Tag Archive for: climate realism

Climate Data Refutes Crisis Narrative

On September 16, with great fanfare, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced his office had filed a lawsuit against five major oil companies. Accusing them of knowingly misleading the public regarding the alleged harm that fossil fuels would inflict on the climate, Bonta’s office seeks billions in compensatory damages. But the climate change theory that Bonta’s case relies on must ultimately be validated by observational data. And the data does not support the theory.

Suing oil companies is becoming big business. Along with California, state and local government climate change lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry have been filed in Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and Hawaii. Alleging these companies have directly caused global warming and extreme weather, they seek damages for consumer fraud, public nuisance, negligence, racketeering, erosion, flooding and fires.

These cases will take years to resolve, and even in victory, will cost oil companies hundreds of millions (or more) in legal fees, costs that will be passed on to consumers. The plaintiffs were handed a huge advantage in 2007 in the Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency case, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 ruling, gave the EPA authority to declare CO2 a dangerous pollutant. In 2009, the EPA did just that, paving the way for litigation.

It’s no certainty the oil industry will aggressively fight these lawsuits. If a broad settlement can be reached, that is probably their preference. Not only will a settlement avoid bad publicity, there is scant economic motive for oil companies to challenge the alleged consensus on climate change. As regulations, restrictions, and litigation disrupts oil and gas development, demand outpaces supply and prices go up much faster than production costs. A rational choice by oil and gas executives would be to collect market-driven record revenues and split the windfall profits with the government. That is a lot less messy.

That’s also a shame. By sidestepping the question of whether CO2 is indeed a dangerous pollutant, and instead leaving that decision up to a politicized EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Massachusetts v. EPA case issued a deeply flawed ruling. Without CO2, life on earth as we know it would not exist. CO2 is plant food, and without it, plants die. There is evidence that more atmospheric CO2 would have a primarily beneficial impact on planetary ecosystem health. If oil and gas companies defended themselves on this basis, they might take a case all the way to the Supreme Court and force a reversal of Massachusetts v. EPA.

An aggressive defense against Bonta’s lawsuit by Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips,, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute would attack the core premise of the plaintiffs, the alleged evidence of global warming and extreme weather. Because what is being presented as “evidence” supporting a climate “crisis” is consistently misleading and often outright fraudulent.

Earlier this month in Orange County, California, at an event attended by water industry executives, a debate between two climate experts offered a revealing look into the tactics and the mentality of the climate alarmists, as well as the beleaguered integrity of climatologists still willing to challenge the narrative.

In a session with the unsubtle name “Is it fair to blame climate change for everything?,” two very divergent points of view were on display. To represent the alarmist perspective, a professor from a world-famous university – who shall remain anonymous – presented a series of maps of the U.S., with a specific focus on the Southwest and on California. The maps depicted “before climate change” and “after climate change” scenarios, using the now familiar technique of benign blue and green overlays in areas with normal cool temperatures, and scary orange and red overlays in areas suffering alarming heat. Predictably enough, without delving into the details, the “after climate change” maps were a sea of red and orange.

The only thing about this presentation that was certain was the certainty of the presenter. We are in a climate crisis, human activity has caused this crisis, and “the evidence is overwhelming.” We only later learned that the maps being displayed weren’t based on actual temperature observations, but had been produced by a computer simulation.

After this first presenter finished, Dr. John R. Christy stepped up to offer a different conclusion. With a Ph.D in Atmospheric Science and currently serving as the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama, Christy is eminently qualified to share his views on our climate future. As a native of California, Christy assured the audience that he has been giving that state special attention his entire life. He then presented a series of slides that unequivocally contradict what we hear every day. California, to say nothing of the rest of the world, is not experiencing rapid warming, nor is it experiencing unusually violent weather.

