Climate change hysteria has become the mantra of U.S. government since Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. The latest is that the U.S. Defense Department has embraced Al Gore’s message. According to a Defense Department official, Daniel Chiu, “All Pentagon operations in the U.S. and abroad are threatened by climate change.” Chiu, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development, gave this additional warning to senators at a hearing on Tuesday, July 22:
The effects of the changing climate affect the full range of Department activities, including plans, operations, training, infrastructure, acquisition, and longer-term investments. By taking a proactive, flexible approach to assessment, analysis, and adaptation, the Department can keep pace with the impacts of changing climate patterns, minimize effects on the Department, and continue to protect our national security interests.
The Defense Department’s proclamation is in keeping with an alarming statement made by President Obama at a recent fundraiser outside Seattle when he called for a Collectivist “New World Order.” Obama bemoaned that the old new order isn’t working around the world, but “we’re not quite yet towhere we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economics that work for all people.”
As discussed in Thorner’s Illinois Review article of Thursday, July 24, UN and its auspices bear responsibility for Climate Change, Agenda 21, as a product of the UN’s Rio+20 conference, is all about the new World Collectivist Order espoused by President Obama in which environmental goals are integral to its success.
The 97% Consensus Figure
Repeated time and again is that almost all scientists agree that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous, even though there are skeptic world-wide among scientists studying weather and climate who question pronouncements of certitude that due to man’s emissions of CO2 runaway global warming will occur.
This past May Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.” John Kerry’s comments mirror those publicized by UN IPCC reports, which have been unequivocally accepted by the Obama administration. It goes without saying that all IPPC scientists are self-professed members of the fictional 97% consensus of world scientists who believe in earth changing, man-made global warming.
Ignored by the media is a petition circulated for signatures by a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif. Known as the Petition Project, it attracted more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). The petition states that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
Heartland Institute fills a need and reaches out to present “hard” science
The Heartland Institute initially started looking at the issue of global warming in 2006, realizing that the debate as being presented by the UN and its auspices was all one-sided. According to Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, it was “time to bring together global warming skeptics to develop personal relationships and a social movement” to counter the published reports released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with its “self-interest to exaggerate the threat, to ignore any doubts, and to pursue one avenue, which is reducing emissions.”
The 1st International Conference on Climate Change was held in New York Cityin 2008. Between 2008 and 2014 nine international conferences were held. The just completed Las Vegas 9th International Conference on Climate Change from July 7-9, attended by Thorner, featured 64 speakers, from a multitude of disciplines and rightly qualifies as the most star- studded climate conference yet. Visit this site to watch all of the #ICCC9 conference videos.
NIPCC as a Counter to IPCC
In addition to Heartland’s sponsorship of nine international climate change conferences to inform the public that there is another side to the global warming debate and that science is not settled, The Heartland Institute’s association with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is noteworthy and is recognized worldwide, sometimes with scorn, with findings that reducing CO2 emissions, especially here in the United States alone, will not effect the global temperature. In 2009 the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and The Heartland Institute combined forces to produce Climate Change Reconsidered,which was the first comprehensive alternative to the alarmist reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The newest volume in the Climate Change Reconsidered series, was released on April 9: Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts. The second volume was released in June. These two volumes are the fifth and sixth in a series of scholarly reports produced by NIPCC. Previous volumes in the Climate Change Reconsidered series were published in 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2013. Reports are available for free online on this site.
Whereas the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warn of a dangerous human effect on climate, NIPCC concludes the human effect is likely to be small relative to natural variability. Whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs.
Lord Christopher Monckton, a favorite of Conference attendees, issues a warning
It was during the 12th panel discussion at the recent Las Vegas 9th International Conference on Climate Change on Tuesday, July 8, titled, International Perspectives on Climate Change, when panelist Lord Christopher Monckton, a former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher and one of the most visible and outspoken voices against climate change science as a climate change skeptic, gave pertinent details about past UN conferences, along with a grave warning about the Paris Conference (COP21) that will take place in the summer of 2015. If the Paris Conference succeeds in its goal, as Lord Monckton feels that it might, for the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations all the nations of the world, including the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, will be bound by a universal agreement on climate change. Monckon is calling for a “Get out” clause insert – or freedom clause — if countries wish to withdraw from the treaty because of changed minds about the dogma of Global Warming as a threat to mankind. In reality, there hasn’t been any global warming for 17 years and 10 months!
