Energy Probe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 20, 2009

Americans will have two messages for Barack Obama at his inauguration today: We love you but don’t blame us for climate change.

In a national survey released on the eve of Obama’s inauguration by Rasmussen Reports, the U.S. polling company, a majority of Americans – 51% – now believe that humans are not the predominant cause of climate change. Only 41% blame humans and 9% aren’t sure.  Just one month ago, the same pollster found that just 43% of Americans let us humans off the hook while 46% blamed humans and 11% were not sure. Last July, fully 50% blamed humans.

Of those who see natural causes at work in our ever-changing climate, the great majority see the Sun and other long-term planetary trends as the cause while a minority blame other natural factors, such as volcanic activity.

To make matters worse for the global warming doomsayers, the majority don’t view the global warming we have seen – whether its cause is natural or man-made – with great alarm, despite media depictions of rising oceans, melting polar caps, dying polar bears and accelerating hurricanes. One third dismiss global warming concerns altogether, saying they are not too serious or not at all serious, and another quarter find climate change only “somewhat serious.” Only four in 10 Americans do find climate change to be a “very serious” issue.

The Rasmussen Poll found Democrats to be isolated in their attitudes toward climate change. A decisive majority of both Republicans and independents absolve humans. Even among Democrats, however, only 59% still blame humans. Likewise, only 18% of Republicans and 33% of independents view global warming as a very serious problem while a majority of Democrats do.

The Rasmussen poll also provides guidance as to how a politically savvy President Obama will deal with climate change, given that he has put the current economic crisis at the top of his political agenda. In response to the question, “Is there a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection?,” 46% responded “yes” compared to only 32% who thought not. If President Obama is to get the broad-based support that he desires for the economic reforms that he will be proposing, he’ll need to respect the views of the large minority of Democrats, and the majority of Independents and Republicans that he now represents. His climate change agenda may need to wait, until the planets align themselves for him in a propitious manner.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers.

Author and Reviewer numbers are wrong
by John McLean, January 2009

How many times have you heard or read words to the effect that 4000 scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) supported the claims about a significant human influence on climate? I think we’ve seen it on television, radio and the Internet and I know that politicians at national levels have quoted such figures. There’s no question whatsoever. It’s utterly wrong.

In fact, once the duplicated names are removed that number falls below 2,900 and if we only want those who explicitly supported the claims it falls to only about 60. So how does 4,000 become 60? Let’s take a closer look at the real numbers.

Consider the statement “The IPCC report concluded that there is a human influence on climate. This was supported by almost 4,000 authors and reviewers.” The popular mythology – and one that IPCC never tries to correct – is that those 4,000 supported the findings but all they really supported, by their work, was the creation of the report. The IPCC is allowing, or perhaps even encouraging, an ambiguity be misinterpreted, and not for the first time either, but I digress.

But how many individuals were involved? Was it 4,000 or some other number?
The IPCC said in its flyer for its Fourth Assessment Report (4AR)
2500+ Scientific Expert Reviewers
800+ Contributing Authors
450+ Lead Authors…[note 1]

so immediately the figure drops from 4,000 to 3,750 – but a closer check shows that’s not correct either. Each of the three IPCC Working Groups (WGs) assembles its own lists of authors and reviewers, making six lists in all. Based on those lists of reviewers and on a previous list of authors that I had already extracted from the start of each chapter of the report (and each “Summary for Policy makers”and “Technical Summary”) the total number of authors and reviewers for each working group is as follows:

WG I – 595 authors, 624 reviewers
WG II – 400 authors, 1169 reviewers
WG III – 251 authors, 469 reviewers

Based on thee figures the total number of reviewers was 2262 and the number of authors is 1246. The former is well short of the IPCC’s 2500 but the latter is near enough to the claimed 1250.

Looking first at the number of authors we must take into account that an author for one working group can also be an author for another working group.

Anil Markandya of the UK was an author of WG II chapter 8 and WG III chapter 2, and Blair Fitzharris of New Zealand was an author of WG I chapter 4 and WG II chapter 11 and “summary for policymakers”. They, along with 39 other authors who contributed to more than one working group, have been counted twice in the IPCC’s total of 1250 authors.
Other authors who have been counted twice include those whose names are sometimes shown with accents, umlauts and other marks and sometimes shown without, and sometimes even with different spelling (e.g. the umlauted ‘u’ is sometimes shown as ‘ue’). After converting the variable spelling to a single form and removing the duplicates across working groups the number of authors falls to 1189 individuals.