Christy’s message might be summarized as follows: There may be some warming occurring over the past century in California, but it is not extreme, nor is it accompanied by unusually severe anything: droughts, extreme wildfires, heavy rainfall, diminished snowpacks, reduced river volumes, or drier air. Readers are encouraged to scroll through Christy’s charts, which are reposted (with permission) following this text.

The data that Dr. Christy used in his presentation did not come from hypothetical climate models, but were compiled from actual climate and weather observations gathered by weather stations and satellites and extracted from databases maintained by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and other internationally recognized official sources.

If you haven’t heard of John R. Christy despite him being one of the preeminent climate scientists in the world, that’s no accident. Along with Dr. Richard LindzenDr. Judith Curry, and hundreds of others, his work is marginalized and his press and online coverage is either nonexistent or negative. Back in 2019, back when President Trump’s regulatory reforms had the climate industrial complex fearing for its life, Dr. Curry published an expose of what she dubbed “consensus enforcement.” In it, she described how the world’s most prestigious climate journals were yielding to pressure – mostly supported by their own editorial management – to refuse to publish anything by climate “contrarians.”

As we know, suppression of unwanted facts and analysis regardless of credibility or intent is not restricted to climate contrarians. In March 2023, Michael Shellenberger – once honored in 2008 as a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” testified before the U.S. Congress on what many have joined him in calling the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a coalition of corporate special interests, government agencies, and major online platforms that smothers honest dialog on topics of urgent national importance.

Attempting to compile information on climate that doesn’t support a crisis narrative is demonstrably challenging, as anyone attempting to use a mainstream search engine will quickly attest. For every analysis or declaration that may exist, claiming there is not a climate crisis, search engines will offer a page full of reports debunking the analysis and discrediting the source. Often it is almost impossible to even find a link to the analysis or the declaration itself. The World Climate Declaration, a petition signed (so far) by more than 1,800 experts who assert there is no climate emergency, is an example of a suppressed and unfairly stigmatized document. But with or without great numbers, the presence of scientists like Christy, Lindzen, Curry, and many others with extraordinary credentials who make this claim should put to rest the notion that the science is settled. Science is not a democracy. It is a search for truth through trial and error.

One of the saddest examples of suppression is the reluctance of conservative editors to challenge the scientific arguments used to support the climate crisis narrative. An article I recently wrote for American Spectator, “California AG Sues Big Oil for Telling the Truth About Fossil Fuels,” was refused by two conservative publications that have frequently accepted my work. Both of them have significant reach and credibility among mainstream conservatives. Rather than identify them, which is not necessary to make the point, here are verbatim excerpts from the rejection emails I received from each editor:

“We’ll pass on this, but thanks for showing it in. On the question of climate change, there’s no editorial line, but I tend to be uneasy about publishing anything directly on the science (mainly because I am not a scientist). Much more interesting to me is how climate policy is being abused (SEC, Fed) and how much of it makes no sense even by its own lights.”

And,

“Ed—we generally avoid getting too deeply into climate science, as it is very hard for me to judge. That is different than the economic trade-offs, absurd mandates, the unavoidability of fossil fuel energy to meet the needs of a growing, ever-more technology-driven society, etc. So I think we should pass on this one, as it does contain some strong climate claims…”

Got that? “Because I’m not a scientist,” and “it is very hard for me to judge.”

But that does not stop any of the crisis mongers. Is Rob Bonta a scientist? Gavin Newsom? Joe Biden? Al Gore? Greta Thunberg? How many of the in-house editors at the Los Angeles Times are scientists, much less climate scientists? But none of these people have any reluctance to hector us with their opinions, often not even derived from those climate scientists who are part of the “consensus,” but lifted from other pundits who got their material directly from press releases that featured cherry picked “impactful” nuggets taken from abstracts and summaries which in turn were exaggerations and misrepresentations of studies that even in their totality were paid for, inherently biased exercises.

