Skeptics From Around The Globe

Germany

Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

For decades Germans were misinformed and successfully "brought up" in an eco-ideological way. This was possible, because the green movement has conquered the editorial staffs of the leading German media, like e.g. public service television, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, die ZEIT, and others. In addition, eco-ideologists also have taken over the important academic key positions. Professor Hans-Joachim Schnellhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) and the Chancellor's climate adviser, is one good example. He is propagating a "great transformation" and the removal of democratic rules in order to achieve this goal. --

Climate protection has nothing to do with genuine nature conservation (as e.g. protection of rain forests and fish populations in the oceans). The prescribed means for reducing CO2 are effectless and meaningless . --

Skeptics From Around The Globe

Germany







Klaus-Eckard Puls

 Vice President of the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE)









"Only a few people in the climate discussion are aware that CO2 is not the main driver, and that most of the warming is assigned to the dubious amplification mechanism. CO2 by itself only has a warming potential of 1.1°C per atmospheric concentration doubling. It is only through the theoretical assumption of the up-to-now poorly understood amplification mechanism that the warming gets catapulted by the IPCC to 2.0-4.5°C per CO2 doubling, mainly through water vapour and clouds.”

Skeptics From Around The Globe

South Africa









Dr Kelvin Kemm

is a Technology Strategy Consultant and runs his own company, Stratek, based in Pretoria, South Africa. He studied at Natal University where he gained a PhD in nuclear physics before working as a scientist at the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa. He subsequently moved into the field of the management of technology, and became involved in a variety of projects in many industrial sectors, giving him wide exposure to the technological and industrial base of society. In 1994, Dr Kemm was appointed to the International Board of Advisors of the Washington DC-based environment and technology lobby group, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In 1996, he became the first person from Africa to be appointed to the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), and was appointed to the ESEF Board in 1999. He is also a member of the British Institute of Nuclear Engineers. Dr Kemm has written a public interest book on technology entitled "Techtrak – A Winding Path of South African Development". He also has his own weekly newspaper column in Engineering News, and has appeared widely on radio and TV.

"It really amazes me – and also does not surprise me – when, in climate change discussions, completely illogical conclusions take hold in the public mind. It is amazing that basic logic escapes the public or is twisted without anyone seeming to care. On the other hand, it does not surprise me because there are elements in society which want false conclusions to be fed to the public so that they will toe the line of the propagators."

Skeptics From Around the Globe

GERMANY

 
"For decades billions of US dollars of taxpayer money have been pumped into climate research without getting any detectable progress. Climate experts still have not even succeeded in delivering the physical proof of the claimed “greenhouse effect”.

The meteorological fact is that at no point on earth and at no time of the year do either the daily or yearly air temperature and CO2 concentrations causally correlate. There is no correlation! Also a radical reduction of ‘greenhouse gases’ in Europe, or ”achieving a ‘CO2-free Europe’, would have absolutely no impact on the weather over the course of the annual seasons.”

Dr. Wolfgang Thüne

"Notable Quotes"

What is happening with regards to the climate hypothesis today is that profound and far-reaching conclusions are being based on pure suspicions. That’s religion, and not science. There are also many other well-founded hypotheses on climate dynamics that allow completely other conclusions to be drawn. But strangely, they are being massively suppressed – simply because they don’t accommodate the political concept of rescuing the planet. That’s propaganda, manipulation, suppression of the freedom of expression and demagoguery. As ‘an educated citizen of former communist East Germany’, I’m experiencing grand déjà-vu.” 

Prof. Knut Löschke

The global warming guerrillas

Published Feb 6 2010

FROM- UK Spectator

Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

So used are greens to sycophancy in the television studios that when they occasionally encounter even slightly hard questions they are outraged. Peter Sissons of the BBC: ‘I pointed out to [Caroline Lucas of the Green party] that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions... Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC — the BBC! — should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.’


Of course, reporters have been going native for decades. The difference is that they cannot now get away with it. When acid rain was all the rage in the 1980s, I was a science editor and I relayed all sorts of cataclysmic predictions from scientists and greens about its effect on forests. (Stern magazine said in 1984 that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying and that experts believed all — all! — its conifers would be gone by 1990.) Today, we know that these predictions were wildly wrong and that far from dying out, forests in Germany, Sweden and North America actually thrived during that decade. I should have been more sceptical.

Yet, this time round, despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?

In a word, the internet. The Climate Consensus may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to cameras and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm. The main blog used by the Consensus, realclimate.org, exemplifies this problem, because it was set up by a PR company and is run by an employee of Nasa, who ties himself in knots trying to show that he does the blog in his spare time. It is also characterised by a tone of weary condescension and censoring of dissent that you do not find on most sceptic sites.


Contrast it with wattsupwiththat.com, a site founded in November 2006 by a former Californian television weather forecaster named Anthony Watts. Dedicated at first to getting people to photograph weather stations to discover how poorly sited many of them are, the site has metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians.

Or take a book published last month called The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, a rattling good detective story and a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing. Montford has never worked in the media. He is an accountant and science publisher who works from his home in Milnathort in Kinrossshire. He runs a blog called ‘Bishop Hill’.

Montford came to the subject in 2005 when he read a blog post by another amateur non-journalist named Tim Worstall, a scandium dealer who lives in Portugal (I am not making this up), who was in turn passing on news of another blogger’s work: Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant and keen squash player in Toronto. Because he keeps catching errors in their work, McIntyre is the sceptic the climate scientists most love to hate, even though he is scrupulously polite and insists that the followers on his website, climateaudit.org, are too. ‘A certain person’, the Climategate scientists called him in their emails, or ‘Mr Mc “I’m not entirely there in the head”’, or ‘the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science’.

