Category: Climate Change

(Tom: I was accused of “having me head in the sand” about global warming. Seems I am in esteemed company!)

The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emiritus of physics Harold ‘Hal’ Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence — it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists.

As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time.

We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere.

In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs.

For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.)

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses.

In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

1. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it.

One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety.

(They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.)

In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original.

The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is.

This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

1. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
2. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation.

I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

1. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment.

You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.)

There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.)

The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

1. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it.

Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.

Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise.

As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making). — via The Telegraph and The Heartland Institute

Top Scientist Resigns: ‘Global Warming is a $Trillions Scam — It has Corrupted Many Scientists’

SkepticalScience, a blog spearheaded by climate science “consensus” advocate John Cook, is widely considered the explanatory guidebook for the anthropogenic global warming movement.

The blog claims that CO2 molecules collectively function similar to that of a blanket, in reducing the rate at which the human body cools down. The rate or time-lapse involved in this “slowing” of heat loss, however, is problematic to the paradigm that says CO2 drives global warming.

Going technical for a minute, Professor Nasif Nahle has discovered that the “mean free path” for a quantum wave to pass through the atmosphere before colliding with a CO2 molecule is about 33 meters (Nahle, 2011a), and such a wide gap between molecular collisions hardly conjures-up the image of CO2 functioning like a blanket.

And even more saliently, Nahle has mathematically assessed that the rate at which CO2 molecules can retain heat at the surface may only last about 0.0001 of a second (Nahle, 2011b) — meaning that the atmospheric CO2 concentration, whether it be 300 PPM or 400 PPM, effectively doesn’t matter — the time-lapse differential would be immaterial for either concentration.

Consequently, Nahle has concluded that “carbon dioxide has not an effect on climate changes or warming periods on the Earth” and his work has been endorsed by the Faculty of Physics of the University of Nuevo Leon (Mexico).

Physicist: CO2 Retains Heat For Only 0.0001 Seconds, Warming “Not Possible”

In what amounts to dissension from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate change policy, a series of just-released studies by working-level scientists prove that geological and not atmospheric forces are responsible for melting of Earth’s polar ice sheets.

Multiple NASA Studies Confirm Bedrock Heat Flow Behind Melting Polar Ice, Not Global Warming

Please watch this short video to get the true data on Earth’s climate.

The misleading (or completely false) story line goes:

Big, destructive hurricanes are hitting the U.S. three times more frequently than they did a century ago, according to a new study. Experts generally measure a hurricane’s destruction by adding up how much damage it did to people and cities. That can overlook storms that are powerful, but that hit only sparsely populated areas. A Danish research team came up with a new measurement that looked at just how big and strong the hurricane was, not how much money it cost. They call it Area of Total Destruction.

But extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has some problems with the study.

Media-Hyped Hurricane Study Gets Flattened By Storm Expert Roger Pielke Jr.

Some people don’t know the difference between climate and weather.
And have never been in a manufacturing plant so don’t know that outliers occur and you don’t tweak the production line every time an outlier occurs.

Sept. 22, 2019 (EIRNS)—EIR has released a Special report titled ‘CO₂ Reduction’ Is a Mass Murder Policy: Designed by Wall Street and the City of London. The dossier, which includes Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “International Call to Youth: The Age of Reason Is in the Stars!” is intended for mass publication and circulation to provide full exposure of the “green finance” mobilization of a virtual new Children’s Crusade in the service of drastic reduction of human population. View the full report.
This report is being circulated by Executive Intelligence Review on the occasion of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, which will be preceded by a Climate Summit convened by the Secretary-General. This summit is supposedly being held to “address the climate emergency” and claims that this will “require an unprecedented effort from all sectors of society.”
This unprecedented effort, in order to reduce emissions of CO₂, would be not only costly, but deadly as well. The denial of efficient, affordable energy to a world in need would necessarily lead to the loss of millions of lives and the impoverishment of many millions more.
This is intentional.
Read this report to learn the dark story of the modern environmentalist movement. Come to understand why the world’s greatest financial powers are eagerly supporting climate hysteria. Encounter data refuting the supposed certainty of a world cataclysm facing us in a dozen years, and gain a fuller appreciation of the complexity of the Earth’s climate, in the context of the mechanisms of the solar system and beyond.
Most crucially, grasp the immense potential of the present moment.
https://larouchepub.com/pr/2019/190922_new_dossier.html

Michael Mann, creator of the infamous global warming ’hockey stick,’ loses lawsuit against climate skeptic, ordered to pay defendant’s costs

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph“ that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The graph was first published in 1998, was prominently featured in the 2001 U.N. Climate Report, and formed part of Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth.