In a similar fashion, reviewers can comment on chapters from more than one working group and their names might have the same variable spelling. After these issues are resolved the total number of reviewers falls to 2073.

With these corrections we’ve now lost almost 500 names from the 3750 that the IPCC claimed and we’re down to
3262.

But that’s the total of the number of authors and the number of reviewers. These roles are not independent and there was nothing to prevent authors also being reviewers, even of the chapters that they had contributed to.

IPCC policies say that each author receives the draft copies of any chapter they contributed to and elsewhere we find that virtually anyone with relevant knowledge can be a reviewer, and authors often meet that requirement even for chapters that they did not work on.

Take for example Anthony Broccoli of the USA. He was an author of WG I chapter 8 and a reviewer of WG I chapter 6. All up, 383 individuals acted both as reviewers and authors. After removing the duplicate names from the composite list the number of individuals falls to 2879, which is a long way short of the claimed 4,000 and even of the IPCC’s total of 3750, which of course could be understood as individuals rather than separate lists.

At this point a few issues need to be clarified about the accuracy of the above figures because I wouldn’t like to be like the IPCC and not be precise. The manual adjustment for accents and other marks (e.g. umlauts) might not be 100% accurate. Care has been taken with the resolving of duplicate names but the results can’t be guaranteed to be correct. I’ve taken great care with identifying duplicate names but it is possible that two individuals might share the same name. On the other hand the same individual might at different times be listed under different names (e.g. women who are listed both under their maiden-name and their married name). I also made corrections where the IPCC seems uncertain whether a Cuban individual was Juan Llanes-Requeiro or Juan Llanes-Requerio, or if a Swedish individual was Markku Rummukainen or Markku Rummu Ainen.

Perhaps I have failed to notice other instances of IPCC incompetence.

Another problem that I discovered was that an Australian author whose name was in the composite list in the appendix to the Working Group I contribution could not be found in the lists of authors at the start of each chapter. (This was another reason for using a list of authors extracted from each chapter rather than the composite list provided by each Working Group.) I haven’t bothered to determine whether other instances of this discrepancy occur for this working group or others. I don’t know and frankly don’t care, because it looks like just
another of the IPCC’s distortions and outright lies.

The IPCC’s claims of 2500+ reviewers and 1250 authors bears little relationship to the truth and its implied total of more than 3750 individuals is even worse. This is just another example of how the IPCC’s messages are ambiguous – deliberately so, in my opinion – and how the organization publishes a lobbyist’s message rather than a clear presentation of the facts.

But did the 2879 individuals all support the IPCC’s principal findings? There’s really no proof that any more than about 2% explicitly did so.

The key chapter in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 is chapter 9 of the Working Group I contribution. No authors prior to that chapter were asked for their opinion, although perhaps we could say that some authors of two chapters, 1 and 8, gave it anyway. Authors of chapters 10 and 11 of the WG I contribution assumed the claims made in chapter 9 were correct, and so did the authors of all chapters of the contributions by Working Groups II and III.

Chapter 9 of Working Group I had 53 authors in total but more than 40 were part of a network of people who worked previously together. In direct contradiction to the IPCC’s statements that the team of authors should have a wide range of views and experiences, most were climate modellers and there were many instances where several authors were associated with the same establishment. In the latter case it was not uncommon for a contributing author to be a subordinate (academic or work) to author higher in the authoring hierarchy. [note 2]

It is impossible to say whether the findings were truly supported by all 53 authors of chapter 9 but let’s assume
that they did.

The second draft of chapter 9, the last draft available for review by individuals, received comments from 55 people and 7 governments. Of these 62 only 5 reviewers explicitly endorsed the overall chapter [note 3]. None of these supporting reviewers was particularly credible because of vested interests or because this was the only review comment they made for the entire report, but let’s not quibble.

Fifty-three authors and five reviewers are all that can be said to explicitly support the claim of a significant human influence on climate. The figure of 4,000 is a myth. Even the IPCC’s total of 3750 is a myth. Not even the 2879 individuals can be shown to support the claim. The true number is about 60, or maybe if we asked each of those privately, perhaps even fewer.

