movement. He is a big environmentalist. He wants people to be concerned about the environment. He says: But they are a doing a disservice.
Rancourt wrote, on February 27, 2007:
Promoting the global warming myth trains people to accept
unverified, remote, and abstract dangers in the place of true
problems that they can discover for themselves by becoming
directly engaged in their workplace and by doing their own
research and observations. It trains people to think
lifestyle choices, in relation to CO2 emission,
rather than to think activism in the sense of exerting an
influence to change societal structures.
Rancourt believes that global warming:
Will not become humankind's greatest threat until the sun
has its next hiccup in a billion years or more in the very
unlikely scenario that we are still be around.
He also noted that even if CO2 emissions were a grave threat, Government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world.
Most significantly, however, Rancourt, a committed leftwing activist and scientist--that is whom we are talking about--he believes environmentalists have been duped into promoting global warming as a crisis. This is a far leftwing environmentalist type. He said:
I argue that by far the most destructive force on the
planet is profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed
by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red
herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion,
activists who, using any justification, feed the global
warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best
neutralized. Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem
for the First World middleclass.
Again, this is a very well-known far leftwing scientist by the name of Rancourt.
Finally, Rancourt asserted that in a warm world, life prospers.
There is no known case of a sustained warming alone having
a negative impact on an entire population. As a general rule,
all life on earth does better when it is hotter. Compare
ecological diversity and biotic density, or biomass, at the
poles and at the equator.
Indeed, 2007 has turned into the ``tipping point'' for unsubstantiated fears and gross distortion of science by activists who have committed decades trying to convince the world it faced a manmade climate crisis. Rancourt so eloquently describes the entire movement as one featuring unverified, remote, and abstract dangers.
Perhaps the biggest shock to the global warming debate was the conversion of the renowned French geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre from a believer in the dangerous manmade warming fears to a skeptic just last year. This is a guy--Dr. Claude Allegre, former French Socialist Party leader and a member of both the French and the U.S. Academies of Science--who was one of the first scientists around to sound global warming fears 20 years ago. Now, this is a guy who was walking down the streets with Al Gore 10 years ago holding hands, saying: The world is coming to an end, the heat is upon us now, and we are going to have to do something. That was the 20 years ago and 10 years ago. But he now says--this is as of this year, 2007--the cause of climate change is unknown. He ridiculed what he termed the ``prophets of doom of global warming'' in a September 2006 article.
Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards, including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States. He now believes the global warming hysteria is motivated by money.
The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very
lucrative business for some people.
I find it ironic that a free market conservative Member of the Senate such as myself and a French Socialist scientist both apparently agree that sound science is not what is driving this debate; it is money.
I just say bravo for the growing scientific dissent. It is not easy for these guys who took a hard position just a few years ago to change their minds. You do not have to believe me. In October, Washington Post staff writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that the climate skeptics ``appear to be expanding rather than shrinking.''
These are the people, the climate science skeptics, those individuals who believed that global warming was causing all of those problems, that manmade gases, methane, CO2, were causing climate change. They are on the other side now.
Washington Post's Eilperin wrote--and, of course, the Washington Post is not known to be a very conservative publication:
In late May, Michael Griffin, Administrator of NASA, which
conducts considerable amounts of climate research, told
National Public Radio that he was not sure climate change was
a problem we must wrestle with and that it was rather
arrogant to suggest that the climate we have now represents
the best possible set of conditions.
Alexander Cockburn, a maverick journalist who leans left on most topics, lambasted the global warming consensus last spring on the political Web site counterpunch.org, arguing that there is no evidence yet that humans are causing the rise of global temperature.
These are liberals we are talking about, in fairly liberal publications.
Leftwing professor David Noble of Canada's York University has joined
the growing chorus of disenchanted liberal activists. Noble now believes that the movement has ``hyped the global climate issue into an obsession.'' Noble wrote a May 8 essay entitled ``Corporate Climate Coup'' which details how global warming has ``hijacked'' the environmental left and created a ``corporate climate campaign'' which has ``diverted attention from the radical challenges of the global justice movement.''
Finally, I would say that world leaders such as Czech President Vaclav Klaus and former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt have been outspoken in their climate skepticism. Schmidt said on June 4 of this year that fears of global warming were ``hysterical'' and ``overheated.'' He called efforts to control the earth's temperature ``idiotic.''
Former Vice President Gore's biggest worry is now coming true; previously committed believers in manmade global warming are now converting to skeptics after reviewing the new science.