Normal or hard science, contrasted with Post-normal science
Just what is the basis of real or hard science and how does it differ from post-normal science? The concept of post-normal science was introduced by Funtowicz and Ravetz during the 1990’s. Climate change as promoted by UN IPCC reports, fall in the post-normal science category in that the process of science is linked to who gets funded, who evaluates quality, and who has the ear of policy makers. Predictions are made on the basis of a theory or hypothesis. This contrasts the use of real world observations to test predictions as do the NIPCC reports published by The Heartland Institute.
In Climate Change and the Death of Science, Christian British blogger Kevin McGrane nails practitioners of post-normal science. In their own words Kevin McGrane demonstrates that even they know and admit they’re no longer doing science but politics. McGrane’s article strikes at the very root of many environmentalists’ routine practices.
A good explanation of Normal vs Post-normal science was contained in a brochure published and distributed by The Cornwall Alliance at the Las Vegas Conference. The Cornwall Alliance is a coalition of clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics, and policy experts committed to bringing a balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development. Not only was the Cornwall Alliance a cosponsor of the Las Vegas Conference, but its president, founder and national spokesman, E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. , participated in Panel 21 (Global Warming as a Social Movement). Dr. Beisner was likewise honored as the winner of Heartland’s Outstanding Spokesperson in Faith, Science, and Stewardship Award.
Normal or Hard science (NIPCC reports) consists of a rigorous process in which scientists formulate hypotheses to explain how some natural process works; test those hypothesis by careful observation of the real world and of laboratory experiments, diligently disciplining themselves to look as carefully for results that might falsify their hypotheses as results that are consistent with them; and freely share the raw data and the computer codes by which they interpret those date with other scientists so that they can try to replicate their observations and experiments, or find flaws in them. Post-normal science (UN IPCC reports) is a process in which someone formulates a hypothesis, pays attention only to experimental and real-world observations that seem to confirm it but ignores and even suppresses contrary observation, refuses to share his date and methods with other scientists, and seeks to intimidate scientists who disagree with him or to prevent publication of their research.
What happens if Post-normal science wins?
This is what we are up against. To put it bluntly, practitioners of post-normal science have stabbed real science in the back on their hurried way to declare how an “overwhelming scientific consensus” exists on manmade global warming.
Nigel Lawson asks in A Wicked Orthodoxy published May 5, 2014:
How is it that much of the Western world has succumbed to the self-harming collective madness that is climate orthodoxy? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate-change orthodoxy has in effect become a substitute religion. . .
Throughout the Western world, the two creeds that use to vie for popular support, Christianity and the theistic belief system of Communism, are each clearly in decline. Yet people still feel the need both for the comfort and for the transcendent values that religion can provide. It is the quasi-religion of global salvationism that has filled the vacuum, of which the climate-change dogma is the prime example.
Although the Western world will suffer economically with countless hardships befalling its inhabitants, it is with the masses in the developing world where the greatest immorality is even now taking place. How can you ask the millions of people in third world countries who live in dire poverty to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy while suffering malnutrition, disease, and premature death. Not only is the global-warming orthodoxy irrational. It is also wicked.
In Conclusion
A new Pew “Global Attitudes Project” poll of July 22 offers details on the way citizens of the world think about climate change. Unfortunately the poll has been interpreted in a way that brands the American people as ignorant to the risks of global warming. Why? Because only one in four Americans indicated that climate change was a “major threat,” making the U.S. the least concerned nation. Maybe Americans as a whole are smarter than we sometimes give them credit for being.
If real scientists don’t rise up and point out that the emperor of “post-normal science” has no clothes, the whole scientific enterprise will die and the world and its people will suffer The Heartland Institute must be applauded and supported for its fearless stance as a global warming skeptic, noted by The Economist, for taking action through its presentation of international conferences, and for its fact-based NIPCC reports which challenge the UN IPCC reports that advance unproven hypotheses.
Articles by Nancy Thorner based on Heartland’s 9th International Conference on Global Warming:
Article 2: http://blog.heartland.org/2014/07/heartlands-science-director-breaks-ground-to-rein-in-us-epa/
[Originally published at Illinois Review]
Nancy J. Thorner is a writer, cellist, and Tea Party activist based in suburban Chicago.