Notice that all of these sceptic bloggers are self-employed businessmen. Their strengths are networks and feedback: mistakes get quickly corrected; new leads are opened up; expertise is shared; links are made. Prejudice and ignorance abound too, but the good blogs get rewarded with scoops and guest essays so they tap into rich seams of knowledge. When Montford first ran his now classic post called ‘Caspar and the Jesus paper’, about the shenanigans the IPCC had to resort to in order to get a flawed paper rebutting McIntyre into the peer-reviewed literature in time to use it in their report, word of mouth caused interest in his website to explode.


Mcintyre’s forensic dissection of the Consensus papers puts cosy scientific peer review to shame. Digging deep into data and computer programs, he has found myriad mistakes in both the statistical technique and the data used to make the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show that recent temperatures were unprecedented in level and rate of change. But he has also uncovered a mistake in data that conveniently prevented 1934 being warmer than 1998 in America; the splicing together of the records of two Antarctic weather stations as if they were one; the smoothing of sea-level rise in a way that conveniently concealed its recent deceleration; the use of a Swedish lake sediment series upside down so it showed recent warming instead of cooling; and most recently the reliance of an attempt to resuscitate the hockey stick on a ludicrously small sub-sample of just 12 Siberian larch trees. That last one came about when Montford spotted that a scientist who had been refusing McIntyre access to data for ten years had published in a journal with a strict policy of archiving data. Montford tipped off McIntyre, who asked the journal to force the scientist to release the data, which he eventually did.

‘It seems inconceivable to the commentariat,’ says Andrew Orlowski of the online newspaper of the IT industry, the Register, ‘that scientists have prejudices too, and that the publication process (peer review) is not some Kitemark of quality but is vulnerable to being hijacked.’ Chip Knappenberger, who blogs at masterresource.org, believes the rise of blogs as repositories of scientific knowledge will continue if the scientific literature becomes guarded and exclusive. ‘I can only anticipate this as throwing the state of science and the quest for scientific understanding into disarray.’

When Climategate broke, the mainstream media, like knights facing archers at Crécy, mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.

For those few mainstream journalists who had always been sceptical — like Christopher Booker — it must be a strange experience, like being relieved after living behind enemy lines. Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions. But it was the bloggers who did the hard work.

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More than a rock collector

FROM-Pajamas Media

Climategate: What We Should Be Doing About Natural Climate Change


Just because AGW is a fraud doesn't mean that we should ignore the natural and cyclical changes in the Earth's temperature.

by Harrison Schmitt

Earth’s climate changes are extraordinarily complex phenomena. They represent decadal, to millennial, to epochal changes in weather patterns as nature continuously attempts to compensate for solar heating imbalances in and between the atmosphere and oceans.

Nature’s attempts to restore heat balance take place under the complicating influences of the Earth’s inclined daily rotation, movement and release of heat stored in the oceans, aerosol production by many natural processes, water and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and periodically changing orbital position and orientation relative to the sun. In spite of all these variables and more, the Earth currently controls its temperature in a very narrow range as shown by satellite measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere (troposphere) since 1979.

Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660. Multi-decade intervals of more rapid warming and cooling have occurred during this current, centuries-long general warming trend as they have for over 10,000 years since the last major ice age.

Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, glaciers had advanced over valley farmlands cultivated as those same glaciers receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period (about 800-1300). Since the last major ice age, decades long periods of warming and cooling have been superposed on longer cycles, the longest repeating about every 1500 years.

All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.

In contrast to these facts, climate change assumptions and computer modeling, rather than real-world observations, underpin the government’s efforts to restrict American liberties and confiscate trillions of dollars of American income in the name of “doing something” about climate change. The scientific rationale behind this proposed massive intrusion into American life requires more than a “consensus” of like-minded climate analysts and bureaucrats. It needs to be right.

Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.

Still, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other government agencies persist in over-stepping their regulatory authority to jam climate related regulations into our lives and economy at the expense of liberty, jobs, and incomes. Federal control of energy production and use, advocated by special “climate” interests, will have a vanishingly small effect on slowing three and a half centuries of very slow, erratic, but natural global warming.

A long-term federal and commercial agenda to gather power and profit in the name of “environment” at the expense of liberty has no constitutional foundation. The Tenth Amendment leaves to the states all governance responsibility for environment as no direct or indirect mention of it exists in the Constitution. Prudent protection of local environments by the states and the people does have justification in the Ninth Amendment’s protection of natural rights, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as formalized in the Declaration of Independence. The Feds need to butt out!

So, what should the people do now about climate, if anything? We must prepare to adapt to inevitable change, however unpredictable it may seem. We can recognize that production and use of our own domestic oil, gas, coal, and nuclear resources buys us time to meet these challenges and, at the same time, preserve our liberty.

We can develop far better surface and space observational techniques and use them consistently over decades to better understand the science of our Earth. On political time scales, we can quit taking actions with unknown and unintended consequences. We can choose sustained research and development of energy alternatives, those with clear paths to commercialization, rather than continue tax dollar subsidies and loan guarantees for premature or flawed introduction of politically motivated concepts. We can provide investment and business environments that will advance new sources of energy, particularly through reduction of personal and business income tax rates.

Basically, instead of being ideologically greedy and ignoring good science and economics, we can start being wise and truly concerned about our children, and their children, and the society in which they will live.

Harrison Schmitt is a a former senator from New Mexico and a geologist. He walked on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17.