Well, the new science is changing minds. The 60 prominent scientists, many of whom advised the Canadian Prime Minister--I mentioned this before. This is very significant. These are the guys in the 1990s who were advising the Prime Minister. These 60 scientists advised the Prime Minister to ratify Kyoto, the treaty we did not ratify, and now they have come back and said:
Significant scientific advances have been made since the
Kyoto protocol was created, many of which are taking us away
from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in
the mid 1990s, we knew what we know today about climate,
Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have
concluded it is not necessary.
These are the 60 scientists who advised the Prime Minister; they have all changed their minds. They are now advising him not to sign on any successor treaties to Kyoto.
The climate skeptics have welcomed many scientists from around the world into the fold recently, including previously noted Claude Allegre. There are others. If you go to my Web site, you can see some of the rest of them. But in addition to Claude Allegre, you have the top Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, Australian mathematician David Evans, Canadian climate expert Bruno Wiskel, paleoclimatologist Ian D. Clark, environmental geochemist Jan Veizer, and climate scientist Chris de Freitas of New Zealand--the list goes on and on--just to name a few.
Please go to epw.senate.gov for a full report and stay tuned to the upcoming blockbuster Senate report detailing the hundreds of scientists who have spoken out recently to denounce manmade global fears. The list is unending. It is larger every day. These people were all on the other side of this issue, vocally, with all their scientific background. They have now come over. They are skeptics now. Skeptics mean that there is no conclusive proof. Instead of that, it is national variances, within national variability, I would add.
We come now to the last point, the central point No. 4, debunking the consensus. The fourth and final essential point deals with how the media and the climate doomsters insist that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus of manmade global warming. The notion of a consensus is carefully manufactured for political, financial, and ideological purposes. Its proponents never explain fully what consensus they are referring to. Is it a consensus that future computer models will turn out correct? Is it a consensus that the Earth has warmed? Proving that parts of the Earth have been warming doesn't prove that humans are responsible.
While it may appear to the casual observer that scientists promoting climate fears are in the majority, that is because most of the media wants to believe this. By the way, this sells papers; we all know that. Evidence continues to reveal this is an illusion. Climate skeptics, the emerging silent majority of scientists, receive much smaller shares of university funds. They don't get university research funds, foundation funds.
You think the Heinz Foundation is going to give funding to somebody unless they agree with their hysteria? Climate skeptics also receive smaller shares of Government grants and are not plugged into the well- heeled special interest lobby. If you are part of that lobby, you get all these funds. If you are not, they will not play with you. On the other side of the climate debate, you have a comparatively well-funded group of scientists, the activists who participate in the U.N. conferences, receiving foundation moneys, international government support, and fawning media treatment. The number of skeptics at first glance may appear smaller, but the skeptics are increasingly becoming vocal and turning the tables on the Goliath that has become the global warming fear industry.
Key components of the manufactured consensus, as they keep saying, fade under scrutiny. We often hear how the National Academy of Sciences and the American Meteorological Society issued statements endorsing the so-called consensus view that man is driving global warming. What you don't hear is that both the NAS and the AMS never allowed member scientists to vote on these climate statements because they know that if it doesn't come out this way, they will not get the money they would otherwise get. Essentially, only two dozen or so members on the governing boards of these institutions produced the consensus statements. It appears that the governing boards of these organizations caved in to pressure from those promoting the politically correct view of the United Nations and Gore-inspired science. The Canadian Academy of Sciences reportedly endorsed a consensus global warming statement that was never even approved by its governing board.
Rank-and-file scientists are now openly rebelling. James Spann, a certified meteorologist with the AMS, openly defied the organization when he said in January he does not know a single TV meteorologist who buys into the manmade global warming hype. In February, a panel of meteorologists expressed unanimous climate skepticism, and one panelist estimated 95 percent of his profession rejects global warming fears.
This is big, a survey of recent peer-reviewed studies. This is something you better get ready for because it is something you don't know about yet. It hasn't been revealed yet, but it will be.
In August 2007, a comprehensive study of peer-reviewed scientific literature from 2004 to 2007 revealed less than half of all published scientists endorse global warming theory. ``Of 539 total papers on climate change, only 38 or 7 percent gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus.'' That consensus being that manmade anthropogenic, CO2, methane gases are causing climate change. Only 7 percent of these 539 total papers since 2004.
In addition, a September 26, 2007, report from the international group Institute of Physics finds no consensus on global warming. Here is an excerpt:
As world leaders gathered in New York for a high-level UN
meeting on climate change, a new report by some of the
world's most renowned scientists urged policymakers to keep
their eyes on the ``science grapevine'' arguing that the
understanding of global warming is still far from complete.
The IOP is also urging world leaders to remain alert to the
latest scientific thought on climate change.