It can’t be denied that other reviewers may have supported the notion of significant man-made warming but failed to explicitly state this. If that’s the case them they only have themselves to blame for not being counted with the other “true believers”. We can however be sure that support among those other IPCC authors and reviewers was not unanimous. The lists of reviewers contain the names of many people who are known to be sceptical of a significant human influence on temperature, so any implication that they supported the IPCC’s findings are totally without merit. As mentioned earlier, the support to which the IPCC referred in its flyer was towards the creation of the entire report, not the findings of a small network of climate modellers, although the “sceptical reviewers” would probably argue that their support for the report was only in trying to curb the excesses of the IPCC’s authors.

This document has shown that yet another statement by the IPCC is unsupported by any solid evidence. Not only was the IPCC dishonest about the level of support for its primary claim, either deliberately or through allowing an ambiguity to be misinterpreted, but it couldn’t even get its number of authors and reviewers correct. If the IPCC cannot provide an accurate count of authors, reviewers and the people who acted in both roles for its report then we probably should be asking what, if any, of its statements can be believed.

NOTES

1 – http://www.probeinternational.org/ipcc-flyer-low%5B1%5D.pdf (IPCC flyer for 4AR)
2 – “Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings” at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/McLean_IPCC_bias.pdf
3 – “An Analysis of the Review of the IPCC 4AR WG I Report” at http://www.probeinternational.org/files/An%20Analysis%20of%20the%20Review%20of%20the%20IPCC%204AR%20WG%20I%20Report.pdf

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 10, 2009

My day usually begins and ends watching BBC World News. Along the way, I generally catch both CBC and CTV news, and CNN and MSNBC, too. I commend these all to you, but I especially commend the gold standard in television news and commentary, the one TV channel indispensable to obtaining an understanding of the events of the day: FOX News.

If you don’t watch FOX News Channel regularly, this advice may surprise you. Most people I know can’t refer to FOX without sneering. Outstanding journalists including the National Post’s own Robert Fulford have lambasted FOX. Democratic presidential candidates spent most of the presidential race boycotting FOX. During his campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly dissed FOX, and in particular Sean Hannity, the co-host of the No. 2 rated show in cable news, Hannity and Colmes.

I can understand none of these critics, aside from Obama, who had good reason to go after Hannity. No one was more partisan or more relentless in attacking Obama, or more effective. Hannity was the one who first broke the story about Obama’s inflammatory pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and when the rest of the media studiously ignored the story, Hannity repeated his Wright attack ad nauseum. It ultimately became a major controversy in the presidential campaign, forcing Obama to explain himself to the voters.

Does the presence of pit-bull Hannity, also one of the biggest names in conservative talk radio, discredit FOX’s claim to be “Fair and Balanced?” Not to anyone who has seen the “Colmes” of Hannity and Colmes in action. Co-host Alan Colmes, one of the most popular hosts in liberal talk radio, is every bit as tough and partisan as Hannity.

FOX’s Bill O’Reilly, the boisterous and opinionated host of The O’Reilly Factor, is even more reviled than Hannity. But those who identify O’Reilly as a knee-jerk conservative have come to knee-jerk conclusions of their own. O’Reilly does not pigeon-hole easily. He campaigns against greed on Wall Street. He especially campaigns against Big Oil, believing the oil majors manipulate supply to gouge consumers. He wants government to be pro-active on the environment, calling people who deny global warming “idiots.”

Watch him and you will come to realize why his show has been rated No. 1 in cable news for 97 consecutive months now. He is a gifted questioner, deceptively so because of his unslick, working class demeanour. I’ve never seen him ask a gotcha question. To the contrary, rather than try to trip up a guest, he often frames questions by restating his guest’s views, a technique that gives guests a jumping off point from which they can elaborate their views, rather than merely restating them themselves.

Who watches O’Reilly? According to Pew Research Center, his viewers are the most knowledgeable on the air, only 17% of them considered to have a low knowledge level. By comparison, Pew found that the audience of Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the high-brow flagship news show at PBS, had 28% with low knowledge levels.

FOX not only has the No. 1 and No. 2 shows in cable news, it has the No. 3 show and 12 of the top 15 shows, making it far and away the most popular news channel, a position it has held for seven years now. FOX dominates not because it appeals to those on the political right – only 38% of FOX viewers consider themselves Republicans – but because it appeals to people across the political spectrum. More people who identify themselves as Democrats watch FOX than watch CNN, the No. 2 news channel. In fact, FOX’s non-conservative viewership exceeds CNN’s entire viewership.