If being a scientist is not a requirement for being a climate alarmist, it should not be a requirement for anyone skeptical of climate alarmism. Our capacity as intelligent non-scientists to assess competing scientific analysis may be limited, but no more so than the Bontas, Newsoms, Bidens, Gores, and Thunbergs of the world. And it isn’t hard to see an agenda at work, when every time the climate so much as hiccoughs, every mainstream news source in the world is regurgitating precisely the same terrifying soundbites and images, and repeating the same phrases and admonitions over and over and over again. Confronting such obvious and coordinated propaganda should raise skepticism in anyone with common sense and a sense of history.

If you concede the science, and only challenge the policies that a biased and politicized scientific narrative is being used to justify, you’re already playing defense in your own red zone. You’re going to lose the game. Who cares if we have to enslave humanity? Our alternative is certain death from global boiling! You can’t win that argument. You must challenge the science, and you can, because scientists like John Christy and others are still available.

The following charts were presented by Dr. Christy on October 13 at a conference in Southern California:

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This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

A Directory of Inconvenient Climate Information Websites

Conservative free speech advocates have been rightly concerned about internet censorship, but the focus of those concerns has been relatively narrow. Conservatives are pushing back against big tech suppression of online critics of globalism, mass immigration, identity politics. They are pushing back against big tech suppression of pro-Trump commentators. But there is another collection of online voices that have been quietly, and very effectively suppressed; climate skeptics.

Over the past 10-15 years, at the same time as identity politics was assuming a dominant position in America’s corporate, academic and media cultures, climate alarm followed a parallel trajectory. But starting in 2017, when the social media monopolies intensified their online offensive against politically incorrect content, climate skeptic content had already dwindled. It isn’t hard to understand why.

Identity politics, globalism, and mass immigration create obvious winners and losers, with Americans bitterly and almost evenly divided over what policies represent the best moral and practical choices. Policies and principles embracing “Climate change,” by contrast, have conducted their own long, slow march through America’s institutions without encountering serious resistance. Proclaiming one’s belief in climate change dogma carries minimal downside and plenty of upside.

Embracing climate change politics enriches and empowers the same cast of characters as embracing globalism – corporations, governments, the financial sector, nonprofits, academia, and the useful idiots in media and entertainment. Meanwhile, the downside of climate change policies is harder to articulate than the downside of globalism. As a result, financial support for scientists and analysts tagged as climate change “deniers” has nearly dried up over the past 10-15 years. Whoever is left confronts an overwhelming climate alarm apparatus.

The problem, however, is that globalism and climate alarm are two sides of the same coin. Globalism requires “climate refugees” to overwhelm the cultures and transform the electorate in developed nations. It requires authoritarian rationing to “save the planet.” It requires supra-national governing bodies to cope with the “climate crisis.” And the globalist project is fatally undermined by the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuel.

Fossil fuel will remain the most inexpensive and abundant source of energy for at least the next 20-30 years, and cheap energy is the prerequisite for prosperity, which in turn is the prerequisite for literacy and voluntary population stabilization, political stability, economic development, and world peace.

Ignoring this fact – that cheap energy worldwide can only be delivered in the near term by continuing to develop fossil fuel – is the true crime of “denial” that is being perpetrated on humanity by globalists. And yet, only a handful of online websites still seek to reopen the debate as to just how dangerous or imminent the threat CO2 emissions are to humanity and the planet. Here, sorted by viewership (most viewed on top) are some of the independent climate skeptic websites that are still active in 2019:

Climate Skeptic Websites

Watts Up With That?
Real Climate Science
No Tricks Zone
Climate Depot
JoNova
Climate Change Dispatch
Roy Spencer PhD
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
Bjorn Lomborg – Get the Facts Straight
Junk Science
Friends of Science
Climate Audit
CO2 Science
Global Warming.org
IceCap
Jennifer Marohasy
Science & Environmental Policy Project`
Greenie Watch
Global Warming Science
The Global Warming Challenge
Tom Nelson Blogspot
Science & Public Policy Institute
Australian Climate Madness
Climate Science
Climate Lessons
The Great Global Warming Hoax
CO2 Web Info
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

The viewership reaching these independent websites is almost negligible. Watts Up With That?, authored by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and former television meteorologist Anthony Watt, only scores a U.S. Alexa ranking of 16,178. Following in a distant second place is Real Climate Science, with a U.S. Alexa ranking of 77,839. Sites with extraordinary work, such as Bjorn Lomborg’s Get the Facts Straight, sit at a distant 780,564.