In May the United Nations special climate envoy, Dr. Harlem Brundtland, declared ``it's completely immoral, even, to question'' the U.N.'s alleged global warming consensus.
Let's examine whether immorality plays a role in this process. There are frequently claims that the U.N. IPCC ``Summary for Policymakers'' is the voice of hundreds or even thousands of the world's top scientists, but such claims do not hold up even to the light of scrutiny. According to the Associated Press, during the United Nations ``Summary for Policymakers''--after they have their process, which is a publication that comes out, then it is many months after that that scientists get to say something.
According to the Associated Press, during the IPCC ``Summary for Policymakers'' meeting in April of 2007, the most recent, only 52 scientists participated. The April 9, 2007, AP article by Seth Borenstein reported:
Diplomats from 115 countries and 52 scientists hashed out
the most comprehensive and gloomiest warning yet about the
possible effects of global warming, from increased flooding,
hunger, drought and diseases to the extension of species.
Many of the so-called hundreds of scientists who have been affiliated with
the U.N. as expert reviewers are, in fact, climate skeptics. They are on our side. Skeptics such as Virginia State climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels, Alabama State climatologist Dr. John Christy, New Zealand climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray, former head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo Tom V. Segalstad, and MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen have served as IPCC expert reviewers but were not involved in writing the alarmist summary. These are the people who were part of this process but were excluded from talking about the summary. The summary is put together by politicians.
An analysis released in September of 2007 on the United Nations scientific review process by climate data analyst John McLean revealed that the U.N. peer-review process is an illusion. A new study found that very few scientists are actively involved in the U.N. peer-review process. The report contained devastating revelations to the central IPCC assertion that ``it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.''
What do the real scientists say about this statement? According to the analysis by McLean:
The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very
much supported by a majority of reviewers. The reality is
that there is surprisingly little explicit support for the
key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4
explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypotheses, and one
other endorsed only a specific section. Moreover, only 62 of
the IPCC's 308 reviewers commented on the chapter at all.
Only four out of 23 endorsed the statement that manmade gasses are the primary cause of global warming. Let me repeat the key point, only four U.N. scientists in the U.N. peer-review process explicitly endorsed the key chapter blaming mankind for warming the past 50 years, according to recent analysis. This analysis was echoed by U.N. scientist Dr. Madhav Khandekar. He is a retired Environment Canada scientist. In an August 13, 2000, letter, Khandekar lashed out at those who ``seem to naively believe that the climate change science exposed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents represents scientific consensus.'' He said:
Nothing could be further from the truth. As one of the
invited expert reviewers for the 2007 IPCC documents, I have
pointed out the flawed review process used by the [United
Nations] scientists in one of my letters. I have also pointed
out in my letter that an increasing number of scientists are
now questioning the hypotheses of Greenhouse gas induced
warming on the earth's surface and suggesting a stronger
impact of solar variability and large-scale atmospheric
circulation patterns on the observed temperature increase
than previously believed.
Khandekar concluded:
Unfortunately, the [United Nations] IPCC climate change
documents do not provide an objective assessment of the
earth's temperature trends and associated climate change.
Keep in mind, the IPCC, the United Nations, are the ones who brought all this to start with.
Paul Reiter, a malaria expert formally of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, participated in the past U.N. IPCC process and now calls the concept of consensus on global warming a sham. Reiter, a professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, had to threaten legal action to have his name removed from the IPCC. They were not even letting him withdraw because he disagreed scientifically with what they are coming up with. He called it a sham. People who are going to review what I am saying here today will call it a sham. I am not calling anything a sham. That is what the scientist called this last report. ``That is how they make it seem that all top scientists are agreed,'' he said in 2007. He said: ``It's [just] not true.''
Hurricane expert Christopher Landsea of NOAA's National Hurricane Center was both an author and a reviewer of the IPCC's second assessment report back in 1995 and the third assessment report in 2001 but resigned from the fourth assessment report after charging the U.N. with playing politics with hurricane science. Landsea wrote a January 17, 2005, public letter detailing his experience with the U.N. Keep in mind, he is one of the top scientist on hurricanes.
I am withdrawing [from the U.N.] because I have come to
view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant
as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised
my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply
to dismiss my concerns. I personally cannot in good faith
continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being
motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically
unsound.
The IPCC's own guidelines explicitly state that the scientific reports have to be ``changed'' to ``ensure consistency with'' the politically motivated ``Summary for Policymakers.'' We have already said that the ``Summary for Policymakers''--that is the political arm, not the scientific but the political arm. In addition, the IPCC more closely resembles a political party's convention platform battle, not a scientific process. During an IPCC ``Summary for Policymakers'' process, the political delegates and international bureaucrats squabbled over the scientific wording of a phrase or assertion.
