Climate agenda

Climate change is the new name used by liberals for their global warming hoax, which they coined as it became obvious that there is no crisis in global warming. The modification in terminology is identical to what liberals did in redefining "evolution" to be "change over time," which of course is a meaningless expression just as "climate change" is.

Climate change does occur naturally, which scientists say has occurred in repeated cycles of cooling (see Ice Ages) and warming over millions of years. Yet many writers have been urging America to fund an ill-conceived initiative to "stop global warming", as if warmer nights or winters would make human life more difficult. The term "climate change" has largely replaced the term "global warming", in ideological discussions.

Ideologues insist that the world's top scientists have reached a "consensus" that most of the warming which land-based weather stations have recorded in the last century is due to human activity. The basis for this claim is a set of reports published by the IPCC, an agency of the United Nations. The assumption is that the government-appointed representatives who run the IPCC would be completely objective and neutral, and would place finding and revealing the truth ahead of any nationalistic interests.

A lot of money is spent publicizing one side's position in the debate:

• Newsweek purports to take readers inside the world of “Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine” without mentioning that the global-warming alarmists are even better funded, in some cases with government support. [1]

Journalists omit mention of key scientific points:

• Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. [2]

Ideologues use all sorts of tricks to convince the general public to support them on the climate change issue. A perennial favorite is to trumpet the current year as the "warmest year on record", as if one outlier denotes a trend. Probably the most insidious kind of trick is to accuse objective people of cherry-picking and censorship, while hypocritically doing just that themselves.

The allegedly harmful effects of climate change include warming temperatures, changing weather patterns, an increase in sea level and in general any climate event affected by global warming. Climate change is one of the top environmental issues, with liberals and conservatives evenly divided on whether global warming is man-made or, if it is significantly occurring, is a natural event — along with global cooling.

Jack M. Hollander wrote:

• The planet has warmed since the mid-1800s, but before that it cooled for more than five centuries. Cycles of warming and cooling have been part of Earth's natural climate history for millions of years. So what is the global warming debate about? It's about the proposition that human use of fossil fuels has contributed significantly to the past century's warming, and that expected future warming may have catastrophic global consequences. But hard evidence for this human contribution simply does not exist; the evidence we have is suggestive at best. Does that mean the human effects are not occurring? Not necessarily. But media coverage of global warming has been so alarmist that it fails to convey how flimsy the evidence really is. Most people don't realize that many strong statements about a human contribution to global warming are based more on politics than on science. Indeed, the climate change issue has become so highly politicized that its scientific and political aspects are now almost indistinguishable.

Questions

1. What is the most important greenhouse gas?
   • AGW proponents say it's carbon dioxide
   • A peer-reviewed scientific paper says it's water vapor
2. What is the role of clouds?
   • Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It's not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down. [3]
3. What are the uncertainties in understanding climatic change?
   • The UN's climate panel said recently there is a 90% chance that most of the last 50 to 100 years of global warming are due to human activity
   • Sallie Baliunas points out that the same climate panel also said, "Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors" [4]

Links

• cloud cover
• ice age

Hypocrisy

Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is part of the global warming controversy. It involves denial, dismissal, or unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific opinion on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its impacts on nature and human society, or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions.[2][3][4] Some deniers endorse the term, while others prefer the term climate change skepticism.[3] Several scientists have noted that "skepticism" is an inaccurate description for those who deny anthropogenic global warming.[5][6][7] In effect, the two terms form a continuous, overlapping range of views, and generally have the same characteristics: both reject, to a greater or lesser extent, the scientific consensus on climate change.[8][9] Climate change denial can also be implicit, when individuals or social groups accept the science but fail to come to terms with it or to translate their acceptance into action.[10] Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism[8][9] and pseudoscience.[11]

