Published on The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com)
Unintelligent Design: Scientists Ridicule UN, EU Climate
Pseudoscience
By Richard Schulman
Created 2009-03-13 09:05

More than six hundred scientists, economists, legislators, and
journalists from around the world met in New York on March 8-10 for
the second International Conference on Climate Change. Presentation
after presentation documented the pseudoscience and dictatorial
intentions behind the climate alarmism of the UN, EU, and Obama
administration.

Rent Seekers at Davos

Conference keynote speaker Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech
Republic and the European Union, described environmentalism as a new
collectivist religion that doesn't want to change the climate but
rather us. He lamented that the debate between climate warming
alarmists and critics such as himself hadn't advanced since he
keynoted the first Climate Change Conference a year ago. He described
his futile attempt to bring sense to a closed session of the recent
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland attended by world business
and political leaders. "No one shared my views," President Klaus said.
Instead, all were focused on preparing for the December 2009
Copenhagen meeting to supersede the Kyoto agreements. The climate
'experts' in attendance -- such as Tony Blair and Kofi Annan -- all
took human-caused global warming for granted and potentially
catastrophic. The debate at Davos was whether Europe and the world
should submit to an 80% emissions cut, a 20% cut, or something in
between.

President Klaus said he chided Davos attendees for talking up radical
proposals when they hadn't even been able to fulfill their modest
Kyoto commitments. But trying to reason with the Davos people was like
trying to reason with Communist officials before 1989 -- they just
regarded you as hopelessly ignorant or naive. Klaus described the
business attendees at the Davos meeting as "rent seekers," interested
only in profits from government and "not at all interested in markets
or freedom." The political situation, he said, is that of a highly
organized rent-seeking group rolling over an opposition of isolated
unorganized individuals.

The executive summary put out by the UN's Intergovernmenetal Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) is all politics and environmental activism,
President Klaus said, "not science." The environmental activists are
"traditional Malthusians." They appear technologically naive, indeed
magic-dominated, in loving technologies that don't exist. But it's
likely they just don't want to reveal their true plans -- to turn the
clock back many centuries, by shutting down existing technologies in
the name of non-existing future ones. When, in previous history, Klaus
asked, has a civilization abandoned existing technologies before the
successors have been developed?

In contrast to his chilly reception at Davos, President Klaus was
given a standing ovation by the scientists and policy analysts in New
York.

Negative Feedbacks Dominate

A second keynote speaker at the Climate Conference -- Richard Lindzen,
the Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology -- detailed the corrupting influence of politics and
foundation and government funding on science. His own and others'
research indicates that the outgoing radiation from earth to outer
space is much higher than the global-warming models predict. The
alarmist models require an assumption of positive feedback whereas
recent satellite data has revealed that planetary heat flows are
negative-feedback dominated.

The UN models, Professor Lindzen jested, are "examples of
unintelligent design." Global warming effects are miniscule if seen on
a graph mapped against the huge variability of daily and seasonal
weather. Climate warming alarmists have forgotten the null hypothesis
-- which assumes that there is no need to bring in exogenous forcing
mechanisms (such as anthropomorphic CO2) to explain observed climate
behavior. The ocean's turbulent movements can suffice to explain most
climate variability. Dreaming up specific causes for this or that
climate blip isn't necessary; we don't, after all, need specific
causes for each whorl and eddy in a bubbling brook.

The apparent endorsement of climate warming alarmism by scientific
organizations, Lindzen noted, doesn't imply that the organizations'
members have ratified these views. Rather, the endorsements are merely
the policy preferences of partisans who've gotten themselves elected
or appointed to the organizations' boards' -- without consulting the
membership. The members who are being abused in this fashion should
resign as a group, with a public explanation as to why they are
resigning. This would be a much more effective form of protest than
petitioning.

CO2 a Minor Climate Player

Tom Segalstad, Associate Professor of Resource and Environmental
Geology at the University of Oslo, pointed out in his presentation
that the actually measured CO2 in the atmosphere is a fraction of what
is predicted by IPCC models. Atmospheric CO2 -- the bogeyman for the
alarmists' catastrophic warming scenarios -- is just one-fiftieth of
the CO2 in the oceans, and of that fractional amount of CO2 in the
atmosphere, only 4% of it is anthropogenic (human caused).

Far from being persistent, the lifetime of CO2 emitted into the
atmosphere is on the order of five to six years rather than the 50 to
200 years claimed by the IPCC scenarists. The ocean, with its
dissolved calcium, can easily absorb all CO2 emitted. The ocean is a
superb CO2 sink -- contrary to the IPCC models, which simplistically
assume that the ocean is made of distilled water.

19th and 20th Century Warming Natural, Not Anthropogenic

Syun Akasofu, Professor of Physics and Director Eeritus of the
International Arctic Research Center and the Geophysical Institute at
the University of Alaska (Fairbanks), showed in his data-rich
presentation that 20th century global warming, far from being non-
linearly increasing and anthropogenic, is with far greater likelihood
a straight-line natural recovery from the Little Ice Age of the 17th
through early 19th century. That linear warming trend -- 0.5 degrees
Celsius per century -- began much earlier than any measurable increase
in man-made CO2 and has been proceeding steadily since at the same
rate. The IPCC simply ignored the historical data.