Steve McIntyre, one of the individuals responsible for debunking the infamous hockey stick theory temperature graph, slammed the IPCC ``Summary for Policymakers'' process in January of 2004.
So the purpose of the three-month delay between the
publication of the (IPCC) Summary for Policy-Makers and the
release of the actual [Working Group 1] is to enable them to
make any ``necessary'' adjustments to the technical report to
match the policy summary. Unbelievable. Can you imagine what
securities commissions would say if business promoters issued
a big promotion and then the promoters made the ``necessary''
adjustments to the qualifying reports and financial
statements so that they matched the promotion. Words fail me.
That is the scientist, not me.
As you continue to scratch beneath the surface of the alleged global warming consensus, more discoveries await. Alabama's State climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville served as a U.N. IPCC lead author in 2001 for the third assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed U.N. scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.
This guy, keep in mind, was a scientist who participated in that process. He said:
I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having
lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead
authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to
make the report dramatic that the United States would just
have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.
That is what Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007, just this year.
Former Colorado State climatologist, Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., also detailed the corruption of the U.N. IPCC process. This is what he said on September 1--just a month ago--2007:
The same individuals who are doing primary research in the
role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to
lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this
obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few
recognize this conflict, or see that since the
recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political
agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case,
scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and
political decisions will inevitably follow.
This is Dr. Pielke.
He added:
We need recognition among the scientific community, the
media, and policymakers that IPCC process is obviously a real
conflict of interest, and this has resulted in a
significantly flawed report.
What we have been talking about is the United Nations at work.
Politics appear to be the fuel that runs this process--the U.N. process we have been talking about--from the scientists to the bureaucrats to the delegates, and all the way to many of the world leaders involved in it.
What is the motivation of these distortions? I am often asked, if we know that the costs are going to be so great, and we know the science is now flawed, and people are now waking up to it, what is the motivation? I would have to say there is a lot of motivation overseas on things like this.
Former French President Jacques Chirac stated in 2000 that as to Kyoto, we are not talking about climate change. He said Kyoto represents ``the first component of an authentic global governance.''
These growing critiques of the politicized IPCC process have been echoed by the U.K.'s Lord Nigel Lawson. He is former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the House of Lords Committee that reviewed the IPCC process. Lawson called for the abolishment of the U.N.'s IPCC process. He said:
I believe the IPCC process [U.N. process] is so flawed, and
the institution, it has to be said, so closed to reason, that
it would be far better to thank it for the work it has done,
close it down, and transfer all future international
collaboration on the issue of climate change [to something
else].
This is a statement he made in 2005.
The huge organizational and funding advantage that proponents of climate alarmism enjoy over scientific skeptics has led to a pretty elaborate and impressive facade of ``consensus.'' Many climate skeptics have been excluded from key roles in the politicized IPCC process and largely ignored by the media unless they are being demonized as ``flat Earthers'' or accused of being part of a well-funded industry campaign. But in reality, it is the climate fear peddlers who enjoy an overwhelming funding advantage over skeptics.
Since the late 1980s, when global warming fears rose out of the scorched frost of the 1970s coming ice age scare--the same ones, I might add--an international organized effort and tens of billions of dollars have been spent promoting the warming fear gravy train.
Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter estimates proponents of global warming fears worldwide have received over $50 billion from international sources and the United States over the last two decades. This is what he said:
In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the
expenditure of more than [50 billion U.S. dollars] on
research into global warming since 1990 has failed to
demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a
dangerous one.
That was a quote from him on June 18, 2007.
The U.S. alone spends over $5 billion a year on research directly or indirectly related to global warming. Adding to these totals of funding manmade climate fears are large foundations such as the Heinz Foundation, international governments, the United Nations, worldwide universities, the Pew Foundation, and individuals such as billionaires Richard Branson and George Soros.
In fact, if you want to get a study funded today on anything from suicide to butterflies, researchers are finding they better somehow link the issue of global warming, and it will increase their chances of securing funding automatically.
James Spann is a meteorologist, certified by the American Meteorological Society. He suggests scientific objectivity is being compromised by the ``big cash grab'' for money flowing to proponents of manmade climate fears. I previously noted that NASA's James Hansen received a $250,000 award from the Heinz Foundation.
It is kind of interesting. One of my favorite liberals--and I think he is kind of the darling on the left on CNN--is Miles O'Brien. We are fellow pilots. We have a lot in common, so I enjoy being on his program. I have been on many times.
He asked me the last time I was on: Well, how do you respond to the assertions that NASA's James Hansen made these statements, and they must be true?