But good as the rough and tumble opinion shows are, I even more appreciate those at FOX that present calm analysis. The FOX formula – to always provide balance via hosts and/or guests with competing viewpoints – attracts high-calibre analysts of the left and right who are willing and able to civilly challenge each other. The upshot for the viewer: superior information due to a wider exposure to expert opinion.

To take a current example, only recently have mainstream journalists in goodly numbers begun to question the rash of stimulus packages that began with President Bush’s $700-billion bailout package of September; FOX viewers were immediately and consistently exposed to informed scepticism. A second example: FOX viewers knew that the Surge in Iraq was working weeks if not months ahead of those of rival networks. A third: Only FOX did not skew its presidential reportage in favour of Obama, according to Pew, which found that only FOX treated both John Mc-Cain and Barack Obama similarly.

In another measure of FOX’s objectivity, of all the debates that occurred in the presidential primaries, FOX’s hosting of the Republican primary debate is generally seen to have posed the toughest and smartest questions. And in yet another, FOX analyst Scott Rasmussen, a pollster with a remarkable record for accuracy, was bang-on in forecasting a 52% to 46% win for Obama. The FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll proved almost as impressive, coming to within one point in predicting the margin of victory. In contrast, polls from media outlets with an axe to grind, such as the CBS/New York Times and Newsweek, gave Obama an 11 and 12 point margin of victory.

My advice to FOX’s critics: Try it before you slam it. You will soon learn what the other networks don’t report. And you can then decide to watch FOX or not, in a fair and balanced way.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers.

B.P. Terpstra
tcsdaily.com (Technology/Commerce/Society)
January 8, 2009

There appears to be a great spiritual thirst for predicting great catastrophes. I call it Armageddon chic. In Lawrence Solomon‘s 2008 book, The Deniers, however, we hear from a good many moderate voices. There are no sensational prophecies, but there are many reasons to take a deep yoga breath.

Here are four:

Notably, the former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Sciences, Dr. Edward Wegman, for example, exposed the “hockey stick” rot behind the catastrophic global warming narrative, in spite of attacks from all directions.

The president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology, Dr. David Bromwich openly believes that “it’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now.”

The chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Prof. Paul Reiter from the influential Pasteur Institute acknowledges that Al Gore’s stated view that “global” warming catastrophes and “mosquito-borne diseases” are partners is not taken seriously in specialist circles.

And, not surprisingly, the director of research, from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Prof. Hendrik Tennekes, maintains that “there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies” to justify catastrophic warming forecasts.

The Deniers also calls readers to think outside the so-called consensus box. Is there really a consensus on the consensus? And, if so, how wise is it to present science as a show of hands? In it, Solomon, a Canadian columnist raises the issue of politics in all of this. Page 183: “Headline horrors make great scapegoats. There’s no more egregious or vicious example than governments using global warming to cover up their own failures to prevent the resurgence of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.”

The dynamics of the global warming issue are changing, too. From Jimmy Carter’s campaign against “global cooling” and his faith in the National Climate Program Act to Hollywood’s An Inconvenient Truth, Solomon’s text is also a cautionary tale about embracing extreme theories. But rather than deleting historical records, and simply inserting ourselves in a catastrophic motion picture, The Deniers also attempts to draw our attention to the big-picture arguments.

Page 171: “For millions of years, the geologic record shows, Earth has experienced an ongoing cycle of ice ages, each typically lasting about 100,000 years, and punctured by brief, warmer periods called interglacials, such as we are now in,” Solomon argues. “The current period of global warming actually constitutes additional indication of the ice age to come.” Thus, there is no reason to blame the “evil” robber barons. Or live like Hobbits.

With so much talk about the role of politics in business (an important argument, no doubt), it’s no wonder so many of us forget just how political the “independent” United Nations and other public intuitions are. And, where, pray tell is the infamous hockey stick today? Page 21: “The IPCC has dropped it from the Summary for Policymakers for its 2007 Report,” notes Solomon. “But the hockey stick did its main work years ago and is still very widely cited by advocates of the science-is-settled position.”

Ron Smith

January 7, 2009

Despite what this newspaper’s editorialists aver (“A New Year’s resolution,” Jan. 2, 2009), there is no scientific proof that “time is running out for mankind to take the needed actions to thwart the most disastrous effects of climate change.” Nor is it anything more than an unproven assertion to argue that “the relevant scientific community has reached a clear consensus: Many decades of unchecked fossil fuel consumption has pushed the planet far beyond the natural cycle, and the impact of this enhanced warming, especially the forecast rise in sea level this century, could ultimately lead to human suffering on an epic scale.”

