The Road to Regulatory Tyranny I

By 2015, 33 percent of coal production was shut down. Some of that was due to the natural gas phenomenon quickly taking a huge market share and less was due to alternative energy. There is no question, however, that the calloused/special interest regulations implemented by the EPA have had a devastating impact. Source: Steamboattoday.com

During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 22, 2016, EPA head Gina McCarthy made a stunning admission. “I think sir, we see it (crippling the coal industry) as having had enormous benefit in showing sort of domestic leadership as well as garnering support around the country for the agreement we reached in Paris.” (Italics and underlining added for emphasis)

Surface mining of clean, low-sulphur coal in the western states is also at risk. Source: Wyomingmining.org

Rep David McKinley (R-WV) shot back that the nations are NOT following the US’s lead, but are greatly expanding their construction of coal-fired plants, especially China, India, and Indonesia. Several European nations can be thrown into the mix as well. Worse, McKinley challenged her with the fact that even if the US demolished every coal-fired power producer in America, it would only reduce the US CO2 emissions by 0.2%, which isn’t even measureable. McCarthy never challenged McKinley’s assertion that the destruction of the coal industry would have no effect on CO₂ emissions.

McKinley retorted, "If we terminate two-tenths, but the other nations of China and India are going to way more than make up for that loss, is it worth it to our economy to put all our people in our coal companies out of work for something that's not measurable? (Italics added) Unfazed, McCarthy shot back, "I'm really trying to keep my eye on my job, which is to try to reduce pollution."

It is obvious that McCarthy could care less about facts and people as long as the EPA becomes more powerful and that real or imagined pollution is stopped no matter who is hurt or destroyed.

Until recently, the US produced 40% or more from coal. In their war on coal, McCarthy and Obama have eliminated 33% of that already. The Washington Post reports a study that identifies nearly 50,000 jobs lost in the coal industry by 2015. The natural gas energy segment has added even more jobs and is likely responsible for the shutdown of the less profitable coal mines.

It is one thing for jobs to be lost through valid competition. It is quite another for the government to deliberately destroy them. Some coal workers have probably been able to find jobs in the natural gas industry, but many have not. These jobs require skills that are not naturally in a coal miners/processor’s experience. What are these former coal workers supposed to do? They have only minimal skills in other work areas and the federal retraining classes have proved pretty much worthless in most cases.

When a powerful agency has a heart of stone and a fixation on stopping something with little to no hard scientific evidence to back them up, tyranny results and people’s lives are destroyed.

NOAA's Climate Data does not support it's doomsday proclamations

Five-year averaged values of annual mean (1979-2015) global bulk (termed “midtropospheric” or “MT”) temperature as depicted by the average of 102 IPCC CMIP5 climate models (red), the average of 3 satellite datasets (green - UAH, RSS, NOAA) and 4 balloon datasets (blue, NOAA, UKMet, RICH, RAOBCORE).

On February 2, 2016 Dr. John Christy, a leading climate scientist, gave testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Committee. In it he presented peer-reviewed research on the datasets used by NOAA. These data don’t support the fear-laden pronouncements of global doom if we don’t stop carbon emissions. It is stunning. You can download the testimony here or by clicking on the graphic above.

Areal fraction of conterminous U.S. under very wet (blue) or very dry (red) conditions. NOAA/NCEI.

The figure above clearly shows the computer models are grossly over estimating past warming (and therefore future warming) compared to real-world satellite and balloon temperature measurements. The correlation between satellite and balloon data is highly significant with a correlation of 98 percent. The climate model projects a temperature increase of 0.214^oC while the much more accurate satellite and balloon measurements only project 0.091^oC and 0.079^oC respectively. That’s less than 1^oC per century, much less (2.5 times less) than NOAA and the UN IPCC claim. Simply stated, the economy breaking solutions offered by president Obama and other leaders around the world are based on false science.    

That’s not all. Christy’s testimony is too long to review in this blog, but two other things stand out. First, as the 2nd figure shows, there has been no significant change in drought and flooding in the past 100 years. If anything, the frequency of drought and floods has declined since the late 1950s when global warming was happening.
 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, food production has not been affected as is claimed by warming alarmists. Says Christy: “It is a simple matter to find documentation of the ever-rising production of grains. One wonders about the Federal Council on Environmental Quality’s allegation that there has been “harm to agriculture” from human-induced climate change because when viewing the total growth in production, which appears to be accelerating, one would assume no “harm” has been done during a period of rising greenhouse gases.” Enough said for now. Read the entire set of testimonies here. It is worth your time.