I said: Because he was given $250,000 in cash by the Heinz Foundation, and I think he would say anything they wanted him to say.
Spann explained:
Billions of dollars of grant money are flowing into the
pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No
man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big
money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money
trail and it tells a story.
That is what Spann wrote in January of this year.
The imbalance of money between the promoters of climate fears and skeptics is so large that one 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant of $20 million to study how ``farm odors'' contribute to global warming exceeded all of the money the groups skeptical of climate fears allegedly received from ExxonMobil over the past two decades.
The money is clearly coming from the far left environmental extremists, from the Hollywood elitists.
Later this fall, my EPW Committee will also release a report detailing the hundreds of scientists--many of them affiliated with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process--who have spoken out recently to oppose climate alarmism. The report will feature the scientists--many of them who have finally had it with claims that ``all scientists agree''--in their own words. The report will be complete with the scientists' biographies and Web links for future reading.
Keep in mind that is in addition to the names we have identified today. Look at them all, as shown on this chart. Those are many of the scientists now--and not even a complete list.
This new research and the hysteria created by the U.N. and by Gore and the media have prompted frustrated scientists to finally fight back in the name of a rational approach to science.
Climate rationalists or skeptics do not need to engage in smoke and mirrors to state their case, and we will be offering the world a chance to read and decide for themselves, unfiltered from the increasingly activist and shrill lens of media outlets such as NBC, Newsweek, Time, CBS, ABC, and CNN.
I have stood on the floor for years detailing all the unfolding science that has debunked climate alarmism. These scientific developments of 2007 are the result of years or decades of hard work by scientists skeptical of manmade climate fears. Finally reaching the point where we can watch the alarm crumble is very satisfying.
All these scientists have come up with the same response.
Despite the massive scientific shift in favor of skeptics, proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics. During Gore's Live Earth concert--which was a dismal failure, I might add--that he had in July, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said of climate skeptics:
This is treason. And we need to start treating them as
traitors.
I have been personally attacked by Anderson Cooper. It is taking place right now, even this week, calling me every kind of name, all kinds of threats. This is what--you people say: Why don't more Members of the House and the Senate tell the truth about climate change? This is the reason. This is what we are subjected to. I have a big family at home who has to watch all this.
Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel--she is a lovely girl--but she called on the American Society of Meteorologists to deny certification of any of the scientists or any of the Weather Channel people or the meteorologists who do not agree with her.
In August, NASA's resident alarmist, James Hansen--whom we already talked about--he called skeptics ``deceitful'' and ``court jesters.'' This is the same activist Hansen who conceded in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of ``extreme scenarios'' to dramatize global warming ``may have been appropriate at one time'' to drive the public's attention to the issue--a disturbing admission by James Hansen. In other words, he is saying: Exaggerate this. Scare people.
Other climate fear promoters have called for Nuremberg-style trials for those expressing manmade global warming skepticism.
In September, the Virginia State climatologist skeptical of global warming lost his job after a clash with the Governor. Dr. Patrick Michaels claims he was censored by the Governor because he held a different view of climate science.
Michaels said:
I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of
expertise, global warming, as state climatologist.
He was fired. If the advocates for climate change alarm are so confident, why are they so afraid of the debate? Why do they resort to such low-brow name calling and intimidation?
The reason is obvious. The latest scientific findings are refuting climate fears and prompting many global warming activists to try desperate measures to silence the debate. When they do agree to debate the scientific facts, the alarmists lose, and lose badly.
In March--this is really significant--in March of this year, an audience of several hundred in the New York City area were persuaded to the view that global warming was not a ``crisis'' following a public debate with scientists on both sides.
Now, what we are saying here is, we had several hundred people just off the street, people in New York City; and most of them, when they were surveyed at the beginning of this--like 75 percent of them--said: We believe manmade gases are causing climate
change. Then, after the debate took place, it reversed, and a majority of them said that was not true. So people--when they hear the debate and listen to the science on both sides, there is a wake-up call.
When I became chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee-- that was 4\1/2\ years ago--I vowed to make science one of the cornerstones of my agenda to ensure policy based on sound science. And as I continue on as the ranking member, I have continued this goal.
I think it is probably fair to say that no other Federal legislator has devoted so many hours addressing Congress about the science of climate change. I have spent this time because sound policy requires understanding, and what climate policy direction we choose will have enormous consequences not only for our Nation but for the world.
I would like now to address a question that I am asked repeatedly: Senator Inhofe, what if you are wrong and the alarmists are right? Isn't it better to adopt carbon restrictions to stop carbon dioxide emissions, just in case? My answer is always the same: What if I am right, and there is no response to that?
