A lot of the members of the scientific community are finding they are sorry that they ever signed on to the global warming enthusiasm.
When I began this blog, the fact that the climate had warmed up a degree or so and had then held on to that increase for a decade was obviously true. The idea that this was an event outside the normal range of climatic variation was not obviously true. In fact the apparent cyclic time spans involved supported the idea that this was a natural reoccurrence.
For that reason, from the beginning, I explicitly separated my concerns over the accumulation of CO2 from my ongoing interest in the climate and my principal theme of terraforming the Earth and yes, actually warming up the northern Hemisphere in the process.
History will show that the atmosphere discharged surplus heat into the Arctic in 2007 and thereafter global temperatures fell back abruptly by a degree or so by now. In short, the warmth that took a decade or more to accumulate and sustained for an additional decade, was lost almost overnight. We also have a much better understanding of the mechanism.
In the summer of 2007, we were on the road to an ice free summer Arctic by 2012. Three months later, the switch had been visibly been pulled and we had started on the down slope. That has continued through this winter. We are literally back to the worst of it and are hoping that some nasty volcano does not pick this time to blow its top.
Right now, the folks who should have known better, or were simply too intimidated to speak their minds are now standing up and kicking this dead horse to death.
It will be fun to promote my program for employing two billion people and warming the Earth while the media gets back to promoting the next ice age. Maybe someone will listen.
The turning point—it’s becoming chic to be a skeptic
This must be it, surely, the point where being a skeptic has more scientific cachet than being a believer. The trickle is becoming a flood. We are reaching the stage where independent scientists will want to make sure they are known to be on the skeptical side of the fence.
None other than James Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA has just announced that not only is he a skeptic, but that Hansen is an embarrassment to NASA and was never muzzled. In a message to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee, Theon wrote:
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made, …I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results”
“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,”
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon
Theon joins a growing list of over 650 prominent skeptics. Here’s how the list is becoming a story all of it’s own, and the drive to publicly announce skepticism is picking up pace.
Dec 11, 2008: Marc Morano released an updated list of 650 skeptics, it’s a 230 page pdf file with quotes and qualifications listed from skeptical prominent scientists that even includes past and present IPCC authors. As people became aware of the list, the clamour began from those who want to join in. 11 scientists joined the list in the next two weeks including Dr Schaffer, and Dr Happer (below).
Dec 19, 2008: Dr Schaffer, Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Uni of Arizona, has authored more than 80 scientific publications and authored the paper “Human Population and Carbon Dioxide.”
“The recent lack of warming in the face of continued increases in CO2 suggests (a) that the effects of greenhouse gas forcing have been over-stated; (b) that the import of natural variability has been underestimated and (c) that concomitant rises of atmospheric CO2 and temperature in previous decades may be coincidental rather than causal,” he added. “I fear that things could easily go the other way: that the climate could cool, perhaps significantly; that the consequences of a new Little Ice Age or worse would be catastrophic and that said consequences will be exacerbated if we meanwhile adopt warmist prescriptions. This possibility, plus the law of unintended consequences, leads me to view proposed global engineering ‘solutions’ as madness.”
Dr. W. M. Schaffer, Professor, Uni of Arizona
Dec 22, 2007: Dr Will Happer, Professor at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, and has published over 200 scientific papers.
“I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly… I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow… Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science.”
Dr Will Happer, Professor, Princeton
January 7th, 2009: Jack Schmitt—the last man to walk on the moon, announced he was a skeptic.
“As a geologist, I love Earth observations,” Schmitt wrote, “But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a ‘consensus’ that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. ‘Consensus,’ as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making…”
Jack Schmitt, Geology PhD, Harvard, NASA Astronaut
This is probably the sweetest of the lot in a way. As Marc Morano points out, back in 2006 Al Gore said “The debate’s over. The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona.”
Back then, being a skeptic was supposedly equivalent to being a nut-case. Now, even those who’ve landed on the moon dispute the concensus.
The momentum is growing. History will record this cold northern winter as the season when being known as a skeptic became scientifically hip, and being labelled a ‘believer’—scientifically uncool (as it should be) .
I say: scientists everywhere, be proud of our standards, stand up and be counted. Rise against Dark-Age-reasoning, political pressure and the call of government grants.
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