Weather From HELL!!! CO2 Storms!!! wrote:
http://www.hnn.us/articles/30148.html

10-16-06
Global Warming: How History Is Being Manipulated to Undermine Calls for
Action By Spencer Weart

Mr. Weart is Director of the Center for History of Physics at the American
Institute of Physics.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate


Informed people now understand that global warming is perhaps the most
severe challenge facing the well-being of human society in the coming
century. ...

I appreciate the way the way he says "perhaps" here. That sure covers a
wide range of possible opinion about the likelihood. But this first
sentence is the last place in Weart's essay/advertisement that such
appropriate restraint appears

... Only a dwindling minority of Americans now denies this ...

LOL - I'd love to see how he counted the # of people who deny the
"perhaps" statement, if that's what he really means.

... (an even
smaller fraction believe that we are regularly visited by space aliens)...

Well, the observational record about space aliens visits is perhaps
stronger than the observational record's role in answering the question
of whether or not global warming will be the most severe challenge
facing the well-being of human society in the coming century.

But those who deny it include powerful people, whose interests or ideology
are threatened by government regulation of the fossil fuels ...

LOL - giving the keys to our economy to central planners is not
something to taken lightly by any informed person. Those who are
interested in economic well-being and the blessings of liberty, be they
weak or powerful, do indeed have interests that are threatened by the
wrenching changes proposed in the CO2-climate policy arena.

... that are the
main source of the danger we face.

What happened to perhaps? Now it's simply "the danger we face"?

History is often used in these arguments. Its role can be direct, as when
global-warming denialists assert that not long ago scientists were
"spectacularly wrong" in claiming that not warming but a new Ice Age
threatened us. So writes, for example, the columnist George Will, quoting
from news magazines of the early 1970s. However, when people checked the
history they found that Will, following a practice common among
denialists, "cherry-picked" a few items that served his purpose from a
much larger body of evidence.1 Here's the real history. In the 1970s
scientists discovered that climate can be catastrophically variable; they
didn't agree on what would come next; but they all agreed that they knew
too little at the time to make a confident prediction. ...

Weart may have some reason to ignore contrary evidence, and maybe it's
a better reason than the real(biased)climate.org advocates he cites. By
1960, the notion of creating a thermostat -- in the form of a Bering
Straight dam -- was mainstream enough for John Kennedy, the week before
he was elected President of the USA, to answer question from Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists regarding the dam idea. Extra urgency was
attached to the military implications at the time. For example, the
Russian government considered diverting Arctic water down along the
Canadian and US west coast. It was his research on arms control and
weather modification that Lowell Ponte credited with prompting his
interest in global cooling, which resulted in his 1976 book titled "THE
COOLING: Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?" His
bibliography includes many journal articles and scholarly books,
monographs and reports, including work by many authors whose names are
easy to recognize as active in the current debates, too.

Please read the following quote from p. 237 of Ponte's book, and let me
know if it sounds any different than the consensus view portrayed by
the calamitologists today:

"Suppose we assume, as did weather scientists interviewed by writer
Nigel Calder, that the chances of continued cooling and of an Ice Age
dawning within a century are one in ten, odds likened by one scientist
to Russian roulette. The odds are in our favor, but consider the stakes
being wagered: if the cooling continues, we can reasonably calculate
that potentially two billion people could starve to death or die of
other symptoms of chronic malnutrition by the year 2050. Potentially,
we could all die if global famines and embargos on scarce resources,
both caused by the cooling, lead to a world war. We simply cannot
afford to gamble against this possibility by ignoring it. We cannot
risk inaction. Those scientists who say we should ignore the evidence
and the theories suggesting Earth is entering a period of climatic
instability are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate
can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored."

Dr. George Kaplan's 1980 monograph reports that "In 1972, a sizeable
group of climatologists meeting at Brown University issued letters to
the governments of the world in which they warned of a global climatic
disaster. Again in 1974 the International Federation of Institutes of
Advanced Study issued a similarly grave message to the community of
governments from a meeting in Bonn." Ponte quotes from that statement
that came out of the 1974 Bonn meeting: "The facts of the present
climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign
near certainty to major crop failures within a decade. If national and
international policies do not take these near-certain failures into
account, they will result in mass deaths by starvation and probably in
anarchy and violence that could exact a still more terrible toll ..."
Ponte says that most of these same scientists met in Berlin in 1975, in
the wake of controversy about their earlier statement, and reaffirmed
that all the best evidence available pointed to climatic changes and,
in consequence, major crop failures "during the next decade." (THE
COOLING, pp. 243-244)

Kaplan continues: "In 1976 a meeting of 85 climatologists chaired by
the late Nobel Laureate Willard Libby and pioneer climatologist Cesare
Emiliani put forth another warning which was put into language by
Libby. In 1976, the CIA released two reports which it had written in
1974 and which provided the same message in greater detail (but in 1977
military climate researchers, backed up by other government agencies,
told the writer that the CIA reports had been discounted by the
government). The consensus of the World Climate Conference was reported
by Nature as stating that the world has entered a 10,000 year cooling,
that the warming theory was complex and questionable, and that the loss
of life and economic substance to the climate would increase." (Kaplan
excerpt was from document formerly, but no longer, available at
http://www.pvbr.com/Issue_1/global.htm -- the site still has an article
discussing Kaplan's work at http://www.pvbr.com/Issue_1/global12.htm )


... Any resemblance to
the current strong scientific consensus is a fantasy.