But let me address their question. Let's assume for a moment that the alarmists are right, which, of course, they are not, but let's assume for the sake of discussion they are. It still makes absolutely no sense to join Kyoto or any successor treaty or to adopt climate restrictions on our own. Not only does it not make economic sense, it does not make environmental sense.
Let me explain that.
First, going on a carbon diet, for us, would do nothing to avert climate change. After the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997--it was never ratified, but we signed it--Al Gore's own scientist--this is what happened to Al Gore when he was Vice President of the United States. His own scientist, Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, calculated--he said: Let's assume we signed on to the Kyoto treaty--this is back in 1997--and all other developed nations--not China, not Mexico, just the developed nations-- signed on to it and lived by the emission requirements. How much would it lower the temperature in 50 years? His answer was 0.07 degrees Celsius by the year 2050.
Mr. President, 0.07 degrees is not even measurable, and that is if we took all these drastic steps, and we are not going to be doing that.
Of the 15 original European Union countries, only two are on track to meet their targets. One of these is Great Britain, and they are starting to increase their emissions again, not decrease them.
Similar calculations have been done to estimate other climate bills. The Climate Change Stewardship Act that was defeated 38 to 60 last year in this Chamber would have only reduced temperatures by 0.03 degrees Celsius, and another bill modeled on the National Commission on Energy Policy report would have only reduced temperatures by 0.008 degrees Celsius. That is right--that is less than 1 percent of 1 degree.
Now, I think when we come to the significant part of this--and that is the lesson on economics--the high costs that would be borne under carbon constraints are unjustifiable to achieve minuscule temperature reductions, and that is if the alarmists are right about the science. How much more unjustifiable would it be if I and the growing number of skeptical scientists are right, which I believe we are?
The fearmongering about global warming has turned common sense on its head. In its December 7, 1998, issue, Time magazine named Henry Ford one of the 20th century's 100 most influential builders. Yet, just this month, ``Time'' named the 1909 Model-T car the worst environmental product of the century. ``Time'' acknowledges that the car supercharged the American economy and put it on its wheels but states: ``That's just the problem, isn't it?'' The consequences keep piling up, it says. In short, ``Time'' now endorses the view that our world would be better off if we had never advanced technologically and if we were still dependent upon the horse and the cart as we were in 1909.
Now, most people don't agree with such extremist views, but at the core of the question: ``Shouldn't we do something just in case''--that is the question they ask--the same calculus is at work. What if Henry Ford had not created the Model-T out of fear of unknown consequences, just in case?
It isn't just that our major cities don't each have to deal with the sanitation disposal issues of tens of millions of pounds of horse manure--one of the many real environmental problems a century ago that the automobile eliminated. It extended to every aspect of life.
When the Model-T first rolled off the assembly lines near the beginning of the 20th century, the average American's life expectancy was 53 years. Today, the average American's life expectancy is 78 years, or 25 more than it was a century ago. We are not just living longer lives but healthier and more secure lives. The average American's real standard of living climbed from $5,300 a year in 1913 to $33,000 a year in 2005. That is an enormous jump. The carbon-based society is responsible for that.
Advances in medicine and food production, building construction, services, and the manufacturing of clothing, furniture, and other goods have all been made possible by the mobility brought about by the transportation sector and the electricity provided by our powerplants.
The advances over the last century are not simply interesting historic facts, they show us not only why we are a prosperous nation, but a roadmap to a prosperous future. Threats to prosperity have real consequences and for how well and how long Americans will live. Whatever actions we take today, we must also safeguard the well-being of America's families now and into the future.
The Senate acknowledged this when it passed two similar resolutions on the floor right here in the Senate Chamber. In 1997, the Byrd-Hagel sense of the Senate passed 95 to nothing, a resolution that the United States should not be a signatory to any kind of a treaty that reduced-- that had the result of costing a lot of money for the United States and that did not involve the developing nations. In other words, something that involved us and the developing nations but left Mexico and India and China and these countries alone. That was passed 95 to nothing. Similarly, the Bingaman sense-of-the-Senate resolution passed in 2005 resolved that the United States should address global warming as long as it will not significantly harm the United States economy and encourages comparable action by other nations that are major trading partners and key contributors to global emissions.
Neither the Kyoto protocol nor a single bill before Congress meets these criteria. They range from costly to ruinous. But they all fail to meet the requirement of Byrd-Hagel and Bingaman.
Both the Energy Information Administration--that is the EIA--and the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates--that is the Wharton School of Economics--analyzed the cost of Kyoto when it was signed and the costs were staggering. For instance, EIA found that the annual cost would be up to $283 billion a year. That is in 1992 constant dollars. Wharton put the cost even higher--more than $300 billion a year. Now, that equates out to an increase in taxes $2,700 a year for every family of four in the United States.