The campaign to undermine public trust in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" organized by industrial, political and ideological interests, and supported by conservative media and skeptical bloggers to manufacture uncertainty about global warming.[12][13][14] In the public debate, phrases such as climate skepticism have frequently been used with the same meaning as climate denialism.[15] The labels are contested: those actively challenging climate science commonly describe themselves as "skeptics", but many do not comply with common standards of scientific skepticism and, regardless of evidence, persistently deny the validity of human caused global warming.[8]

Although scientific opinion on climate change is that human activity is extremely likely to be the primary driver of climate change,[16][17] the politics of global warming have been affected by climate change denial, hindering efforts to prevent climate change and adapt to the warming climate.[18][19][20] Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none.[21][22]

Of the world's countries, the climate change denial industry is most powerful in the United States.[23][24] From 2015 to 2017 (after having already served from 2003 to 2007), the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works was chaired by oil lobbyist and climate change denier Jim Inhofe, who had previously called climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people" and claimed to have debunked the alleged hoax in February 2015 when he brought a snowball with him in the Senate chamber and tossed it across the floor.[25] He was succeeded in 2017 by John Barrasso, who similarly said: "The climate is constantly changing. The role human activity plays is not known."[26] Organised campaigning to undermine public trust in climate science is associated with conservative economic policies and backed by industrial interests opposed to the regulation of CO2 emissions.[27] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates and conservative think tanks, often in the United States.[19][28][29][30] More than 90% of papers sceptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[31] The total annual income of these climate change counter-movement-organizations is roughly $900 million.[32] Between 2002 and 2010, nearly $120 million (£77 million) was anonymously donated via the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund to more than 100 organisations seeking to undermine the public perception of the science on climate change.[33] In 2013 the Center for Media and Democracy reported that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 U.S. think tanks, had been lobbying on behalf of major corporations and conservative donors to oppose climate change regulation.[34]

Since the late 1970s, oil companies have published research broadly in line with the standard views on global warming. Despite this, oil companies organized a climate change denial campaign to disseminate public disinformation for several decades, a strategy that has been compared to the organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking by the tobacco industry.[35][36][37]

William Happer wrote:

The current debates about global climate change are complicated by our not understanding the physics of the sun or of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans well enough to dismiss them as major causes of climate change on the earth. Dramatic climate changes like the medieval warm period at the time of the Viking settlements of Iceland and Greenland from about a.d. 900 to 1250, and the subsequent “little ice age,” from about 1250 to 1700, which led to extinction of the Greenland settlements, were certainly not caused by manmade changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One of the major problems with many scientists' conclusions about climate change is a misunderstanding of correlation versus causation. Some studies show correlations between increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and increasing precipitation, and between human activity and atmospheric greenhouse gases, and then go so far as to conclude that humans are causing increased rain, snow, and catastrophic flooding. Correlation does not imply causation. This is especially true considering the relatively short periods of data used (a few decades at most) compared to the Earth's age, and the fact that weather patterns have been cyclic throughout history (see climate cycles).

History of Climate Change vs. Global Warming

The term climate change has its origins several decades ago when physicist Gilbert Plass published a study called The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change in 1956. In this study, Plass postulated the release of CO2 into the atmosphere by industrial and other human activities may have caused the temperature rise noticed in the twentieth century.

The term global warming was first thought to be used by Wallace Broecker, a geochemist from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. His paper, Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? acknowledged the scenario of global warming, though there was a common acknowledgement that airborne aerosols may cause global cooling.

A National Academy of Science study of carbon dioxide's impact on climate published in 1979 also used the term global warming to refer to surface temperature change. Jule Charney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge declared: "If carbon dioxide continues to increase, we find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.” Climate change was still used to refer to the other changes thought to be caused by increased CO2.

Further reading

• Climate Change Reference Guide
• Climate change: directory of references/resources
• National Climatic Data Center
• Real Climate
• IPCC Fifth Assessment Report
• The Global Warming Policy Forum

See also

• Anthropogenic global warming
• War on Science

Links

• Global warming: both sides
• Australian Anti-Climate Hypocrisy Site