Climate Change? What Climate Change?

  '97% Of Climate Scientists Agree' Is 100% Wrong Alex Epstein Contributor     If you've ever expressed the least bit of skepticism about environmentalist calls for making the vast majority of fossil fuel use illegal, you've probably heard the smug response: “97% of climate scientists agree with climate change” — which always carries the implication: Who are you to challenge them? The answer is: you are a thinking, independent individual--and you don’t go by polls, let alone second-hand accounts of polls; you go by facts, logic and explanation. Here are two questions to ask anyone who pulls the 97% trick. 1. What exactly do the climate scientists agree on? Usually, the person will have a very vague answer like "climate change is real." Which raises the question: What is that supposed to mean? That climate changes? That we have some impact? That we have a large impact? That we have a catastrophically large impact? That we have such a catas...

  Is the 97% claim fallacious? Activists, politicians and advocates who are passionate about global warming often use the claim that “97% of scientists” support their views to end debates. A typical example is a tweet from President Obama in May of 2014: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Leaving aside the quality of this claim as a statement of fact, isn’t this a logical fallacy when used as a counter-argument? Below, I offer an example of a typical exchange I’ve had with global warming advocates. (As with all such examples, I should point out in advance that it is a bit of a straw man.) I then make my case for why the argument is a fallacy and of what type. Please let me know what you think of my assessment as an expert in logical fallacies. ----- ME: I’m skeptical of the claims I keep hearing from environmental activists about global warming. I mean, how can we possibly know what the temperature will b...

  Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change University of Houston Energy Fellows (Photo by Fabrice BEAUCHENE) The claim that there is a 97% consensus among scientists that humans are the cause of global warming is widely made in climate change literature and by political figures. It has been heavily publicized, often in the form of pie charts, as illustrated by this figure from the Consensus Project . (Graph by The Consensus Project) The 97% figure has been disputed and vigorously defended, with emotional arguments and counterarguments published in a number of papers. Although the degree of consensus is only one of several arguments for anthropogenic climate change – the statements of professional societies and evidence presented in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are others – there is data to suggest that support is lower. In this post, I atte...

Let’s Talk About The ‘97% Consensus’ On Global Warming Michael Bastasch Contributor March 05, 2017 6:21 AM ET We’ve heard it time and time again: “97 percent of scientists agree global warming is real and man-made.” Question one aspect of the global warming “consensus” and politicians and activists immediately whip out the figure. “You disagree with 97 percent of scientists?” The 97 percent figure was often used by the Obama administration to bolster its case for phasing out fossil fuels, and President Barack Obama himself used the figure to undercut his critics. NASA even cites studies purporting to show near-unanimous agreement on the issue. More recently, Newsweek included this figure in an article fretting about “climate deniers” in state legislatures trying to influence science curriculum. The author couldn’t resist noting that “97% of scientists who actively study Earth’s climate say it is changing because of human activity.” Liberals use ...

  Transition to Nowhere California’s switch to a primarily solar and wind-powered grid is a dead end. Mark P. Mills October 20, 2021 California Infrastructure and energy The leaders of California and China have at least one thing in common: fear of blackouts. In late September, following widespread and economically debilitating losses of power, China’s vice premier Han Zheng ordered the country’s energy companies to ensure sufficient supplies before winter “at all costs” and added, ominously, that blackouts “won’t be tolerated.” A month earlier, California governor Gavin Newsom issued emergency orders to procure more natural gas-fired electrical capacity to avoid blackouts. And in a possible sign of more such moves to come, earlier in the summer, California’s electric grid operator “ stole ” electricity that Arizona uti...

  Shock, horror! COP26 has an electric car problem 22 October 2021, 3:35am If absurdity were a source of renewable energy, the COP26 climate change summit might achieve its aim of saving the planet. Yesterday Mr S brought news that local lawyers are set to join rail engineers, transport operators, catering staff and refuse collectors in timing industrial action to coincide with next week’s eco-jamboree. Now Steerpike learns of a fresh crisis afflicting the UN conference: there’s not enough places to power the luxury electric cars needed to ferry delegates around the city. Some 240 Jaguar Land Rover vehicles including its I-PACE SUVs will be laid on by the UK government to move the 120 visiting heads of state and their entourages between their hotels and the SEC venue. Unfortunately a lack of charging points means the fleet now has to be re-charged by cooking oil-powered generators. A COP26 spokesperson has confirmed that the substitute generators may have to run on ...

  As Its Global Warming Narrative Unravels, The IPCC Is In Damage Control Mode James Taylor IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri is pictured next to an unidentified Arab official during a ... [+] Struggling to keep a discredited global warming crisis afloat, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair Raj Pachauri this week denied the well-documented plateau in temperatures during the past 15-plus years. Pachauri’s denialism contradicted his own admission earlier this year that there has been a 17-year plateau in global temperatures. The IPCC is in full damage-control mode after it leaked advance copies of an upcoming Summary for Policymakers to what it assumed would be friendly journalists. The journalists, however, quickly realized the IPCC Summary for Policymakers contained several embarrassing walk-backs from alarmist statements in prior IPCC reports. Two of the most embarrassing aspects of the Su...

  Climate Change Theory: What's Wrong with it? By William Lippincott I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy. For the record, climate does vary -- think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscien...

  The Cynical Plot behind Global Warming Hysteria By John Eidson How do you take over the world?  You find a way to terrify the world's children to believe they will  die  if they don't listen to you. In what amounts to nothing less than intentional child abuse, the Left has sought since the 1980s to terrify the world's children about global warming.  This cabal of socialist elites have preyed, like hyenas, upon the fragile emotions of easily frightened — and easily indoctrinated — young people, the most famous being Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was severely traumatized when she was a little girl by climate hysteria.  She is still deeply traumatized, as evidenced by the pained look on her face at her emotional speech ...

  A Strategic Plan For The West By David Archibald Entities without a plan tend to drift; they tend to get overtaken by events instead of shaping events in their favor.  The United States shouldn’t be drifting because it has a plan.  The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 requires a National Security Strategy to be issued annually.  The latest dates from February 2015.  Reading it won’t make you any wiser though.  It is a mess of pabulum, evinced by the fact that one chapter is entitled “Confront Climate Change.”  Not “Win Against Climate Change” or “We Will Run Away From Climate Change,” but simply confront something without having a result. The Quadrennial Defense Review is a more sensible document even though ...