The graph’s methodology and accuracy have been and continue to be hotly contested, but Mann has taken the tack of suing two of his most prominent critics for defamation or libel. One case, against Mark Steyn, is called by Steyn likely to end up in the Supreme Court. But another case, against Dr. Tim Ball, was decided by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with Mann’s case thrown out, and him ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs, no doubt a tidy sum of money. News first broke in Wattsupwiththat, via an email Ball sent to Anthony Watts. Later, Principia-Scientific offered extensive details, including much background on the hockey stick.

The Canadian court issued it’s [sic] final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Dr Tim Ball’s libel lawyers.

Not only did the court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. A detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course.

This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are “unprecedented.” (snip)

Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ’working out’) behind the world-famous ’hockey stick’ graph[.]

Real science, not the phony “consensus” version, requires open access to data so skeptics (who play a key role in science) can see if results are reproducible. Of course, there are no falsifiable experimental data associated with the global warming predictions of doom, so it doesn’t really stand as science as Karl Popper defined it.

This is an important victory in the process of debunking the warmist scare.

Update 1: Michael Mann disputes the notion that he lost (and more):

There have been some wildly untruthful claims about the recent dismissal of libel litigation against Tim Ball circulating on social media. Here is our statement (https://t.co/8tGoBZnE3Y): pic.twitter.com/ySeJcOktX9

— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) August 23, 2019 Update 2: Technology.news has a rather different take from Mann’s, noting that further legal steps are on their way.

Penn State climate scientist, Michael ’hockey stick’ Mann commits contempt of court in the ’climate science trial of the century.’ Prominent alarmist shockingly defies judge and refuses to surrender data for open court examination. Only possible outcome: Mann’s humiliation, defeat and likely criminal investigation in the U.S.

The defendant in the libel trial, the 79-year-old Canadian climatologist, Dr Tim Ball … is expected to instruct his British Columbia attorneys to trigger mandatory punitive court sanctions, including a ruling that Mann did act with criminal intent when using public funds to commit climate data fraud. Mann’s imminent defeat is set to send shock waves worldwide within the climate science community as the outcome will be both a legal and scientific vindication of U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that climate scare stories are a “hoax.” (snip)

Michael Mann, who chose to file what many consider to be a cynical SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) libel suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver six long years ago, has astonished legal experts by refusing to comply with the court direction to hand over all his disputed graph’s data. Mann’s iconic hockey stick has been relied upon by the UN’s IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of ’man-made global warming.’ (snip)

The negative and unresponsive actions of Dr Mann and his lawyer, Roger McConchie, are expected to infuriate the judge and be the signal for the collapse of Mann’s multi-million dollar libel suit against Dr Ball. It will be music to the ears of so-called ’climate deniers’ like President Donald Trump and his EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt.

As Dr Ball explains:

“Michael Mann moved for an adjournment of the trial scheduled for February 20, 2017. We had little choice because Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable. We agreed to an adjournment with conditions. The major one was that he [Mann] produce all documents including computer codes by February 20th, 2017. He failed to meet the deadline.”

Punishment for Civil Contempt

Mann’s now proven contempt of court means Ball is entitled to have the court serve upon Mann the fullest punishment. Contempt sanctions could reasonably include the judge ruling that Dr. Ball’s statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State’ is a precise and true statement of fact. This is because under Canada’s unique ’Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/michael_mann_creator_of_the_infamous_global_warming_hockey_stick_loses_lawsuit_against_climate_skeptic_ordered_to_pay_defendants_costs.html

A new model that predicts the solar cycles more accurately than ever before has suggested that solar magnetic activity will drop by 60 percent between 2030 and 2040, which means in just 15 years’ time, Earth could sink into what researchers are calling a mini ice age.
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-mini-ice-age-is-coming-in-the-next-15-years

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html
And here’s more evidence: http://www.kirotv.com/news/weather/mini-ice-age-could-hit-earth-2030-researchers-say/nmyKx/