Meet Four Notable Scientists Who Disagree with the "Settled Science" of Manmade Climate Change

Remember the furor over the existence of WMD's in Saddam Hussein's Iraq?  George W. Bush asserted, based on reports that actually hailed back to his predecessor, that Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that these made him an imminent threat.  This assertion was much of the justification for the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent decade-long war.  When the weapons were not found, the media and many Americans cried foul, arguing that Bush had deliberately misled the country in order to pursue his own personal  and political agenda.  Eventually the evidence for or against the WMD's became more of a central focus than the war itself or the dissolution of the Hussein government.

Now, let ME be clear--this post (and the one to follow) are not referendums on the war or whether we should have invaded Iraq.  But considering the political hay that the left made over the specific term, "weapons of mass destruction" I find it odd that Secretary of State John Kerry has recycled exactly this same argument as a justification for the Obama Administration's newest push for climate-change legislation via executive fiat and agency regulation. 

Speaking in Jakarta, Indonesia, on February 16, Kerry described climate change as a threat to the way of life of all people, and  a "fearsome weapon of mass destruction," while denouncing skeptics as "shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues."  "The bottom line is this: it is the same thing with climate change. In a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction."  Obama had previously dismissed critics of his administration's policies regarding man-made climate change saying that his administration does not have time to attend meetings of the "flat earth society."

The Obama Administration's new line is that man-made climate change is a "settled science" and that the time has come for Obama to use his now infamous phone and pen to save us from Armageddon via draconian new regulations.  With that in mind, I want to introduce to you four prominent climate-change skeptics from the scientific community.  Although the Obama Administration dismisses all those who disagree about man-made climate change as "shoddy" scientists, these four prove that there is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community about the "science" of global warming.  You can use their resumes to defend yourself in your next argument with liberal friends and co-workers.  And if you plan events for a local chapter of the "Flat Earth Society" you might consider inviting one of these men or women to speak to your group. :)

JUDITH CURRY:  A professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
 

Because of her impressive resume, Curry was called to testify about man-made climate change before the U.S. House of Representatives last summer.  According to NPR.org, her message that day on Capitol Hill was, in essence, that while humans may be contributing to climate change, we simply don't know how the climate will behave in the coming decades, so there may be no point in trying to reduce emissions.  In her interview with NPR she explained that there is no way to predict how the climate will look in a few decades, and she is more concerned with the immediate economic impacts of climate change legislation on her six nieces and nephews who deserve an opportunity to build a sound and prosperous economic  future. 
Read Judith Curry's interview on NPR.org.

DR. WILLIAM HAPPER:  Award-winning Princeton Professor of Physics, former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, author of over 200 published scientific papers, and  a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. 
Happer was reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore’s scientific views.   In 2009 he testified before Congress about CO2 levels:

“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million - ppm) – that’s unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it’s been quite higher than that."  

“Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” Happer explained. Happer also noted that “the number of [skeptical scientists] with the courage to speak out is growing” and he warned “children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.”

“I keep hearing about the ‘pollutant CO2,’ or about ‘poisoning the atmosphere’ with CO2, or about minimizing our ‘carbon footprint.’  This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: ‘But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning."  (Emphasis added.)

Most recently, in January of 2014, in an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Happer spoke out against the notion being popularized by the media that the extremely cold winter weather conditions and polar vortex were the result of man-made climate change saying, "Polar vortices have been around forever. They have almost nothing to do with more CO2 in the atmosphere.”  

LARRY BELL:  professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where he founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and heads the graduate program in space architecture.

Bell is author of Climate of Corruption, Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax and a regular contributor to Forbes.   He has written extensively about Agenda 21 and the threat that legislation aimed at stopping global warming and man-made climate change pose to U.S. sovereignty, American freedom and our way of life. 

In his article in Forbes entitled, Confessions of a Climate-Crisis Skeptic, Bell addresses the realities of climate variations and then adds:

This picture is far different from the really scary “climate crisis” reports we constantly receive in the media. And this circumstance isn’t the first time prominent news producers, supported by “scientific experts”, have warned about impending doom. An October 7, 1912 Los Angeles Times feature proclaimed “Fifth Ice Age is on the Way: Human Race Will Have to Fight for Existence in Cold”. By August 9, 1923 the situation had become desperate, prompting the Chicago Tribune to declare “Scientists Say Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada”. Then, after a short period when the world appeared to be warming again, the March 1, 1975 cover of Science News magazine depicted New York City being swallowed by a glacier. The New York Times followed with a headline story “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable”. The prestigious National Academy of Sciences agreed: global cooling was a real threat.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Professor Emeritus at MIT.  Lindzen won numerous awards in the 1970’s for disproving an accepted theory about how heat moves around the Earth’s atmosphere.  Accepted to the National Academy of Sciences before he was forty years old, he moved to MIT in the 1980’s. 

In the 1990’s he was invited to join the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), where he helped to author a report in 1995 on climate change and co-authored chapter 7 of the 2001 report on climate change. 

Lindzen left the IPCC after he claims the panel rewrote his work, and while he does not dispute that people have some impact on the climate, he says that impact is very small.  

In part, Lindzen takes exception to the  IPCC's entire process. Though the panel claims that more than 2,500 respected scientists and policy makers work together to produce its climate change assessments,  Lindzen argues that less than a tenth of these ‘experts’ actually hold qualifications in climatology.  Instead, most are educated in political and social sciences.  The panel that edits and approves the reports are appointed by the United Nations; more than half are actually UN officials, and they rewrite the Summary for Policymakers  to reflect  political and social agendas rather than scientific realities. 

 "It's not 2,500 people offering their consensus, I participated in that. Each person who is an author writes one or two pages in conjunction with someone else. They travel around the world several times a year for several years to write it and the summary for policymakers has the input of a handful of scientists, but ultimately, it is written by representatives of governments, and of environmental organizations, each pushing their own agendas."

In an interview with The Weekly Standard for a piece entitled "What Catastrophe?" published in January 2014, Lindzen adds that the IPCC reports contains significant doubts from various participants about the scope and consequences of man-made climate change, but these are scrubbed from the Summary which "rips out doubts to a large extent. .  .  . [Furthermore], government representatives have the final say on the summary." 

And the reason for all of the editing and scrubbing and monolithic messaging of climate change as the threat to mankind?  Lindzen says it all comes down to money.

After World War II, the nation was grateful to the scientific community for their contributions to ending the war, and funding for many projects was flowing. After Vietnam, however, "it was recognized that gratitude only went so far,” Lindzen says, “and fear was going to be a much greater motivator. And so that’s when people began thinking about .  .  . how to perpetuate fear that would motivate the support of science.”  As the scientific community began looking for scary-sounding projects that would drive funding, they settled on climate change. 

What is scary is that all scientists who are openly skeptical of man-made climate change and its apocalyptic threat to the future of mankind are demonized as inept fools who deny that the earth is round, while proponents like Al Gore, whose most notable achievements are having served eight years as Vice President and having invented the internet (wait, I think there might be some disagreement about that second one!) win the Nobel Prize. 

And so we are embarking on a new war, justified by rumors of weapons of mass destruction.  But this time, the enemy to be vanquished is American prosperity.  More on that tomorrow.