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Climatology expert threatened for climate change views

When I initially started investigating global warming, what drew my attention more than any single issue was the absolute vileness of the "believers" towards their opponents. It was and remains one of the most despicable events in the history of science. Someday probably many years from now, some of the skeptics who have stood by the truth in the face of absolute unfounded attempts at personal destruction by their so called peers will be seen as truly courageous men of not only science but of humanity. Their persecutors if remembered at all have shamed themselves and will be remembered with utter contempt. I sincerely believe this to be true. Timothy Ball is a very courageous and honorable man whom all who love truth should admire. IMO

FROM-Toronto Sun

By MICHAEL COREN,

Recently I interviewed professor Tim Ball on my TV show. Ball is a highly qualified and experienced academic with an expertise in historical climatology who rejects most of the current hysteria around climate change and global warming.

He is a modest, gentle man who, in spite of his enormous work in the field and the chairing of inquiries and commissions into environmental causes, is now libelled, slandered, abused and threatened for his opinions.

“If people knew just how deep and dark this conspiracy is — yes, conspiracy — they’d be amazed,” he explains. “More and more academics are standing up to refute climate-change theories, but it’s still dangerous to do so. It can mean the end of a career, the targeting of someone by well-organized fanatics.”

I rather doubted this man who is arguably Canada’s leading scientific opponent of climate-change fundamentalism until the e-mails poured in after his television appearance. People wrote that he was in the pay of big oil, was a simple high-school geography teacher, was insane and worse. In fact, he is a university academic with impressive graduate degrees and doctorates and, unlike so many global warming advocates, is not in the pay of anybody.

Because he took some of his degrees under a university department of geography, an Internet mythology has developed around him and people who cannot spell let alone define scientific concepts try to silence him whenever he speaks.

“I’ve rather got used to it by now,” he says. “At first it was shocking that a climatologist with different ideas was treated like a Holocaust denier. Now I just move on and speak the truth.”

Such aggression has become typical of climate-change fanatics. When they lose arguments or are exposed as frauds, they attack their critics’ reputations or, in the case of the UN climate chief last week, shout that opponents should have their faces rubbed in carcinogenic material. It’s a grander, better financed version of pushing someone off a stage and is as crass and nasty as any anti-Communist witch-hunt.

Usually I wouldn’t reveal this sort of information, but in this case it’s necessary. We flew professor Ball to Toronto from Victoria for our interview because he could not afford the flight. The money for the economy fare was donated by two friends of our program with no connections to the climate-change debate and there was no fee for professor Ball. In other words, this man alleged to be in the pay of millionaires could not find anyone to subsidize even an entirely legitimate domestic flight for a major interview seen by 300,000 people!

“The believers are on increasingly thin ice — which is ironic because 400 years ago, the ice on London’s River Thames was three-feet thick!” he explains. “There has always been and always will be climate change, but it has very little to do with human activity and has nothing at all to do with pollution of course. We’re being lied to and the lies started 40 years ago.”

And professor Ball continues to speak out, no matter what the cost. More e-mails condemning him? Yes indeed. They’re being written right now.
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"Notable Quotes"

" Our atmosphere, with its infinite degree of freedom, is able to maintain its global average infrared absorption at an optimal level. In technical terms, this “greenhouse constant” is the total infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere, and its theoretical value is 1.87. Despite the 30 per cent increase of CO2 in the last 61 years, this value has not changed. The atmosphere is not increasing its absorption power as was predicted by the IPCC. "

source

Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi

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"Notable Quotes"

" The truth is, climate science uses computer models like a drunk uses a lamppost, not for illumination but for support. Even AGW supporters agree that if the only evidence for global warming were computer models, then skepticism would be entirely justified. But, while models are most definitely a sore point in the global warming debate, they are not the central point. It is the science itself that is uncompelling. Neither current scientific knowledge nor historical data prove the theory of anthropogenic global warming as put forth by the IPCC. If anything, new data and new studies reveal that current climate change dogma has got it very wrong. That is why I remain a global warming skeptic. "

source

Doug L.Hoffman

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Elitist scientific media meets real world genius

I find this excerpt from the New Scientist article telling. A journalist is taken aback that a man of tremendous intelligence isn't buying into this journalist obvious faith in anthropogenic global warming. I often wonder what the exchanges must be like between Rutan and Richard Branson on the subject since they work so closely on projects but are diametrically opposed on the issue. If there is a heirarchy of the AGW movement Branson would be near the top whereas Rutan is a passionate skeptic.


Excerpts from "Burt Rutan: The maverick of Mojave"


I whip out my list of questions, but before I get to the first, Rutan blindsides me. "Which magazine are you from again?" I tell him. "OK, well, I won't talk to Scientific American," he says, "They improperly covered man-made global warming. They drink Kool-Aid instead of doing research. They parrot stuff from the IPCC and Al Gore." I'm taken aback but curiosity gets the better of me so I ask him what he means. For the next 30 minutes he launches into an impassioned diatribe. He believes claims of catastrophic global warming are nothing but scare-mongering and are a product of "the greatest scientific fraud ever". At first I think this is some sort of joke but he's totally serious and at times gets quite angry.

And yet, if you didn't know his views, you'd think Rutan was an arch environmentalist. In 1989 his house featured in Popular Science magazine, billed as the ultimate energy-efficient dwelling, and for years he drove an electric car. "People thought I was a liberal and a tree-hugger, but I'm not. It's not because I have any concern about saving the planet, or peak oil. It's about neat technology."...

...Over the next few days Rutan sends me numerous emails supporting his argument about a climate change conspiracy. I am far from convinced, but find myself thinking there's something beguiling about such passionate persistence - perhaps this is exactly what makes him such a maverick genius.




