(November 12, 2013) … resembles the Obamacare lie, writes Peter Ferrara for Forbes.com, who says the real world has shattered the falsehoods behind both global warming and Obamacare because the motivation for both ‘frauds’ is the same: expanding government power. Lawrence Solomon’s work is cited.

To read Peter Ferrara’s column in full, see the publisher’s website here.

A lengthy excerpt from Ferrara’s piece related to global warming, citing Lawrence Solomon, follows below:

Richard Lindzen is Professor of Atmospheric Sciences emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  There is no climate scientist in the world with a better professional pedigree than Lindzen.  It was his apparent understanding of the quality of the climate science peddled by the IPCC and its cohorts that led him to write his recent article, “Science in the Public Square: Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents.”

Lindzen writes,

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly.  It also has been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions.  How can one escape from the Iron Triangle (ambiguous statements from scientists translated into alarmism by advocates and the media, with politicians responding by feeding the scientists taxpayer money) when it produces flawed science that is enormously influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy.

There are past examples.  In the U.S. in the early 20^th century, the eugenics movement had coopted the science of human genetics and was driving a political agenda.  The movement achieved the Immigration Restriction Act of 1923, as well as forced sterilization laws in several states.  The movement became discredited by Nazi atrocities, but the American consequences survived well into the 1960s.

In the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) promoted the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.  It fit with Stalin’s megalomaniacal insistence on the ability of society to remold nature….However, opposition within the Soviet Union remained strong, despite ruthless attempts to suppress dissenters….

Global warming differs from the previous two affairs.  Global warming has become a religion.  A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.  There may be a growing realization that this may not add that much meaning to one’s life, but outside the pages of the Wall Street Journal, this has not been widely promulgated, and people with no other source of meaning will defend their religion with jihadist zeal.

In contrast to Lysenkoism, Global Warming has a global constituency, and has successfully coopted almost all of institutional science.  However, the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.”

Lindzen concludes that the previous examples of the eugenics movement and Lysenkoism lasted 20 to 30 years, which is about equal to the run of the global warming movement since its American rollout in 1988.  He suggests that the global warming movement may be just about spent as well.

Coming revelations concerning the scientific fraud behind global warming will confirm Lindzen’s estimation.  The first of these relate to the growing, ultimately yawning disparity between the temperature projections of the IPCC’s 73 global climate models, and the observed temperatures in the real world, over the past 30 years, as shown in the graph below.  The actual atmospheric temperatures as recorded by U.S. weather satellites and weather balloons are shown by the two lines at the bottom of the graph, connecting the squares or the circles.  The average of the temperature models is the solid line going through the spaghetti of lines representing the projections of each of the models, well above the real world temperatures, with the divergence growing and growing.  The source of that graph is Dr. Roy Spencer, award winning NASA scientist monitoring the global atmospheric temperatures as measured by U.S. satellites, and a contributor to Climate Change Reconsidered, as produced for testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee of the United States Senate.  Spencer, R.W. 2013. Statement to the Environment and Public Works Committee, 19 July 2013, Washington, DC.

This divergence is already approaching a full degree Celsius, which already demonstrates that the models are more fairy tale than science.  But in the coming years that divergence will only grow and grow, ultimately not only discrediting but falsifying the theory of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming.

The second relates to the growing specter of global cooling.  Lawrence Solomon reports in the Financial Post in an article published on October 31, “Global Cooling Consensus”:

“‘Real Risk of a Maunder Minimum ‘Little Ice Age’ announced the BBC this week, in reporting startling findings by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University.  ‘Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age]…, explained Paul Hudson, the BBC’s climate correspondent.  If Earth is spared a new Little Ice Age, a severe cooling as ‘occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and cold summers is, according to him, ‘more likely than not to happen.”

Solomon adds,

“During the Little Ice Age, the Sun became eerily quiet, as measured by a near disappearance of the sunspots typically present.  Solar scientists around the world today see similar conditions, giving impetus to the widespread view that cold times lie ahead.  ‘When we have had periods where the Sun has been quieter than usual we tend to get these much harsher winters’ echoed climatologist Dennis Wheeler from Sunderland University, in a Daily Express article entitled ‘Now get ready for an ‘Ice Age’ as experts warn of Siberian winter ahead.’”

Solomon cites further authorities, continuing,

“In a paper published this month by the American Meteorological Society, the authors demolish the claims by IPCC scientists that the Sun could not be responsible for major shifts in climate.  In a post on her website this month, Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, all but mocked the IPCC assertions that solar variations don’t matter.  Among the many studies and authorities she cited: the National Research Council’s recent report, ‘The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate,’ and NASA, former home of global warming guru James Hansen.”

Solomon reported that in a January press release, “To bolster the argument that solar activity could explain the Little Ice Age as well as lesser changes, NASA listed some dozen authorities, including Dan Lubin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose research on other sun-like stars in the Milky Way suggest that ‘the Sun’s influence could be overpowering.’”

Solomon further reports, “In the last two years, the scientific community’s openness to examining the role of the Sun in climate change – as opposed to the role of man – has exploded.”  That includes “scientists at the Russian Academy of Science’s Pulkovo Observatory, whose predictions in the last decade that global cooling would start in this decade are looking especially prescient.”  It also includes George Kukla of Columbia University, who explained in 2007, “None of us expected uninterrupted continuation of the [cooling] trend [of the 1960s and 1970s].  Solomon concludes, “Global warming always precedes an ice age, Kukla explained.  The warming we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, was expected all along, much as the calm before the storm.”

In other words, global warming is starting to sound a lot like Obama promising that under Obamacare if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance, or if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, or that Obamacare would cause the cost of health insurance to go down, or provide for universal coverage.

The bottom line is that America dodged a bullet in the 2000 Florida recount.  Because in an October 29 Wall Street Journal commentary, Al Gore sounds like he has gone mad with his grand delusions as personal global savior.  Gore tries to warn investors about a coming subprime carbon asset bubble, where fossil fuel investments will be dangerously overpriced, because most investors are overlooking the risk of global warming to investments in fossil fuel assets.  He cites a “Carbon Budget” calculated by the “International Energy Agency,” which supposedly means that “at least two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves will not be monetized…, creating ‘stranded carbon assets.”  He warns investors to look out for “sociopolitical pressures (e.g., fossil-fuel divestment campaigns, environmental advocacy, grass roots protests and changing public opinion) [which] could create an environment in which carbon-intensive businesses could lose their ‘license to operate,’ thereby stranding assets.”

All of which spells opportunity to me.  By all means, investors, look out for those fossil fuel divestment campaigns and grass roots protests, which would signal that fossil fuel investments had become artificially undervalued.  In other words, take such developments as buy signals.  And if any of you want to divest yourselves of the social burden of fossil fuel investments, just send title to those investments to me, care of Forbes magazine.