The Baltimore Sun confidently urges the next president to avoid the temptation of postponing drastic action on this matter because of other pressing problems, such as the worldwide economic slowdown, our wars in Eurasia, etc. – the most important thing in the long term is to “reduce global warming.” To this I say: “Nonsense.” Oops, that makes me a “flat-earth type,” and an all-around bad person, perhaps allied with “certain deep-pocketed traditional energy interests such as coal producers.” As you probably know, proponents of global warming are very well funded as well, but space is limited, so let us move on to the idea of scientific consensus, which is oxymoronic.

Michael Crichton put it this way in a 2003 speech: “Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

The talismanic word consensus is hauled out and used to beat skeptics about the head and shoulders only in cases where the science is far from convincing. Besides, the consensus is not actually there. Search for the book The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution and Fraud and you’ll find a list of some of the scientists who depart from the supposed consensus.

The idea that we can predict anything at all about what the next century has in store for us and further generations is patently ludicrous. We don’t know what the weather will be like over the next two weeks, yet the global warming crowd insists that computer modeling shows imminent disaster and actions must be taken immediately, no matter the cost, to avert it.

S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery wrote a book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, a New York Times best-seller, providing details on scientific studies that disprove the arguments put forth by Al Gore (and The Baltimore Sun) about human activity causing climate change. The 1,500-year cycle of climate change is not based on unproven, theoretical computer modeling, but on actual ice core sampling and satellite measurement of the sun’s varying rays. The evidence from the actual measurements is that variation in solar activity – sun spots – is what causes global warming and cooling.

The fact is that the latest global warming began about 18,000 years ago, long before man started spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. At that time, thick layers of ice covered much of the Earth. The even bigger picture to keep in mind shows that for several million years, the dominant climate on this planet has been that of ice ages, which last approximately 100,000 years and which are interrupted by far briefer periods of warming, called interglacial periods, lasting for about 15,000 to 20,000 years. The current one in which we humans and other species developed and thrived should last a while longer before the extreme, life-unfriendly deep freeze returns. Warming is what enables and enhances life and is therefore something to be welcomed, not something to be feared.

Ron Smith can be heard weekdays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., on 1090 WBAL-AM and WBAL.com. His column appears Wednesdays in The Baltimore Sun.

Lawrence Solomon

December 14, 2008

A debate over whether the science of climate change is ‘settled’ turned into an unsettling exchange.

It was a global warming debate hosted by a pillar of the American establishment and my opponent was a respected scientist representing one of the most authoritative organizations in the field. I was there to dispute the conventional wisdom that the science is settled on climate.

No sooner did the debate start than I felt as if I had stumbled onto a set for Alice in Wonderland.

“I really detest phrases like the science is settled,” asserted Dr. Jay Gulledge, a climate specialist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in his opening statement. “To characterize myself and the Pew Center as viewing the science as settled is a bit of a red herring.”

What an odd way for Jay to begin a debate, I thought (Jay and I were on a first-name basis). The only ones who claim that the science is settled are Al Gore and those who side with him — not the sceptics. Is Jay saying he detests the arguments made by those on his side of the debate?

But Jay’s comments were stranger still to anyone who knows the Pew Center. Like just everyone else on his side of the debate — from the world governments meeting this week at Poznan, Poland to the authors of the Ontario Climate Change Action Plan — the Pew Center paints the science as settled by claiming that an overwhelming number of scientists are overwhelmingly in agreement on the need for dramatic action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the exception being scientists in the pay of industry.

The debate was hosted by the National Chamber Foundation, a wing of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which every year selects and promotes 10 “Books That Drive the Debate.” Earlier this year the foundation gave this honour to my book, The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution and fraud, and those who are too fearful to do so. At my suggestion, the National Chamber Foundation decided to arrange a formal debate with someone who believed that the science is settled on climate change. It asked the Pew Center to participate and it agreed.

Jay’s opening statement continued his line of attack, which was that I was employing red herrings and straw men, leading to confusions in the debate on climate change. “For instance, a claimed link between hurricane activity and global warming,” he went on. “There’s never been any statement of consensus on this. It’s widely acknowledged within the media and within the scientific community that that is a very active area of debate within science.”