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The "lord of the sceptics"

Climategate gives lord of the sceptics plenty of ammunition

FROM-Sydney Morning Herald

The visit to Australia this week of Lord Christopher Monckton - the world's most effective global warming sceptic - couldn't have been better timed. Hot on the heels of the "Climategate" email leak, which called into question the "tricks" used to sex up the case for the war against global warming, have come back-to-back revelations tarnishing the reputation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change....

Read entire article with a video interview of Lord Monckton here

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Ohio geologists go rogue

From- Helliogenic Climate Change

The Ohio Section of the American Institute of Professional Geologists does hereby oppose House Bill H.R. 2454, the Markey-Waxman “cap & trade” bill. The bill is based on the premise that human production of CO2 gas is responsible for “global warming” and that “global warming poses a significant threat to the national security, economy, public health and welfare, and environment of the United States and other countries” (H.R. 2454, Title VII, Part A, Section 701). The Ohio Section of AIPG professes that there is no scientific evidence supporting this premise. We therefore reject the bill’s aforementioned, unsupported premise. Subsequently, we also reject the bill’s alarmist claims and unprecedented, economy-wide, government-control proposals. …

We are concerned that the bill relies primarily on reports by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC), to support its premise. Our concerns include IPCC reliance on unrepresentative ground-based temperature stations.4 We note an inability of ground-based data to agree with superior quality temperature values from weatherballoons and satellites.5 Of additional concern is the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report’s reliance on the work of Mann et al. (1998)6 in claiming 1998 the “warmest year, in at least a millennium.” The report’s claim, along with its prominently featured “hockey-stick” temperature graph, has since been discredited by the National Academy of Science (2006).7 We also have concern with IPCC dependence on unreliable climate computer-model simulations. …

Given the lack of evidence supporting the bill’s premise, we reject the claims of near-term increases in human-caused severe weather, fire, coastal flooding, drought, disease, mass animal extinctions, and displaced human populations (H.R. 2454, Title VII, Part A, Section 701). … We therefore oppose the bill because it will increase global pollution, by shifting American manufacturing to emerging countries such as China, India, and others. We also recognize grave economic consequences from the bill, which extend beyond the scope of this geologic-advisory position paper.

There is compelling evidence to support the position that human CO2 emissions do not cause climate-change. Existing data reveal that human change-agents are so small in the total climate force-field that they are negligible. We therefore advocate thoughtful evaluation based on the scientific method and oppose any hasty and drastic action.” “Position Statement: Markey-Waxman “Cap & Trade” House Bill H.R. 2454“ h/t Heartland Institute


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Penetrating the Smog: How the EPA and the Media Distort Climate Science

FROM-Big Journalism

by Rich Trzupek

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

Latest scientific advice” is, of course, code for “scientific consensus”, a phrase that has become all the rage. A funny thing this “consensus”; when it comes to global warming, or the new smog standard, or a host of other environmental topics, consensus: a) doesn’t matter, and b) doesn’t exist.

Jackson’s EPA wants to lower the smog standard for the fourth time since the agency was created. The original Clean Air Act set a standard of 120 parts per billion. It was lowered under the Clinton administration to 80 parts per billion and again, under President Bush, to 75 parts per billion. These Clinton and Bush reductions share a couple of common characteristics: EPA did not pick the lowest proposed number in either case, and the costs associated with each of these new standards played a role in the agency’s final decision. Where these two actions differed was in the reaction of the mainstream media. The Clinton-era reduction was hailed as an environmental triumph. The Bush-era reduction, notwithstanding the fact that it was more stringent than the Clinton-era standard, was decried as an environmental disaster.

The EPA’s sin under President Bush is that the agency did not pick an even lower number, like 70 or even 65 parts per billion. That’s the kind of number that the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) wanted to see, and it’s CASAC that provides the media’s basis for claiming that George W. Bush “ignored the latest scientific advice.” In a January 7 press release, USEPA cited CASAC prominently. So you might be wondering: what is CASAC, this purportedly “independent” advisory panel that speaks with the voice of “consensus”? Who are the scientists on this committee?

There are seven scientists on CASAC, four of whom have absolutely no qualifications, by either education or experience, to opine on the potential health effects of smog. The other three have spent their lives in academia, performing research – much of it publicly funded – designed to discover new and ever more horrendous ways that minute amounts of air pollutants can cause illness and death.

The three CASAC members who sport public health credentials are: Dr. Jonathan Samet, who has spent most of his career doing research, much of it publicly-funded, about second-hand smoke and who is an advisor to the American Lung Association, which, in turn is one of the biggest organizations to lobby for – no surprise – tighter smog standards; Dr. Helen Suh MacIntosh, whose credentials include a stint on the web as the answer lady at treehugger.com; and Dr. Joseph Brain, a Harvard professor who has spent his professional career studying the effects of minute amounts of things that we breathe and why they are bad for you.

Given the make-up of CASAC it is hardly surprising that they would recommend using the lowest proposed number. Had someone thrown out 50 parts per billion, or 20 parts per billion, there’s no doubt that such a number would have become the “latest scientific advice” instead. The reason CASAC didn’t pick 50 or 20 or some lower number is that EPA hasn’t proposed such a number – yet. Eventually, they will. The definition of “clean air” is an always moving, ever-shrinking target. This is known within the EPA as “job security”.

According to the EPA, the “scientific community, industry, public interest groups, the general public and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee” all get to play a role whenever the agency sets new standards. This is the way EPA approached the issue under President Bush, President Clinton and every president before them. But now, under President Obama, the agency has effectively handed that authority over to a group of seven scientists, four of whom know nothing about public health and three of whom have spent their careers wearing the kind of academic blinders that leave them unable to perform any sort of reasonable risk vs. reward analysis. It’s every bit as remarkable, and outrageous, as it would have been if President Bush had turned the process over to the American Petroleum Institute.

