Commentary by James H. Shott
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.
Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.
Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.
Among the group’s findings are:
• Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.
• Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
• The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.
• CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.
• No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:
• Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.
• Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)
• There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.
• No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.
These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.
As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”
In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”
The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”
Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.
Cross-posted from Observations
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The Washington Navy Yard shooting highlights many serious problems
Before the gun smoke had dispersed at the Washington Navy Yard, the agenda media reacted with a kind of grim glee that an “assault weapon” – an AR-15 – had been used yet again in a mass shooting.
The New York Daily News devoted its entire front page to the story with the headline, “Same Gun Different Slay,” in letters so big they took up two-thirds of the page. Inside the publication was an anti-gun column by Mike Lupica titled, “AR-15 is the rifle for the ‘sport’ of hunting humans.”
MSNBC even used an animation of the shooting, featuring an AR-15, while CNN's Piers Morgan said, "He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle, another rifle, and a handgun.”
The Washington Post asked how the suspected shooter, Aaron Alexis, acquired “his weapons (an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol were reportedly found on him).”
Some of this results from the drive to get news out first. But hardly all of it.
And then, of course, the politicians got into the act.
“A gunman appeared with an assault rifle, and several other weapons,” said Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin on the Senate floor.
California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein released a statement which read, “This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time.”
Even the hallowed halls of academia were not immune to the ranting of the unhinged. (surprise, surprise, surprise!!)
“#NavyYardShooting The blood is on the hands of the #NRA,” tweeted David Guth, an associate professor of Journalism at the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism. “Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters,” he continued. “Shame on you. May God damn you.”
To its credit, the University suspended Guth. With such as this in journalism classrooms, it’s no wonder there is bias in the news media.
“The contents of Guth’s tweet were repugnant and in no way represent the views or opinions of the University of Kansas,” an official statement said. Whether UK works like the federal government, and keeps suspended misbehavers on the payroll, it didn’t say.
Well, Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Durbin, Prof. Guth, et al, we certainly have had enough of these incidents. But we’ve also had enough of you folks and your mis-informing cronies in the media allowing your emotions and your prejudices to commandeer your thought process and produce automatic responses that are so grossly wrong.
The shooter had only his own recently and legally acquired shotgun when he started the rampage, and is thought to have taken a handgun from one of his security officer victims along the way. No “assault rifle” was involved.
Moving from the thoughtless responses of these demagogues to the somber realities and serious issues that exist, we need to recognize that the most serious of these is clearly not a need for more gun control.
Washington, DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country and the Navy Yard prohibits weapons being carried by anyone except for military police and other law enforcement and security personnel; not even trained military personnel who may carry weapons when they are deployed can carry a weapon on the Yard.
Alexis, who worked for a civilian contractor at the Navy Yard, had a history of arrests for weapons violations and mental health issues. Except for him, the military and civilian personnel assigned to and working at the Navy Yard obeyed the rules and didn’t bring guns to the Yard. Stronger gun laws would have made no difference at all.
Like gun-free schools without armed security, gun-free military bases have become shooting galleries for people who do not obey gun control laws and want to do bad things.
All kinds of screw-ups took place here, among which are:
**Lousy security checks – Given his criminal and mental health past, how was Alexis able to legally obtain the shotgun and a security clearance?
**Dumb rules about weapons on military facilities – On both Ft. Hood and the Navy Yard, had military personnel carried weapons, the shooters might never have planned those attacks, but they almost certainly would have done far less damage.
**The base security staff was undermanned when the shooting started, and had to close the gates to the base so they could respond to the emergency, and that interfered with civilian police trying to get on the base to help.
**Media knee-jerk misinformation appears to have emanated from an anti-gun mentality that leads to a shoot first, get details later process.
At least the media didn’t try to associate Alexis with TEA Party organizations or the Republican Party, as has often occurred in the past; they would have been wrong about that, too. A friend of Aaron Alexis, Michael Ritrovato, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he was “more of a liberal type, not conservative like I am.”
Let’s hold our breath to see how the mediadistort the coming debate over raising the debt ceiling yet again and a possible government shutdown.
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