Absent the facts, climate alarmists call dibs on victimhood
Because denialists (climate alarmists) insist on peddling their snake-oil to lead readers astray, as TE of Limassol has done (Let’s look at some real climate change science, Sunday Mail, October 13), let’s set the record straight about the real story of the flawed greenhouse gas hypothesis.
But first a brief detour to look at denialists’ own attitude toward their child prophet Greta, an attitude that speaks solely to their own pathology.
TE fits the bill, when he equates criticism of Greta to an “ad hominem attack,” an emotive phrase. It attests to deniers’ own weakness to cope with any criticism, which in their paranoia they perceive as aggression (hence the word ‘attack’). It’s like calling dibs on victimhood. By playing the victim card (again, a plea to emotionality) they hope to shut down the conversation and get their way.
Then again, alarmists do seem to possess superpowers – the ability to read minds and detect whether words are spoken in ill-feeling or not. Maybe they’ve taken their cue from Greta’s parents who reliably inform us their daughter can ‘see’ carbon dioxide with the naked eye. Which would take superpowers since carbon dioxide is invisible.
It’s likewise droll that deniers will say insane things like “teenagers are wiser than adults.” Hard to figure out if they actually believe these things that they say, or if it’s because they feel they have to rally behind Greta come hell or high water, no matter how silly they sound. Either way, it’s an internal issue they will have to resolve, and we wish them the best of luck.
Here’s the deal: child or not, if you’re a public figure and you put yourself out there, you are fair game for criticism.
Now back to TE. Although the concept of the burden of proof is pretty straightforward, TE still cannot grasp it – or maybe pretends not to.
Once again: the assertion in the climate debate belongs to the denialists/alarmists. It is they who posit anthropogenic climate warming or AGW. So they are the ones who need to prove their assertion, not the other way around. And the data – i.e. reality – shows they have failed miserably. The spotlight is still on them.
Next, TE’s junk science. He clings to the long-debunked work of his idol, Arrhenius, the ‘grandfather’ of the greenhouse gas theory, a hypothesis that has led to decades of superstition.
In 1901 Swedish physicist Knut Angstrom demonstrated the flaws in Arrhenius’ work, such as that Arrhenius failed to account for water vapour as a greenhouse gas.
Angstrom, and later others, showed that the CO2 molecule, due to its physical properties, traps/absorbs only certain wavelengths of energy (heat) reflected off the Earth’s surface. Meaning that at some point increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere makes very little difference to how much additional heat is trapped.
Forty years later, the United States Department of Agriculture confirmed Angstrom’s experiment. In its ‘Yearbook of Agriculture, 1941’ the USDA stated: “Much has been written about varying amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a possible cause of glacial periods. The theory received a fatal blow when it was realised that carbon dioxide is very selective as to the wave lengths of radiant energy it will absorb, filtering out only such waves as even very minute quantities of water vapour dispose of anyway.”
And in 1971, the top climatologists at NCAR and NASA reported that a runaway greenhouse effect is not possible, because the CO2 absorption spectra is nearly saturated already. See Rasool, S.I., and S.H. Schneider, 1971: ‘Atmospheric carbon dioxide and aerosols: Effects of large increases on global climate.’
Inconvenient findings to deniers.
Moving along. Predictably, TE wheels out the darling of alarmists, NASA’s James Hansen, and asserts that Hansen’s assessments have been proved ‘correct’. It’s a patently fraudulent statement. Sadly, TE is not above spreading outright disinformation. In reality Hansen got his predictions wrong – on temperature, precipitation etc. If anything, Hansen is the poster child for alarmists getting it wrong.
In 1988, Hansen told the Lansing State Journal: “If we do nothing to cut down on pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, temperatures in 2050 will be 6 to 7 degrees higher than they are today. Washington DC, for instance, would go from its current 35 days a year over 90 degrees to 85 days a year.”
He got his forecast exactly backwards. The number of 90F days in the DC area peaked in 1911 and have been declining ever since.
Hansen also proclaimed that “the level of the ocean will rise anywhere from one to six feet.” Woefully wrong again based on data trends, but isn’t it interesting that he gave his ‘scientific’ forecast a nice wide berth of one to six feet? Just to be on the safe side.
TE will saturate this forum with information, thinking that quantity means quality. The problem being, however, that all the info he posts is from alarmist research – an echo chamber.
An echo chamber that won’t tell you, for instance, about a June 2019 research paper published by Finnish scientists J. Kauppinen and P. Malmi concluding that human activity can account for no more than a 0.01C rise in global temperatures.
Published in Nature, the paper explains how the IPCC’s analysis of global temperatures suffers from at least one glaring error – namely, the failure to account for “influences of low cloud cover” on global temperatures.
In the same month these findings were further supported by researchers at Kobe University in Japan, in a paper titled ‘Intensified East Asian Winter Monsoon during the last Geomagnetic Reversal Transition‘.
Which it to say, the science on climate is not settled. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Living as they do in a bubble, dismissing anything not jiving with their own dogma as ‘funded by Big Oil’ or as ‘conspiracy theory’, denialists can’t see how they themselves have devolved into tinfoil hatters.
They can’t see that it is alarmist research which is funded to the tune of billions of dollars, precisely to produce ‘research’ on the understanding it conforms to the narrative of man-made climate change. The inherent conflict of interest here is gargantuan. Paid shills indeed. But TE and his fellow deniers have this weird belief where, because warmist research is taxpayer-funded, somehow that makes the research unimpeachable. Their self-deception is off the scale.
A great deal more could be said: the ‘Climate Gate’ email scandal in 2009, exposing the fraud and data tampering by alarmist climate scientists; or the fact that between the mid 1940s and the mid-1970s there occurred significant cooling, at a time of soaring CO2 emissions.
Again, don’t be fooled by fearmongering over an imaginary ‘climate crisis’, or by phony appeals to authority or emotionality. Rely on logic, proof and data.
D.A. Larnaca
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