Guest Post by John Hunt, MD
Climate scientists are not prophets. Those who believe them on faith provide no good service to the pursuit of truth.
Those who blame climate change for every storm or forest fire are silly. Equally silly are those who claim that a particularly cold day proves that climate change is a farce.
Fear of environmental calamity has caused human destruction before, such as when Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, led to the banning of the pesticide DDT. As a result of the “success” of the environmentalist movement in banning DDT, an estimated 30-50 million people in Africa—mostly children—died from malaria carried by the renewed growth in the mosquito population. Malaria deaths increased from tens of thousands per year pre-ban, to millions per year post-ban. The story was similar in India. These were preventable deaths that resulted from stoked fears.
Now the target is carbon dioxide. We are told that 97% of climate scientists agree with their own scientific consensus. But that’s a misleading statement in an important way. The actual figure refers to “97% of climate scientists actively publishing in scientific journals.” To understand the relevance of this 97% figure, we need to know: what are the determiners of “actively publishing?”
Could the selection process for entry and success (“actively publishing”) in the climate profession create a bias that compromises the information we rely on to make our critical decisions about climate?
Let’s ask the question, calmly and rationally, and see where it takes us.
1. It is reasonable to consider that children raised in climate-conscious families are more likely to become interested in the environment than those raised by families who either don’t care or who deny. The climate-conscious children are more likely to undertake science fair projects and write papers about climate change. Climate work is rewarded in school. So it shouldn’t be any surprise if such children, more than others, later consider environmental science as a college major. If this occurs, which seems likely, this childhood process would be Distillation Step 1 in creating a future climate scientist. More speculatively, if sufficiently reinforced, some of these youth might even develop some neuronally hardwired (unchangeable) biases as the brain matures.
2. As is true in all fields, college climatology professors encourage the most dedicated students in the introductory environmental studies class to pursue climate science as a major. Other students—such as those who are skeptical—may never again see the inside of a climate science classroom. The selection of academic major is Distillation Step 2.
3. When students pursue their Master’s degrees, the crop of future climate scientists is further distilled. Those who don’t align with their professors’ views are less successful getting into a PhD program. Then, success within a PhD program relies (in any field) on abiding by one’s dissertation committee’s wishes so as to get their PhD in as few years as possible so as to finally make some money. During this phase, those who best comply will be more likely to obtain their doctorate and get set up in post-doc positions working for experienced senior scientists. Distillation Step 3 has occurred, along with further psychological reinforcement to agree with those more senior. The climate liquor is getting more concentrated.
4. To succeed in academia, the newly minted PhD must apply for grants—mostly from government agencies or his own university. He chooses hypotheses and writes his grant application with care, knowing he’ll need the approval of committees populated with scientists who are invested in promoting their previously published papers and who make their living from government-funded studies of climate change. If he fails to craft his project to appeal to the needs of the reviewers on the committee, he won’t get funded. Funding failure increases the likelihood that he will wash out of academia. This selection of research grants to write is Distillation Step 4.
This looks interesting, but the article formatting seems to be screwed up after ‘This selection of research grants to write is Distillation Step 4.’
If environmentalism restricted itself to truly caring for our natural resources, I would have no problem with it. However, with the secret science and questionable funding that these environmental groups possess taints the whole barrel. It turns out that many claims that environmentalists make have no basis in fact and are not based on good, honest, scientific investigation. This is why environmental scientists have to hide their data, as it does not fit their agenda. A good example of this is the so-called global warming crap, now renamed climate change. For one, the climate is always changing. The East Anglia emails in which data was purposely falsified by climate scientists comes to mind. Not only that, the climate scientists purposely installed temperature monitoring sensors in cities, contrary to manufacturers recommendations and good scientific practices, in asphalt-covered parking lots, and other heat sink areas in order to prove their (faulty) hypothesis. This is scientific dishonesty at its worst.
It turns out that the solar system is in a cooling cycle due to decreased solar activity. There are two long-term solar cycles that reinforce themselves when in phase and cancel themselves out when out-of-phase. Look up the Maunder minimum. There are no SUVs on Mars or other planets, yet they are also experiencing the same solar variability.
Environmentalism has been the method used to impose communist principles on western societyespecially in the USA.
Environmentalists are not content with promoting clean water, air and land, but are hell-bent on controlling human behavior, and yes, promoting extermination plans for much of humanity as these anointed types consider mankind to be a pestilence (except for themselves) to be reduced in population by any means necessary.
Environmentalists HATE the God-given concept of private property and have imposed government-backed and enforced land use controls on private property owners without compensation, clearly an unconstitutional taking of private property. If environmentalists want to control land use, let them purchase it themselves, not by government force. Today the only method of negating government-imposed land use restrictions is shoot, shovel, and shut up.
If environmentalists had their way, the earth’s human population would be reduced by approximately 90%, with the remainder to (be forced) to live in cities, in soviet-style high rise apartments, utilizing bicycles, buses and trains for transportation. The use of automobiles and access to pristine wilderness (rural) areas would be off-limits to us mere mortals, and would only be available for these anointed environmentalists.
The endangered species act is another abuse of environmentalism. Species are always changing, to adapt to their environments-survival if the fittest. In fact, the hoopla over the spotted owl (that placed much northwest timber land off-limits to logging) turned out to be nothing but scientific misconduct and arrogance. There are virtually identical species in other parts of the northwest.
More scientific malpractice occurred when government biologists attempted to plant lynx fur in certain areas to provide an excuse for making those areas off-limits for logging or development. Fortunately, these scientists were caught, however, no punishment was imposed.
In a nutshell, today’s environmentalism IS communism like watermelon-green on the outside and red (communist) on the inside.
It is interesting to note that communist and third-world countries have the WORST environmental conditions on the planet. Instead of the USA and other developed countries spending billions to get rid of that last half-percent of pollution, it would behoove the communist countries to improve their conditions first. Here is a question for you environmentalists: Why is there a push for restrictive environmental regulations, but only on the developed first-world countries, and not the gross polluters such as India and China?
As a research scientist who has studied, over a period of about 35 years, the chemical evolution of oceans and atmospheres through geologic time, I am prepared to state the following:
1. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory is probably the greatest and most expensive scientific fraud of the 20th and 21th centuries. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas but its contribution to gloabl warming is not detectable because of other factors that are much more important. such as energy output from the sun, the intensity of the magnetic field which influences cosmic flux, and cloud formation related to nucleation by cosmic particles.
2. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not about the science of climate change; in fact it is about the corruption of climate science. People seem to have forgotten about the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), East Anglia University, which led to Climategate. CRU was heavily involved in cherry picking data, rigging reviews, selecting IPCC members and writing the IPCC Report. Now how is that for corruption? Their most famous fraud is the so-called “hockey stick” showing rapid warming over the past 100 years and the suppression of the warmest period over the past 1000 years referred to as the Medieval Warming, which of course was followed by the Little Ice Age.