One of the biggest reasons that CASAC and groups like the American Lung Association want the new standard involves asthma. Many believe that alarming increases in childhood and other forms of asthma over the last thirty years are related to increasing rate of smog formation in big cities. Hang on. Did I say “increasing rates” of smog formation? Seems I had this darn graph flipped upside down. According to USEPA monitoring data, smog has been reduced by an average of twenty five per cent in big cities over the last thirty years. If we really want to help kids breathe better, perhaps the best solution is to raise the standard, not lower it.

And the consequences of all of this nonsense? It will be expensive, and you and your kids will pay the price down the road, long after Obama has left office. Which is, in a way, what makes this move so devilishly brilliant. The president has written yet another I.O.U., one that helps restore his “green” credibility (which was so damaged after the “Hopenhagen” fiasco), and the bill for implementing this utopian vision won’t come due until long after he returns to community organizing




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Skeptics From Around the Globe

ISRAEL


FROM-JC.com

Israeli scientist denies global warming

By Robyn Rosen,

A leading Israeli scientist has renounced the concept of man-made global warming at a lecture given to the British Technion Society, just days before world leaders meet to discuss ways to halt it.

Professor Giora Shaviv, professor of physics at the Technion, claimed that the accepted level of carbon dioxide in the air is wildly exaggerated.

Last week he gave the eighth Ron Arad lecture at the Royal College of Physicians, for the British Technion Society, which raises funds for Israel’s science university.

The lecture was given in the same week that leaked emails appeared to show leading scientists at University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit had manipulated data to exaggerate the impact of climate change.

Next week, 193 countries meet at the Copenhagen Conference to establish a global climate agreement for the period from 2012.

But Prof Shaviv said that though for years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has claimed that an increase in carbon dioxide has led to an increase in temperature, in fact, the reverse is correct.

He argued that the movement of the sun affects temperature, which influences the levels of carbon dioxide, and that these levels have risen and fallen for centuries, even before mankind.

He said: “CO2 is not responsible for heating the earth, the cause is the activity of the sun which we cannot control.

“However we are responsible for our environment on earth, for the future of our grandchildren, and therefore, we should all still act responsibly.”

The lecture was attended by Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up last week by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson to analyse global warming policies and its economic implications.

Dr Peiser, who was born in Haifa, said that too much money was being ploughed into climate change research and that politicians were stifling contentious research that opposed the commonly accepted views.

He said: “People talk about saving the world but no one crunches the figures. It has become an obsession and economic burden for many countries.

“There is a hysteria and exaggeration of the issue with people worrying that the end is nigh. People need to calm down. The reality is we haven’t got a clear idea what the climate is doing.

“Part of our agenda is that scientists like Professor Shaviv have to be allowed to research freely and without political pressure.”

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John L. Daly

FROM-Quadrant Online

by John Izzard

Yesterday I visited John L. Daly’s tiny office where he lived on the outskirts of Launceston. It is about the size of two telephone boxes. His wife, Amy, has kept is just as it was when John died in 2004. His computer, his files, the maps on the wall — his notes, letters, photographs and dairies. She has also kept alive his web-site which he was still updating at the time of his death.

Looking at his scientific work today gives an insight into why the people at the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were so annoyed with Daly’s work and why he was such a thorn in the side of their climate theories and research.

Daly was a pioneer in the questioning of global warming theory when the rest of the world was taking little interest in the issue. In the year the IPCC was formed under the shelter of the UN (1988), and a year before Margaret Thatcher gave the IPCC her blessing, Daly was writing a scathing book on what he called the myths and politics of the Co2 scare campaign.

Entitled The Greenhouse Trap— Why the greenhouse effect will not end life on earth., the book, published in 1989, clearly laid out what would be the crucial arguments later presented by the IPCC. To each and every argument Daly countered with his own arguments, questioning the “orthodox” science.

He was perhaps the first to point out and identify, in his book, what he called "The Armageddon Syndrome", "The False Prophets", "The Cult of Experts", "The Science of Non-Communication" and pounded away at "The Burden of Proof". His chapters on "How Nigh is the End" and "Spotty Sun, Pimply Earth" and "The Ice-Man Cometh" combine a sense of irony with surgically-precise scientific argument.

His charts and diagrams look eerily like those presented today. His predictions of dodgy computer modelling have a spooky ring to the present day questioning of modelling science, and indeed the notion of “self-fulfilling prophesy” that seem to be at the heart of present day scepticism of the IPCC’s modus operandi.

And what John Daly seemed to recognised back in 1989 was that it wasn’t the “almost 90% certain” part of the climate-change science that needed to be examined, questioned and rigorously debated, but the remaining 10% that was in doubt. That 10% of doubt is avoided like the plague, with climate scientists using every available device to stop research and debate. Spin, ridicule, lies, deceit, destruction of evidence, avoidance of oversight and character assassination are now clearly on the record for future historians to mull over.

Name any funding, by any government or academic institution, that is designed to examine the 10% of doubt.

John Daly was born in Bournemouth, UK in 1943. He followed his father’s occupation and joined the merchant navy as a radio officer in the Blue Funnel Line. He and his family migrated to Tasmania in 1980 where he eventually became a lecturer in economics at Launceston College. In a kinder age he would have been considered a ‘Renaissance Man’ being self-taught in a range of earth and climate sciences. No-one financed John L. Daly’s research. It all came out of his weekly wage.

Daly’s last great battle with the “science-is-settled coalition” was over a small line and arrow carved into a rock on the shoreline of the Isle of the Dead, at Port Arthur, Tasmania. It was placed there by the Antarctic explorer Captain James Clark Ross in 1841 to mark the Mean Sea Level in Tasmania.