The estimated costs to comply with carbon legislative proposals in the United States would be unreasonable. The NCEP approach would do nothing to lessen global warming, even according to the alarmists. But according to the EIA, it would still cost more than 118,000 American jobs simply to make this symbolic gesture.
As I recall from our debate, I say to the Presiding Officer, the highest job loss was actually in the State of Pennsylvania if we had passed that bill 2 years ago.
According to the MIT study--this is a different study than the one we just talked about--the Sanders-Boxer bill would cost the energy sector consumers an amount equal to $4,500 per American family of four. This is a bill that is now pending in the Environment and Public Works Committee. The same study found the Lieberman-McCain bill would cost consumers $3,500 per family of four. Similarly, the EIA found that it would have a cost of
1.3 million jobs. A new EPA analysis shows the Lieberman-McCain bill would also cost up to a half a trillion dollars by 2030, and $1.3 trillion by 2050.
Let me in all fairness say it is no longer called the Lieberman- McCain bill; it is the Lieberman-Warner bill now.
So the environmentalists will now tell you that is OK. Dan Lashof of the National Resource Defense Council says the EPA's analysis of the Lieberman-Warner bill shows it is affordable, although EPA finds that fuel will increase by 22 percent, because he calls fuel impacts ``pretty modest.'' Activists inside the Beltway may think that big jumps in gas prices is not a big deal, but I doubt people living in the real America would agree.
What few Americans realize is that the impact of these policies would not be evenly distributed. The Congressional Budget Office recently looked at the approach taken by most global warming proposals in Congress, known as cap and trade--cap and trade the CO2 emissions--that would place a cap on carbon emissions, allocate how much everyone could emit, and then let them trade those emissions. Let me quote from the CBO report:
Regardless of how the allowances were distributed, most of
the cost of meeting a cap on CO2 emissions would
be borne by consumers, who would face persistently higher
prices for products such as electric and gasoline. Those
price increases would be regressive in that poor households
would bear a larger burden relative to their income than
wealthier households would.
Think about that. Even relatively modest bills would put enormous burdens on the poor. The poor already face energy costs much higher as a percentage of their income than the wealthy. While most Americans spend about 4 percent of their monthly budget on heating homes and energy needs, the poorest one-fifth of Americans spend 19 percent of their budget on energy. Why would we adopt polices which disproportionately force the poor and working class to shoulder the higher costs?
To put this in perspective as to what the costs would be, we go back--on this chart we show that these right here represent the last four of the largest tax increases in this country. This one right here, a $32 billion tax increase, was the Clinton-Gore tax increase of 1993. You remember that: Increased marginal rates, corporate rates affected all of the capital gains tax and all that. I came down here and stood at this podium in outrage trying to fight that tax increase of 1993. By contrast, the Kyoto protocol would actually be 10 times greater. So it is a tax increase 10 times greater than the largest tax increase in recent history.
Carbon caps would also fundamentally alter the way we live. Take the case of the cement industry and its relationship to our daily lives. Cement is experiencing a tremendous growth in daily demand with new jobs that are created. Cement is essential to the maintaining and revitalization of our aging infrastructure. Highways, bridges, water and sewer systems are built with cement. Already, our ability to meet our energy needs is under tremendous stress due to the cost. I think we understand that. I have several things I will put in the Record talking about how that is going to hurt the economy.
But I wish to move on here and say that many times I have heard America is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. They have been saying this up until a month ago. They said that America is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, and thus, we are the problem. That is no longer true. Earlier this year, China surpassed the United States as the world's largest emitter of carbon. Only 6 years ago, it was estimated that China's emissions would still lag those of the United States in 2040. China's emissions growth is explosive and climbing upward.
To put things in perspective, the United States did not build a single new coal-fired powerplant in the last 15 years, up until 2006-- not one--although there are now some efforts underway to change that. By comparison, according to the New York Times, China last year built 117 government-approved coal-fired powerplants at a rate of roughly 1 every 3 days according to official figures. So they are putting up 1 every 3 days and we crank out none in 15 years. You talk about the main motivator of that. India's emissions increases are not far behind China, and Brazil is not far behind them. The fact is if these countries do not curb their rapidly accelerated emissions growth, then embracing a carbon diet and sluggish economic growth by developed countries will accomplish nothing. Moreover, many of the carbon reductions achieved through most manufacturing jobs in developing countries are simply emitted elsewhere, as jobs are created to make the same product in countries that don't ration energy. The U.S. emissions as a measure of productivity are far lower than China. Cement manufacturing is a perfect example. Every job sent there will increase emissions, not lower them.