Well, climatology wasn't so popular a discipline back then. The hundred
thousand or so scientists today who might call themselves engaged in
climate science is a lot more than were involved in climatology when
the global mean temperature was cooling. To point to the difference in
the paper trail without mentioning the size of the cohort leaving the
trail seems like obviously deficient scholarship to me.

In determining whether the alarmism and precautionary principle as
expressed about cooling was virtually indistinguishable from recent
eloquent exhortations regarding warming, I propose asking a random
sample of subscribers to Nature and Science the following question as
part of a current events survey: "To what phenomena does the following
refer: 'The facts of the present climate change are such that the most
optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failures
within a decade. If national and international policies do not take
these near-certain failures into account, they will result in mass
deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence that could
exact a still more terrible toll ...' [Source: International Federation
of Institutes of Advanced Study, Bonn meeting]"

I suspect that more would say global warming than global cooling,
because the alarmism in this 30-year-old quote is pretty much
indistinguishable from the alarmism so commonly heard today.

A subtler historical fantasy is that the warnings of climate change are a
political plot of radical, anti-business environmentalists (so says
Michael Crichton's recent best-selling thriller). In the actual history,
concerns arose in the 1950s well before any environmentalist movement.
These concerns spread among scientists who were either apolitical or
supported by US military agencies. But the most important historical story
that people should know is how the concern gave rise to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by
self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be "alarmist."
Conservatives promoted the IPCC's clumsy structure, which consisted of
representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to
consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting
in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has
issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.

That President Reagan anecdote is an artful touch. Had President Reagan
known then what we know now, perhaps he wouldn't have been so
optimistic about minimizing the alarmists' influence.

Yet perhaps the most important use of history can come through simple
explanation. Historians have often worked to illuminate current affairs
through their historical descriptions of social and political forces. With
a technical subject like the science of climate, history can also clarify
the subject itself. Such is the main use of a website I created to
describe the history of scientific work on climate change. With a
quarter-million words and a thousand references, it is the equivalent of a
thick tome. Several hundred visitors come to the site each day. Most are
brought by a search engine, either because they entered a general term
like "history global warming" or because they sought specific facts about
a particular scientist or technical point. Others come through links
provided by other climate Websites, blogs, or personal recommendations.
What do the visitors want, and do they get it?

A monitoring program shows that many visitors go away quickly, and I
presume they either found the specific fact they wanted, or decided the
site was too long and scholarly. But many stay for hours, and some read
every word. A visitor who reads extensively will come unexpectedly upon a
request to answer a brief survey. I've gotten only 400-odd responses so
far, but these exceptionally motivated readers are worth notice. The
majority of respondents are students, typically driven by class
assignments; and, indeed, the number of visits to the site exceeds a
thousand per day during term-paper periods. Scientists constitute the
second largest group of respondents. Most of the visitors, scientists or
otherwise, attempt to sort out a subject that they feel they should
understand. Some come in search of detailed textbook facts rather than
history, and are disappointed. But most say they got what they sought,
while others report, as an economist put it, "though I have not found what
I'm looking for, I'm enjoying the CO2 history essay, and finding it
helpful."

Not only students and scientists, but also many concerned citizens
(describing themselves, for example, as lawyer, physician, engineer, and
"unemployed") wanted enough information to formulate their own opinions.
Environmental activists, teachers and science writers - and a few
industrial lobbyists - came not only to inform themselves but also to
prepare for explaining or debating the subject. A farmer wondered how
warming was affecting the weather; a chemist in Britain wondered if a
rising sea level would affect a seaside home. Only a small fraction said
they came to find history as such. But a strong majority of respondents
said they were getting what they came to find, and many were enthusiastic
about the form of presentation.

History, as we all should know, is a great help for presenting complex
topics - not just thoroughly but clearly, not just with balance and nuance
but with readability and even excitement. Technology lets us do this
better than ever. Historians should note that putting work on the web,
with appropriate attention to "marketing" through search-engine placement
and the like, can bring a real increase in the social utility of their
efforts.

1 See
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...-cooling-myth/.

My best assessment of the state of climate science as a discipline
today is that it is in quite a sorry state. Of the many examples which
helped in forming that conclusion, I'll mention one he the influence
of Ralph Cicerone. In 2001, shortly after taking office, the Bush White
House submitted a series of questions about climate science to the
National Academies of Science. NAS tasked National Research Council
with selecting a blue-ribbon panel to provide the answers. Dr. Cicerone
chaired that panel. They met and agreed on the contents of the report.
But one thing the panel did not agree to before the short report was
written was the summary. I don't just mean the contents or review
process for a summary, but even the eventual existance of a summary. As
it turns out, a summary was published, and includes alarmist
perspective that has no foundation in the body of the report. Here in
sci.environment, I've more than once asked what in the body of the
report was being summarized by the clear statement in the summary that
"The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly
due to human activities". I think when you call something a summary, it
ought to actually summarize. That was not the case with this report.
The full report, BTW, is available at
http://books.nap.edu/books/030907574...7.html#pagetop

One of the members of the panel has politely noted that the summary was
an add-on, apparently at the perogative of the chairman, without going
through the deliberative process used by the committee for the body of
the report. I was really disappointed when the panel chairman was
subsequently elected to head the entire National Academy of Sciences;
my disappointment was because he had so clearly shown proclivity to
portray his spin as the product of the committee.

This year, Dr. Cicerone again helped out the alarmists. His tasking of
a new blue ribbon panel failed to include all of the questions that
House Committee Chairman had specified. I'm about as optimistic a
fellow as you'll ever meet, but I'm not optimistic that the climate
science community will clean up its act in near future.

Very truly,

Steve Schulin
http://www.nuclear.com