The marking venture was approved, curiously, by the Governor of Tasmania at the time, Sir John Franklin. Franklin was later to become the Arctic explorer who died trying to find the Northwest Passage.

Daly’s research uncovered flaws in claims made by scientists that the Isle of the Dead base-line mark proved a rapid rise in sea levels. Daly showed this to be wrong. Scientists then tried to claim that Ross was marking the high tide level. Again Daly proved this to be wrong. The latest claim by climate scientists is that the Isle of the Dead is “Rising” up out of the sea, so the mark is misleading. Really!

After looking at the material that Amy still keeps - the nasty, snide letters and emails from IPCC members and other scientists, the evidence of the endless efforts to destroy his reputation - it seems ironic that the man the IPCC scientists so disliked, and tried to destroy, has now come back to haunt them. The comment by the Chief Scientist at CRU, Phil Jones, on learning that Daly was dead — “… in an odd way this is cheering news” — was not one of the great moments in scientific endeavor.

Daly’s life was perhaps best summed up by Professor Emeritus John Brignell of the University of Southampton who said at the time of his death in 2004:

No matter how long you live on this planet, the shock of sudden death never seems to lose its potency. One moment someone is a vital presence that you are inclined to take for granted, the next they are gone. Daly was the epitome of a new phenomenon of the post-scientific age, a lone scholar with all the traditions of meticulous attention to detail and truth that the word implies, with limited means upholding the principles of the scientific method in the face of adversaries with vast resources. He usually won, but the establishment media ensured that the world never got to hear of it. He was the eternal small boy gleefully pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.

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Skeptics From Around the Globe

FROM- US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

Scientist: Carbon Dioxide Doesn't Cause Global Warming

By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers

A noted geologist who coauthored the New York Times bestseller Sugar Busters has turned his attention to convincing Congress that carbon dioxide emissions are good for Earth and don't cause global warming. Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book Fire, Ice and Paradise in a bid to show senators working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels.

"I'm trying to kill the whole thing," he says. "We are tilting at windmills." He is meeting with several GOP lawmakers and has plans to meet with some Democrats later this week.

Much of the global warming debate has focused on reducing CO2 emissions because it is thought that the greenhouse gas produced mostly from fossil fuels is warming the planet. But Steward, who once believed CO2 caused global warming, is trying to fight that with a mountain of studies and scientific evidence that suggest CO2 is not the cause for warming. What's more, he says CO2 levels are so low that more, not less, is needed to sustain and expand plant growth.

Trying to debunk theories that higher CO2 levels cause warming, he cites studies that show CO2 levels following temperature spikes, prompting him to back other scientists who say that global warming is caused by solar activity.

In taking on lawmakers pushing for a cap-and-trade plan to deal with emissions, Steward tells Whispers that he's worried that the legislation will result in huge and unneeded taxes. Worse, if CO2 levels are cut, he warns, food production will slow because plants grown at higher CO2 levels make larger fruit and vegetables and also use less water. He also said that higher CO2 levels are not harmful to humans. As an example, he said that Earth's atmosphere currently has about 338 parts per million of CO2 and that in Navy subs, the danger level for carbon dioxide isn't reached until the air has 8,000 parts per million of CO2.

Steward is part of a nonprofit group called Plants Need CO2 that is funding pro-CO2 ads in two states represented by two key lawmakers involved in the energy debate: Montana's Sen. Max Baucus and New Mexico's Sen. Jeff Bingaman.



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THE WEATHERMEN

Art Horn

From Energy Tribune
Global Warming is Neither

We have heard the dire predictions from many different sources. Magazine articles have warned that in the coming years the Earth will warm rapidly. Television shows portray dramatic and alarming images of rising sea levels and animal extinctions. Network news programs report the latest scary forecasts from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These predictions are said to be undeniable and are believed by most climate scientists. Studies from major colleges and universities say burning of fossil fuels will produce “tipping points” and after reaching these points there will be no turning back the heat. Coastal cities will be flooded. Polar bears will drown or starve and will soon be gone. Deserts will spread and cover vast areas of farm land. Fires will burn out of control and the Amazon rainforest will burn to a crisp. Hurricanes will explode with unheard of devastation. Climate Armageddon will mean the end of our world as we know it.

This all sounds pretty scary. What if you’re in the business of energy? What effects will global warming have on the industry 5, 10, 15 to 20 years from now? The predictions of future climate are made by computer models. A computer model is made of line after line of computer code that is written in a way to attempt to simulate what the real climate of the Earth will be in the future. Information about what the real atmosphere is doing is fed to the model and the model attempts to predict the Earth’s climate. These predictions are saying that the Earth’s average temperature will rise 6 to 12 degrees by the year 2100. If we take an average of an 8 degree rise by 2100 we come up with an increase of 1 degree every 10 years for the next 90 years. But is this actually happening or going to happen? Let’s see how they have done so far.

The early results are not very good. In 2001 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that by 2009 the average temperature of the Earth would be one degree warmer than it was in 2001. That is a very big number. In fact it is equal to all the warming that has taken place over the last 100 years. But it did not happen. In fact the average temperature of the Earth in 2009 is about one-half degree cooler than it was in 2001. This is such a bad forecast that it is the equivalent of saying we will have a sunny day with highs in the 90s and instead we get a snowstorm with temperatures in the 20s. And yet these are the same forecasts that we are relying on to make future energy policy for entire nations.

Temperature readings from around the world tell us there has been no increase in temperature for 11 years. The average temperature of the Earth has been going down for the last 8 years. But you will never see this on any news program, read it in any newspaper or hear it on any radio show. There are five institutions that track global temperature: The Hadley Center in England, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, the Remote Sensing Systems of California, the University of Alabama at Huntsville and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). All of these centers show no warming for 11 years and all show the temperature falling for the last 8 years at varying degrees.