Missing CO2 Hotspot Falsifies IPCC Theory

David Evans, Ph.D., who from 1999 to 2005 built models for the
Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Australian Department of Climate
Change) and who wrote the carbon accounting model that measures
Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, ridiculed climate
alarmists' attempt to create popular acquiescence to their plans via
symbols, such as the photos of the receding snows of Kilimanjaro,
rather than facing up to the testimony of real scientific evidence in
the form of atmospheric temperature signatures. These decisively
falsify the anthropogenic-CO2 hypothesis of the IPCC's models, which
predict a hotspot at the top of the troposphere above the equator. The
hotspot's absence, contrary to the models' prediction, is documented
by 1979-1999 radiosonde temperature data. The IPCC's recourse has been
to attack the data. Any unbiased scientist would conclude instead that
something else besides CO2 must have caused the perceived 20th century
warming.

Diminishing Influence of CO2

Fred Goldberg, Associate Professor at the Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm, ridiculed the effort to attribute warming to
CO2. The greenhouse (warming) effect of CO2 is just 1%, while that of
water vapor 95%. Large increases in CO2 produce only minor increases
in temperature forcing, because of diminishing returns. The portion of
the electromagnetic spectrum that CO2 affects is largely saturated
already, so that each subsequent increment of CO2 has less and less
effect. Furthermore, CO2 doesn't last that long in the atmosphere.
Twenty-eight percent of all atmosphereic CO2 is absorbed by biomass
and the oceans each year. Manmade CO2 isn't necessarily correlated
with either overall CO2 or temperature. During the Depression, human
CO2 emissions decreased but natural CO2 in the atmosphere increased,
along with temperature. If one is hunting for correlations between sea
surface temperature and something else, sunspot numbers are a better
choice.

Peer Review Fraud

A number of scientists discussed the blatant political bias at leading
"peer reviewed" publications such as Nature and Science. Examples were
cited of scientific papers that were rejected within one to three
hours of submission. Clearly no deliberative review ever took place,
the papers being rejected for being out of step with the reigning IPCC
orthodoxy.

Warming Planet the Best Scenario

Indur Goklany, Assistant Director, Programs and Science and Technology
Policy, U.S. Department of the Interior, based his study of likely
health effects from different temperature futures conservatively on
data from the World Health Organization, IPCC, and other UN bodies.
His conclusion from this data: human well-being would be highest in
the warmest temperature scenario, the one with the most atmospheric
CO2. Mortality-wise, the predicted climate change would have minimal
impact and under a CO2-rich warming scenario, less land would be
needed under cultivation because of superior agricultural
productivity.

Energy Rationing Will Be Genocidal

On the second day of the Climate Conference, the lunchtime plenary
session was addressed by former U.S. senator, NASA astronaut, and last
human to set foot on the moon Harrison Schmidt, along with chemist
Arthur Robinson, co-founder with Linus Pauling of the Linus Pauling
Institute of Science and Medicine and now with the Oregon Institute of
Science and Medicine. Dr. Robinson excoriated the efforts of
environmentalists to bury the nuclear industry in favor of speculative
alternatives. "Free men produce more than they consume." Right now,
"We're standing on the backs of free men that produced these things
before us." Dr. Robinson cited the Palo Verde nuclear reactor site in
Arizona. It's the largest nuclear power generation plant in the United
States. It was supposed to consist of ten reactors, but only three
were allowed to be completed. Those three reactors produce the
electricity of ten Hoover dams. Palo Verde is producing electricity at
one-tenth to one-fifteenth of what Californians are now paying. The
United States would now be exporting energy if its nuclear and
hydrocarbon capabilities hadn't been legislatively sabotaged.

Who's the Real Criminal Against Humanity?

Once the environmentalists and climate alarmists are able to ration
our energy -- their present aim -- our freedom will be gone, Robinson
said. They are preparing technological genocide. Their first run at
this was the DDT ban, which resulted in tens of millions of children
dying of preventable malaria. If the environmentalists are able to
ration energy and shut down the existing best sources, hundreds of
millions of people will die in the developing sector. Al Gore protege
James Hansen wants to try "global warming deniers" -- the people at
this conference -- of crimes against humanity. He should look instead
in the mirror.

Senator Schmidt pointed out that by cancelling the Nevada waste
storage facility the Obama administration has deliberately killed
nuclear power plants being built in the U.S. Asked about the relation
between energy restriction and population control, Senator Schmidt
replied that the only moral way to reduce developing sector population
pressures is by increasing the standard of living, just as was done in
the advanced sector.

California's Destruction

California Congressman Tom McClintock documented the
environmentalists' destruction of his home state's economy. So many
Californians are fleeing his state -- once the breadbasket and center
of technology innovation for all of North America -- that U-Haul
rental rates are six to seven times higher for people driving out of
the state than inbound. California's wine industry is under attack
because fermentation produces -- the horror of it! -- CO2. Cement is
energy intensive, so California environmentalists are using that to
stymie further construction there. But the environmentalists can't
even bring coherence to their destructive laws. Californians are
encouraged to grow redwoods to soak up CO2 from the air but are also
being taken to court if their redwoods cast shadows on a neighbor's
solar panels.

The Climate Conference, which otherwise eschewed name-calling,
concluded with a hilarious talk by Lord Christopher Monckton, chief
policy advisor to the U.K.'s Science and Public Policy Institute and
former policy advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Lord
Monckton described the environmentalists as "bed wetters" and "greens
too yellow to admit they're red." He said the only danger of rising
sea levels came from the bedwetters.

Videos of all conference presentations, lecture notes, and slides are
being incrementally posted on the web site of the conference's main
sponsor, The Heartland Institute, and may be viewed here.


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