What we are talking about here is they don't have all these safe terms--the technologies in China--that we have to lower the emissions. So if we force them overseas to China, emissions will have a net increase.
China is growing at such a rate that even if the United States, Europe, and the rest of the developing world were to eliminate every ton of its emissions and become zero emitter countries within a few decades--a clearly ruinous goal--emissions would still be higher than today because of rapidly growing emissions in the developing world. We are talking about China and other countries.
Some will say we simply need to educate the developing countries, but the fact is they understand all too well that there are more important priorities. As the Director General of China's Office of Global Environmental Affairs said in October 2006:
You cannot tell the people--
Talking about his Chinese people--
who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to
reduce their emissions.
The Secretary of India's Environmental Ministry expressed the same sentiment when he said:
Removal of poverty is the greater immediate imperative.
These views are consistent with the findings of the Copenhagen Consensus. In 2004, a Danish environmentalist who believes global warming is a serious problem got together eight of the world's leading economists, including four Nobel laureates and 30 specialists on many of the world's leading problems. They analyzed the world's biggest issues and ranked them on the cost-effectiveness of directing societal wealth or resources toward these problems. Of the 17 issues studied, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, malaria and sanitation topped the list as the best investments, while climate came in dead last. It was ranked as a bad use of resources.
So what is the path forward? I categorically will oppose legislation or initiatives that will devastate our economy, as well as those that will cost jobs simply to make symbolic gestures to the far left.
I believe such measures would be defeated because the approach is politically unsustainable. We are seeing the first signs of that in Europe right now. Even if the alarmists were right on the science-- which they are not--their command and control approaches sow the seeds of their own failure. As long as their own policies put national economy in the crosshairs, they will stoke the fires of opposition and eventually collapse under their own weight.
Stabilizing emissions cannot happen in 20, 40, 60 years because our world infrastructure is built on fossil fuels and will continue to be so for a long time to come. The powerplants and other facilities being built now and in the future will emit carbon for half a century once they are complete. Quite simply, the technology does not exist to cost- effectively power the world without emitting carbon dioxide. I and many others who reject the climate alarmism or ineffective yet expensive solutions will block efforts to implement mandatory carbon restrictions.
I find it unfortunate that so many politicians and climate advocates focus on trying to resurrect a mandatory carbon policy in the face of its demonstrated failure in practice in the countries that have adopted it. In the process, they are ignoring the best path forward.
There is only one approach so far I have seen that will work, which is called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Why is this? It is because this approach serves multiple purposes. There are
some real pollutants out there. CO2 is not a pollutant; it is a fertilizer. But there are real pollutants out there, SOX, NOX, and mercury. By working with our partners, the Asia-Pacific partners, we can expand our energy supply, increase trade, and along with these other goals, reduce greenhouse gases as a byproduct, along with reducing real pollutants such as SOX, NOX, and mercury. Others might put this list together differently in terms of priority, but my point is that the Asia-Pacific Partnership meets the criteria for success.
It is a politically and economically sustainable path forward that addresses multiple issues in the context of their relation to other issues. Perhaps other approaches in the future will meet this criteria as well, but this partnership is currently the only one that does.
Any international post-Kyoto agreement the United States enters into must make the concepts embodied in the APP a cornerstone of that agreement.
Let me conclude. I point out that climate alarmism has become a cottage industry in this country and many others. But a growing number of scientists and the general public are coming around to the idea that climate change is natural and that there is no reason for alarm. It is time to stop pretending the world around us is headed for certain doom and that Kyoto-style policies would save us--when, in fact, the biggest danger lies in these policies themselves. Again, new studies continue to pile up and debunk alarm and the very foundation for so-called solutions to warming.
I know this has been a long speech. I want the real people--not the money-driven liberals and the Hollywood elitists but the real people out there raising their families and working hard and paying taxes for all the stuff we are doing in Washington--we want to tell them that help is on its way and that all the U.N.- and media-driven hype to sell America down the river will fail.
During the past 2 hours, I have named hundreds of scientists who were Al Gore followers in the past and now who are skeptics; and they realize this issue is driven by money and the far left. The truth is coming out loudly and clearly.
As Winston Churchill said:
Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic
may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is.
Why am I willing to subject myself to the punishment by the alarmists and elitists? It is because of this. My wife and I have 20 kids and grandkids who are living in this world. I don't want them to have to pay a tax 10 times greater than they should because of something that is based on flawed science and contrived science. It is for them that we are doing it.
With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, let me make an inquiry. What is the Senate's current posture?