Many people read magazines and newspapers and listen to morning or evening news programs on television. These publications and news programs point to things like the melting of glaciers to prove global warming is real. The melting of glaciers is not new. It began over 250 years ago when the Earth began to warm from a deep freeze know as “The Little Ice Age.” During that time the Earth’s temperature bottomed out in the 1600s. Since then, the Earth has been warming.

What about the polar bears? I speak in many schools to young students about weather and climate. When I ask for all of those who believe the polar bears are drowning to raise their hand they all go up. This is unfortunate because the truth is far different. The 1960s population estimation of polar bears was 5,000. Today that number is 25,000. That does not sound like a creature going extinct. There are predictions about what will happen to polar bears but the reality is that they are thriving.

Rising sea level is one of the biggest threats from human-made global warming. Business man and carbon entrepreneur Al Gore predicts sea level will rise 20 feet by 2100. In reality sea level has been rising ever since the last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago. It is now rising about eight inches per century and there has been no acceleration of that rise. The reason there has been no acceleration of sea level rise is because the Arctic, Greenland and the Antarctic are not melting. We have only been able to measure the amount of ice at the top and bottom of the world for 30 years. Polar orbiting satellites were launched in 1979 to take pictures of the ice. Arctic ice is highly variable and in 2007, it hit a low volume. The ice has been increasing for the last 2 years and is 17 percent above what is was in 2007. The amount of ice in the Arctic and in Greenland is largely regulated by the 60-year water temperature cycle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The water was warming in the 1980s up until about 2005. The Atlantic is now beginning to show a cooling trend. There is more ice in Antarctica now than there was 30 years ago. Fifty years ago the average annual temperature at the South Pole was 49 degrees below zero. Today, the average annual temperature at the South Pole is 49 degrees below zero. All of the highest world record temperatures by continent were set before 1943 except for Antarctica where it reached 59 degrees on January 5, 1974.

So where does this leave us? When humans burn fossil fuels they create a small amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the air. Carbon dioxide levels have been rising for at least 150 years, yet there is no relationship in the long-term temperature record. The Earth’s temperature rose from about 1908 to 1943. Carbon dioxide levels were rising as well. Then from 1944 to 1977, the Earth’s temperature fell. Carbon dioxide levels continued to rise during this time. From 1978 to 1998 the temperature rose again while carbon dioxide levels continued to increase. Since that time, the temperature has not increased, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise. How can this be? According to global warming theory if the amount of carbon dioxide increases, so must the average global temperature.

The reason is because the theory is wrong. Studies of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica show that the temperature of the Earth rises first then carbon dioxide levels rise. The increase in carbon dioxide levels in the air is the result of warmer temperature, not the cause of it. The ice core record proves this. Al Gore had it backwards. This is not surprising since he is not a scientist. He is an activist business man selling a product.

As global temperature continues to fall over the next decade the world will wake up. This will eventually have deep and profound effects on energy markets. Hydrocarbon-based products will become more valuable. The value of alternative energy sources like wind, solar and bio fuels will collapse. In step with that collapse will be the demise of carbon credits originating from cap and trade policies. Just when this will happen depends of the severity of the next several winters. The depth of the cold of the coming winters will change the social and political climate in ways that only nature can orchestrate.


Art Horn is a meteorologist with 25 years of television experience with NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS. His company, The "Art" of Weather, presents programs about weather and climate to adults and students. He lives in Connecticut.


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"NO-the science is settled!"

FROM- Seacoast on line


A different take on global warming

Meteorologist contends it is a natural occurrence

By Patrick Cronin

HAMPTON— When you think global warming, you think warm weather, polar ices caps melting, rising sea levels and the possibility that Florida may one day be under water.

But nationally-known global warming lecturer and Ogunquit, Maine resident Tom Wysmuller gave a different perspective Thursday night when he presented a forum titled, "The Colder Side of Global Warming" as part of this month's "energy conversation."

Every month, the town's Energy Committee hosts a conversation with people who are experts in some aspect of the energy issue.

Wysmuller — a meteorologist — said global warming is part of the natural climate cycle.

"Global warming occurred on this planet and ended the Ice Age," Wysmuller said.

The theory, he said, is based on research by scientists Maurice Ewing and William Donn that was done 50 years ago. Recent data, he said, validates much of it.

Wysmuller said the cause of the natural cycle is the melting and freezing of the northern polar ice cap due to warm ocean currents flowing into the Arctic Ocean. As the waters continues to warm, more and more carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere.

"Carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean," Wysmuller said. "The warmer the ocean is, the less dissolved CO2 stays in."

Man-made carbon dioxide is accelerating the process, he said, but it is not the ultimate cause.

No amounts of "carbon management" and associated "green" efforts will stop the Arctic ice from melting.

The consequences of that, he said, is that the northern half of the United States will see colder winters. He said the process will generate "ocean-effect" rain and snow, similar to the lake-effect rain and snow that hits the upstate New York area.

Wysmuller said for the first time residents will see ocean-effect snow covering large areas of North America and Asia.

As that continues to occur, the snow will take longer to melt each year.

"What happens, is what you had last winter," Wysmuller said. "You had a very cold winter and spring that lasted late into June."

He says it will get worse each year until finally there is so much snow on the ground that it will not be able to melt.

"The accumulated snowfall increases reflecting light so temperatures will cool," said Wysmuller, eventually starting a new ice age.

Wysmuller said sea levels, however, will not rise.

"Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice on their edges," Wysmuller said. "They are doing that at accelerating pace, but its only the edges.