Web viewership rises and falls based a great deal on Google search results. If a website link shows up on the first screen of Google search results, it will get traffic. And this is a self-reinforcing cycle, the more a site shows up in search results, the more it will get visited, and the more it gets visited, the higher it will go in search results. This chicken/egg process obscures the reality of biased algorithms.

Search Google under “climate skeptic websites,” and the first two results you will get take you to “SkepticalScience.com,” a website devoted to debunking climate skeptics, followed by “RealClimate.org,” produced by the IPCC. Result #4 is of marginal assistance, a Business Insider report from 2009 that provides a mostly geriatric assortment of the “10 most respected global warming skeptics.” The #5 result is WattsUpWithThat, and #4 and #5 are the only results that aren’t directing you to “consensus” material.

Nonprofit Think Tanks Still Willing to be Climate Skeptics

The most unambiguously skeptical think tank still compiling data and analysis that presents a skeptical perspective on climate change is the Heartland Institute. They refer to their position on the issue as “climate realism” and have assembled an impressive lineup of skeptical experts on climate science and climate policy. They regularly host international conferences on the topic of climate change, and sponsor the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which issues regular reports that contradict much of what comes from the mainstream IPCC.

Another consistently realist think tank on the topic of climate change is the American Enterprise Institute. The redoubtable PragerU has produced a 12 video series on climate change entitled “Climate Change: What’s So Alarming.” Useful information on the scientific debate over climate change also comes from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, although much of their focus has shifted to the policy debate.

Climate Skeptic Videos on YouTube

Searching YouTube to find climate skeptic content yields very little. If there are dedicated video channels offering ongoing new releases of credible climate skeptic content, they’re not very easy to find. Documentaries and other stand-alone videos with a climate skeptic perspective are sparse, but those few that could be found have valuable information:

No Trend In Extreme Weather In The US – Climate Change Fraud Exposed, 2019 – 10 minutes
Is Global Warming a Scam?, 2019 – 17 minutes
Cost-Effective Approaches to Save the Environment, with Bjorn Lomborg, 2019 – 48 minutes
The truth about global warming, 2018 – 14 minutes
Nobel Laureate in Physics; “Global Warming is Pseudoscience”, 2015 – 31 minutes
The Lack of Science in the Scientific Consensus, 2013 – 1 hour, 13 minutes
Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd”, 2012 – 3 minutes
One climate change scientist takes on a roomful of sceptics, 2011 – 45 minutes
The Great Global Warming Swindle, 2007 – 1 hour, 15 minutes

Watching these videos, along with viewing climate skeptic websites, will present an open minded inquisitor with information, data, logic, arguments, and perspectives that are utterly absent from mainstream public dialog. It has become obligatory for any Democrat and the majority of Republican politicians in America – along with every establishment newscaster – to proclaim their adherence to the “consensus” on climate. The only debate left – not that it isn’t a big one – is how best to limit and eventually eliminate use of fossil fuel.

This is a non-debate with serious consequences. It is preposterous to think worldwide use of fossil fuel will decline by any meaningful percentage within the next 30 years. What could happen, however, is it will be restricted to the point where developing nations, especially in Africa, will be pressured into developing a “renewable” energy infrastructure that will be far too expensive to rapidly deliver the broad based prosperity that is a crucial prerequisite to population stabilization. Moreover, developing nations that are denied access to cheap fossil fuel will continue to rely on biomass to supplement inadequate or unaffordable renewable energy, stripping their forests for energy, or, worse, they will annihilate their ecosystems to plant “carbon neutral” corporate biofuel monocultures.