How odd, I again thought. When Kevin Trenberth of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change held a press conference in 2004 to link hurricane activity and global warming, it made headlines around the world. The Reuters headline was typical: “Global warming effects faster than feared — experts.” The news reports then and since linking hurricane activity and global warming said nothing about this issue being “a very active area of debate.”

But Jay is wrong about more than the existence of a widespread public debate here — he has it backwards as concerns the science. There actually was a consensus on the relationship between hurricane activity and global warming. This consensus appeared in the IPCC’s own reports, and was expressed by its own chief expert, Chris Landsea, who protested the 2004 press conference.

“Where is the science, the refereed publications, that substantiate these pronouncements?” an exasperated Landsea wrote to top IPCC officials following the press conference. “What studies are being alluded to that have shown a connection between observed warming trends on the Earth and long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity? As far as I know, there are none … the evidence just is not there with hurricanes, no matter how much it is trumped up for the media and the public.”

But Jay had more Alice-in-Wonderland oddities, or straw men, to announce.

“No one has claimed that anthropogenic global warming is melting ice in the Antarctic,” he asserted. What can he possibly be thinking of, I wondered? Most see the melting of Antarctica as one of the greatest potential climate change threats to the planet, and who hasn’t seen the dramatic footage of Antarctic ice shelves breaking off from the continent?

But the biggest straw man in my book, Jay claimed, involves my book’s “unstated” focus on the claims that global warming could lead to catastrophes. “There’s a doomsday case that he’s tearing down,” Jay complained, as if the doomsayer case was some side issue that was not worth discussing.

There is nothing “unstated” about the doomsayer case in The Deniers. My book explicitly and entirely focuses on the doomsayer case — it has been the fear of catastrophe, not the fear of a mild warming, that has spawned environmental protests around the world, that has led world governments to hammer out the Kyoto Protocol, that forced businesses to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to reinvent the economy, that caused citizens to pay more for their heating fuel, electricity and gasoline.

Jay’s positions flabbergasted me and others too, as evidenced by a question from the audience. “We’re making decisions now based on a catastrophe, both in government and also in businesses. So when I’m hearing somebody on the side of global warming saying, well the science isn’t settled, that’s kind of unsettling,” the questioner began.

“We’re firing people, now. We’re laying off people because we’ve got to make new products and we have to retool to make greener products. Don’t you think it’s pretty doggone important for people to understand that it isn’t settled?” Jay’s response was other-worldly, as if the climate change policies that he and others advocated had no consequences. “Since we haven’t implemented any policies regarding climate change or limiting carbon emissions nothing that’s happening now is the result of those policies,” he demurred.

During the debate, I came to realize that Jay, like most everyone else, has been taken in. The press and public believe that there is a consensus on climate change for only one reason — the widely repeated claim that 2500 scientists associated with the IPCC’s reports had endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions.

When I explained that the 2500 were merely peer reviewers and not endorsers of the final report — and that the Secretariat of the IPCC had confirmed this to me — Jay nevertheless claimed I was wrong, insisting that the 2500 were authors of the various chapters in the report.

To my amazement, he even claimed that he personally had counted the authors, and that people in the audience could confirm this by going to the IPCC’s website and counting them for themselves.

“Very factual and very verifiable,” he insisted. I invite readers to verify by visiting the IPCC website. They will see that the IPCC itself describes the 2500 as reviewers. Moreover, almost none of the 2500 reviewed the entire study and a large number of reviewers disagreed with the science that they did review.

Jay was wrong, in fact, on every single point of fact that he raised to contradict my book. The claim that sticks with me most, however, involves his treatment of geophysicst Syun Akasofu, the discoverer of the causes of the storms of the aurora borealis, twice named one of the “1000 Most Cited Scientists,” and founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, an organization created in 1998 with the mission, as Science magazine put it, “to plumb the consequences of climate change in the Far North.”

Jay refused to accept Akasofu’s climate change credentials, despite his extensive work in the area, claiming that Akasofu’s reputation rests on being a space physicist.

How audacious, to dismiss so easily so storied a scientist as Dr. Akasofu, who for two decades had led one of the world’s most important Arctic research centres. And yet, how necessary, if the case that the science is settled is to be sustained.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

For some references on the debate, see here.

Sources:

The IPCC Can’t Count

The IPCC 4th Assessment Report is coming out: A picture of climate change – the current state of understanding