"The interior of Antarctica and Greenland are actually increasing ice," he said. "The more open water that appears around Greenland, the more ice that is dumped on center of the continent basically causing a balance."

So what can be done to stop another ice age from occurring? Wysmuller suggests building a dam to control warm ocean currents working their way into the Arctic.

"If we can build a dam, we can actually control the melt and refreezing of the ocean," he said. "This will basically enable us to manage our own climate."

If those in power don't do anything, Wysmuller said, the entire Arctic will eventually be open water.

"We will inundate North America and Asia with ice," Wysmuller said. "In the next century, a billion people who haven't even been born yet would die horrible deaths."

Wysmuller's presentation was an abbreviated version of one that he has been making all over the county.

In addition to being a meteorologist, Wysmuller served as the administrative director of Government Operations at Pratt & Whitney, where he wrote the code that solved the Polynomial Regression Algorithm now part of millions of Texas Instruments' calculators.

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Global warming theory received coolly

“I’m a green guy, it’s just that carbon dioxide has very little effect on our climate.”
FROM-Lawrence Journal-World & News

Sunspot link to climate patterns overshadowed by CO2 research

Most of us wouldn’t know by looking at it, but the sun has been in a record breaking mode lately for its lack of activity.

It’s a trend that Charlie Perry, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, follows closely. For the past few decades he has been charting the correlation between droughts and floods in the Midwest and the activity of the sun.


It is from that research that Perry predicts that the current lack of sun activity could lead to a cooler winter this year and drought conditions around 2043.

The sun goes through a cycle of activity about every 11 years. And right now, it is going through what is known as a solar minimum, a time of little activity with few sunspots, solar flares and sun quakes.

Through Aug. 31, 51 days had gone by with no signs of a sunspot. It was the fifth longest period for days without sunspots in 150 years. And, it came close to breaking a record set in 1913.

The sun is still on track to break a record for the fewest number of sunspotless days over a three-year period.

“It’s pretty hard to ignore the big orange ball in the sky that produces all the heat the earth has. And, very small fluctuations in that can make a big difference in our earth and climate,” Perry said.

Explaining sunspots

Sunspots are the dark areas of cooler temperatures in the sun’s photosphere. During times that the number of sunspots are at their highest, temperatures are hotter and the sun is releasing more energy.

First seen by Galileo, sunspots have been tracked by humans since the 1600s.

From 1640 to 1715, when few sunspots were reported, the northern hemisphere experienced what was known as the Little Ice Age. Londoners ice skated on the frozen Thames and people could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on ice.

Another period of few sunspots occurred in 1913.

“And, that is a time when old-timers talk about it being really cold,” Perry said.

Perry’s interest in weather began as a youth working on a farm in Douglas County during the drought of the 1950s.

“I would sit on the back of this old horse-drawn equipment and I would pray for rain and it would never come,” he said.

Perry, who has a background in physics, was a meteorologist for the Air Force and started working for the USGS in the 1970s as a hydrologist.

Since the early 1980s, Perry has been looking at patterns to see how the sun’s activity relates to droughts and floods in the Midwest.

What he knew was that the sun has an 11-year-cycle, there is a 22 year-cycle for magnetic polarity and major droughts in Kansas occur about every 20 years.

With that, Perry developed a thesis that when the sun is very active, it puts out more heat and causes fewer clouds. In turn, the oceans heat up and carry that warmth throughout the world, influencing local weather patterns.

The tricky part was figuring out the lag time between when the solar activity occurred and when the ocean currents reached North America to affect the weather system.

The 34-year link came by happenstance.

“I had (looked) at a three- or four-year lag. And I just happened to lay them down on a table, two sheets fairly far apart and looked at them and went ‘my gosh, it’s over a 30-year lag.’ And, I lined it up on the light table and it just fit like a glove,” he said. “I had a hard time explaining a three-year lag. So, how can I explain a 34-year lag? It’s been a slow process.”

An unpopular theory

Perry has traveled around speaking at conferences, gathering new ideas and information along the way. He says his work supports that of a renowned Danish physicist Henrick Svensmark.

Svensmark’s research shows that cosmic rays generate cloud formations. Therefore, during periods when solar activity is high, which slows down the number of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, there are fewer clouds and the earth warms. This phenomenon, Svensmark has argued, contributed to the warming of the planet in the past century.

Perry and Svensmark’s work runs counter to the mainstream belief that carbon dioxide is the major cause of climate change.

Perry — a man who has an electric wind generator and once tried to make a solar collector out of 10,000 beer cans in the 1970s — still attempts to conserve energy for the sake of conserving energy.

“I’m a green guy,” he said. “It’s just that carbon dioxide has very little effect on our climate.”

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change disagrees. The panel has stated that solar radiation plays a small part in the warming and cooling of the planet. But, the panel attributes a much greater contribution to the effect from the increase in carbon emissions over the past few decades.

When looking at fluctuations in the earth’s atmosphere, David Braaten, Kansas University professor of atmospheric science, said the largest factor has been the enormous increase in carbon dioxide versus the ebbs and flows of the sun’s 11-year cycle.

“Basically, we have a long record of little changes going on in the atmosphere and there is this other huge change of concentration of (carbon dioxide). To try to explain that it has nothing to do with (climate change) is crazy,” Braaten said.

Perry knows his and Svensmark’s theory isn’t a popular one.

Even the USGS’s official point of view is that carbon dioxide is unequivocally the cause of climate change. Because of that, much of the research Perry has done has been on his own time and without the aid of grants.

Despite the doubters, Perry said he is not giving up.

“I am having too much fun,” he said. “I am finding out something new that no one else is finding out.”

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