None of this is necessary. The only reason we are debating how best to quickly eliminate use of fossil fuel is because “the debate is over” with respect to the planetary impact of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. But that debate is not over. Read the material on these websites. Watch these videos. There is ample scientific basis for the debate to be raging, and yet the corporate globalist establishment universally declares the debate to be “over.”

Why?

The reason is because virtually all powerful vested interests in the Western hemisphere recognize climate change alarm as leverage to impose self-serving policies and garner higher profits.

  • Fossil fuel companies keep prices (and profits) high.
  • “Renewable energy” companies acquire subsidies.
  • Politicians enact new taxes.
  • Public sector entities get new tax revenue.
  • Environmentalist nonprofits have a new source of funds.
  • Left wing activists have a new basis to attack private ownership.
  • Labor unions get more jobs, especially in the public sector.
  • Lawyers have a new basis to file lawsuits.
  • Wall Street trades emissions credits, making trillions in commissions.
  • Climate researchers get more grant requests funded.
  • United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream.
  • “Greentech” entrepreneurs receive subsidies for “green” products.
  • Corporations can force consumers to replace all their appliances.
  • Corporations can impose the “internet of things” to monitor household resource consumption.
  • Millions of “Climate refugees” will be transported to the developed nations who are to blame.
  • Global governance will be necessary to coordinate climate mitigation efforts.

Taken individually, each of these reasons – and this list undoubtedly omits additional special interests that benefit from climate change alarm – represent a profound shift in public policy. Each of them represent investments skewing away from optimal returns and instead towards returns that favor a politically entitled group. The overall impact of all of them is regressive, increasing the cost-of-living for the most economically vulnerable populations.

These policies also represent a profound cultural shift with consequences that extend to every corner of society. All of a sudden:

  • The litmus test for an environmentalist is whether they embrace climate change alarm and support climate change activism.
  • Elementary school children are being indoctrinated to believe the planet is in imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable.
  • Capitalism, rather than being viewed as the only practical and reasonably equitable engine for economic growth, is portrayed as the despicable cause of environmental catastrophe.
  • A life of rationed scarcity, remotely monitored and managed by algorithms, replaces the reasonable expectation that technology and capitalism will deliver increasing abundance for every generation.
  • Sovereign nations have become a toxic anachronism.
  • Developed Western nations must admit millions of destitute refugees, often coming from hostile cultures, because the states where they lived failed due to “climate change” brought on by industrial civilization.

And suddenly the madman, racing through the streets screaming that the world is about to come to an end is the sane person, and now the psychopaths are those who hold back, suggesting that perhaps the situation isn’t quite that dire.

All of this is an inversion of reality. All of this must be challenged, and challenged with the same vigor that Americans – of all backgrounds – are finally rising up to challenge identity politics. Climate change alarm, in its emotional fearmongering and scapegoating, in its reliance on authoritarian governance, and in its coopting of the industrial and financial elites, is explicitly fascist.

In George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, the main character, Winston, worked for the “Ministry of Truth.” His job, day after day, was to systematically rewrite history. Today’s social media and search monopolies are the realized versions of what Orwell imagined. They define and redefine our reality. As credible, informed content offering a climate skeptic’s perspective disappear from search results, as the traffic to these websites dwindles into nothingness, a part of our collective consciousness is lobotomized. We lose our ability to make informed choices. Read these websites. Bookmark them. Share them. Print them. While you still can.

It is not enough to debate climate change policy. Even in the most benign forms, policies based on the premise that fossil fuel use must be swiftly eliminated represent policy choices that will magnify human suffering around the world at the same time as they disenfranchise the citizenry of entire nations.

The scientific debate must be renewed. Even if the alarmists are right, the fact that “the debate is over” is universally recited by every instrument of America’s establishment should terrify anyone concerned about free speech, if not freedom itself.

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