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August 27, 2009

Global Warming Blues



By Norman Rogers

I spent my working life as a computer engineer and entrepreneur. I have a long history of tilting at windmills having been involved in numerous causes and crusades during my life. So when my retirement started it was natural for me to look for something to get involved with. I picked global warming. Since I had completed the course work for a Ph.D. in physics I felt that I could deal with the technical side of global warming theory. As a computer expert I though that I would have insight to the giant computer models of the earth's climate that are central to global warming science.


I smelled a rat right from the beginning. As a 20-something activist I had a job as the Director of Operations for Zero Population Growth, Inc. ZPG was a 70's environmental organization that at one time had 25,000 members. I knew that professional environmentalism has an ethics problem. Exaggeration promotes contributions.


In my quest to investigate and understand global warming I joined the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. At scientific meetings, like an anthropologist, I cultivated native informants.


I learned that most scientists don't have a good grasp of the big picture because they are narrowly specialized and don't think about much outside of their immediate interests. The scientists that do have a grasp of the big picture can be divided into global warming advocates, skeptics and the majority of passive observers who play it safe by not taking a position. The global warming advocates have the upper hand and the most power. The skeptics, including quite a few excellent scientists, are marginalized and frankly persecuted. They are whistle blowers. A lot of skeptics are retired. The warmers can't cancel pensions, at least not yet. The most famous promoter of global warming, James Hansen, wants to put his opponents on trial for crimes against humanity.

Global warming scare stories are good for global warming science because the scare stories promote research funding. If it weren't for the scary predictions these scientists would be toiling in a poorly funded and obscure branch of academic science. As the distinguished climate scientist Richard Lindzen noted in an article, fear is more effective than gratitude for inducing financial support.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC is a branch of the United Nations and is very much under the control of climate doomsters. If climate doom were not impending the IPCC would not be necessary, thus it is a bureaucratic imperative that the IPCC predicts climate doom. The IPCC and Al Gore were jointly given the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The peace prize is given by politicians for political reasons and the 2007 recipients have shown themselves to be accomplished politicians. The history of the Nobel Peace Prize does not inspire confidence. Some of the recipients have been crackpots (Linus Pauling) and others fraudsters (Rigoberta Menchu). Gore seems to me to be a combination of both......read rest of article here

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1 comment:

  1. Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.

    That’s given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.

    Proposals to combat global warming are “crazy” and will “destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family’s annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year,” the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. “High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health,” the ads asserted.

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