UNSkeptical UNScience's Manufactured Myths.

Cartoonist Cook: SS

The Cartoonist and PhD student  (in cognitive psychology) John Cook runs a site misleadingly called Skeptical Science (SS). We prefer to call it UNSkeptical UNScience. It lacks both elements - 

Scepticism  and Science.

Cook and his conniving cronies have posted a page of, what they call:

Global Warming and Climate Change Myths

Continuing in Cook's Comical Credentials the page is a catastrophe of chaotic confusion and contrived conclusions.

Let's examine a few of the flawed feeble failed fallouts.

UNSkeptical UNScience:

"Climate's changed before" Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing. 

This links to a page which erroneously states:

Greenhouse gasses – mainly CO2, but also methane – were involved in most of the climate changes in Earth’s past. When they were reduced, the global climate became colder. When they were increased, the global climate became warmer. When CO2 levels jumped rapidly, the global warming that resulted was highly disruptive and sometimes caused mass extinctions. Humans today are emitting prodigious quantities of CO2, at a rate faster than even the most destructive climate changes in earth's past.

A recent peer reviewed paper (An Estimate of The Centennial Variability of Global Temperatures: Philip J. Lloyd) rebuts this:

This suggests that while some portion of the temperature change observed in the 20th century was probably caused by greenhouse gases, there is a strong likelihood that the major portion was due to natural variations. 

Let's examine the parts of SS' flawed fabrication:

Greenhouse gasses – mainly CO2, but also methane – were involved in most of the climate changes in Earth’s past.

In fact, as agreed by ALL climate scientists, in the Earth's past, temperature increased before rise in atmospheric CO2,  (LINK: Jo Nova)

But, in 1999 it became clear that carbon dioxide rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003, we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.

When CO2 levels jumped rapidly, the global warming that resulted was highly disruptive

As can be seen, temperature JUMPED before rise in CO2.

Humans today are emitting prodigious quantities of CO2, at a rate faster than even the most destructive climate changes in earth's past.

That may and probably is true, however, for ~20 years atmospheric CO2 has risen unabated whilst global temperatures have plateaued. 

More debunking of Cartoonist Cook's Global Warming and Climate Change Myths to follow.

APS members and the Climate Change Statement

The shrill alarmists claim that all the scientific bodies agree with the AGW hoax. This is known, in logic, as an appeal to authority.

When is appeal to authority abused:

1. Is the cited authority really an expert in the appropriate field?2. Is this the kind of question that an expert can settle?

The scientific bodies are basically unions, their members are the experts in the field. Most of these "scientific unions" have issued statements without consulting their members.

As an example the American Physical Society (APS), issued a statement in 2007 that began:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. 

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

There were many members who disagreed and expressed their disagreement with that statement.

The APS is about to issue a revised statement, again without the support of many of its members.

Read some of their disparaging comments on Judith Curry's blog here:

APS members comment on climate change statement

Meanwhile some senior APS members have issued a statement:

To Whom It May Concern 

What follows is a letter that we sent to the current President of the American Physical Society (APS) with a copy to members of the Society’s Presidential-Line Officers.

Because of the serious issues pertaining to the integrity of APS — one of the world’s premier scientific societies (with upwards of 50,000 members) — we have decided to make the letter public.

 SIGNATORIES (2 June 2015)—

• Roger Cohen  - Fellow, American Physical Society 
• Laurence I. Gould - Past Chair (2004) New England Section of the American Physical Society 
• William Happer - Cyrus Fogg Professor of Physics, Emeritus Princeton University May 8, 2015 

Samuel Aronson
President,
American Physical Society
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740-3844

Dear Dr. Aronson,

As three members of the American Physical Society, we are writing on behalf of the nearly 300 other members who signed our 2009 and 2010 petitions to the APS taking strong exception to the 2007 Statement on Climate Change. Those petitions called for an objective assessment of the underlying science, leading to a more scientifically defensible Statement.

We wish to call attention to important issues relating to the processes that led to the 2007 Statement and the Draft 2015 Statement. In developing both the 2007 Statement and the current Draft, the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) failed to follow traditional APS Bylaws. In particular, regarding APS statements the Bylaws state: “The Chair of POPA has the responsibility for ensuring that the statement draft incorporates appropriate APS member expertise” (XVI.B.2), and, “Anyone, particularly POPA and Council members, who can reasonably be perceived to have a conflict of interest, shall recuse themselves from all aspects of the Statement process, including drafting, commentary, and voting. The President of the APS shall be the final arbiter of potential conflicts of interest” (XVI.E). Examples of relevant process exceptions include:

1. APS email records show that the original 2007 Statement was rewritten “on the fly, over lunch” by a small group of firebrands who arbitrarily inserted themselves in the process, thereby overruling the prerogatives of POPA and the APS Council. Thus, in "reaffirming" the 2007 Statement, the current Draft is referring to one that was produced by a bogus process and led to much ridicule of the APS, especially for its use of the infamous “incontrovertible.” In an attempt to disown this public relations fiasco, in 2012 APS (presumably POPA) quietly introduced a new paragraph break in the 2007 Statement so as to alter the original intent of the passage. Thus, the description of the Statement presented today as “Adopted by Council on November 18, 2007” is untrue and a violation of APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct (http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/02_2.cfm, paragraph two). 
2. In the process of developing a Draft 2015 Statement, APS failed to consult any of at least 300 members, including Nobel Laureates, NAS members, and many Fellows, who were deeply dissatisfied with the 2007 Statement. Thus POPA deliberately failed to seek and incorporate interested and appropriate member input, as required in the Bylaws.  
3. In the process of developing a Draft 2015 Statement, POPA failed to take into account the findings of the broad-based workshop, chaired by Steve Koonin, which faithfully and expertly executed its charge to assess the state of the science in global warming. The Koonin committee did the APS proud, conducting the only serious review of global warming science by a major American scientific society that we know of, while simultaneously realizing the objectives of our 2009 and 2010 petitions. Having thus advanced the interests of physics and the Society, POPA subsequently ignored the Koonin workshop and its product. POPA once again returned to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as its sole source of authority on the science, thereby abrogating its responsibility to the membership to properly conduct independent scientific assessments. 
4. The Chair of the POPA committee has failed to identify serious conflicts of interests by its members. For example, a few years ago, one member of POPA, representing himself as an agent of a politically active nongovernmental organization, demanded that a Cleveland-area television station fire its meteorologist for expressing some doubt about IPCC statements on global warming. On every scientific point, the meteorologist was right, and we are glad to say that he retained his job. 

These process exceptions by POPA cloud the legitimacy, objectivity, and content of the current Draft. In considering this, along with the strong basis for continuing investigations of unresolved key scientific questions in the global warming issue, it is clear that the best course of APS action is simply to archive the 2007 Statement without further attempts to replace it. We ask that you take this step in the interests of the Society and its membership.

We trust that you will share this letter with the APS Council. This is a very serious matter, and we intend to pursue it. We look forward to your response. Please respond to Roger Cohen, rogerwcohen@gmail.com; P.O. Box 2042, Durango, CO 81302.

Sincerely,

Roger W. Cohen

Laurence I. Gould

William Happer

c. Presidential-Line Officers:

Malcolm R. Beasley, Past President
Laura Greene, Vice President
Homer Neal, President Elect