Michael Coffman

Warmer weather does not melt Arctic and Antarctic icecaps

“Glacier Girl,” a WWII P-38 fighter that was forced to land on the Greenland icecap in 1942. It and other planes were found in 1992, 50 years later and some 268 feet below the ice surface of Greenland. Greenland’s ice is growing, not shrinking. The team melted the ice around the plane as seen in the picture, disassembled, brought to the surface and reassembled. It now flies in airshows around the country. (see “Climate Fraud”) Louis A Sapienza, all rights reserved.

 

     Every claim that man-caused global warming will produce extreme weather events has been disproven. (See Hot Air). However, the claim that the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps are melting by global warming remain in question. Now, after years of claiming the icecaps are melting and causing rising sea levels, this claim has been disproven.

Recent research was combined by Dr. Willis Eschenbach is showing that over geologic time, the warmer it gets the more it snows, which eventually turns into ice.

50,000 years of temperature and ice accumulation in Greenland. Temperatures calculated from the ∂18O oxygen isotope levels and borehole temperatures in the GISP2 ice core in Greenland. Ice accumulation also from GISP2 ice core. After Willis Eschenbach “The Warmer the Icier” WUWT.

Notice that as the temperature increased after the last ice age, so did the rate of snowfall and ice accumulation. Much of that increase is likely due to the ocean ice melting allowing for more evaporation from the thawed ocean surface and therefore more moisture available for snow formation. Warmer air also holds more moisture than cold air.

     Now notice the inter-glacial period we are currently in starting some 10,000 years ago. Temperatures have been going down while precipitation is going up – exactly the opposite of what happened at the end of the last ice age. There are a number of reasons for this.

For example, think of the Great Lakes during the winter. As very cold air moves over relatively warm lakes it picks up tremendous amounts of moisture which dumps snow over the southern shores of the lakes. The colder the lakes the more it snows.

The point is that warming temperatures tend to reduce the rate of rain and snowfall, not the melting of ice and snow. Also, there is a growing body of research showing that industrial soot and dust causes the surface of the icecaps and glaciers to warm and melt in recent years, which in itself is a concern. Therefore, warming does not likely cause a significant increase icecap melting and rise in sea levels as we are told by our government.

To be sure, the warming temperatures from 1970-1996 probably did cause some melting of glaciers and the icecap of Greenland (the Arctic icecap cannot increase ocean levels as it is merely floating on water.) However, Greenland’s icecap is actually growing. Antarctica’s icecap is also growing except along the Antarctic Peninsula where the ocean is warmed by volcanic activity.

This is supported by real evidence.  In 1942 a squadron of B-17’s and P-38’s were forced to land on Greenland’s southern icecap. In 1992 the planes were found; 269 feet below the icecap surface. The icecap grew by that amount in 50 years! See the picture at top of blog.

Michael Coffman

This, that and a word of caution

    I hope you like our new web page. It gives us much more flexibility, especially with mobile devices. It also allows us to include former web sites that were stand-alone. We will be expanding it in the coming months.
     We all have been watching the country slide into anger and division. It is easy to become angry when you see our president dividing our country, forcing absurd policy using executive orders, and instituting foreign policy that guarantees global disorder and terrorism. Out of this has come a populist presidential candidate who is feeding on that anger. While he is right on many points, be careful you don't allow his vitriol to turn your anger into bitterness or hatred. Those are destructive emotions that blind a person to reality and positive solutions. Case in point: look at the insane actions of our president and other liberal progressives to see the results of those kinds of emotions. Let your anger motivate you to action and then ask yourself what each candidate actually plans to do and how would they pay for it. After all, "Make America Great Again" tells you no more than "Hope and Change" did eight years ago. And, we've all seen how the promise of hope and change has worked out.
     For those of you who have been praying for me and my stage IV colon cancer, it has been a rough year. I'll explain more in future posts, but for now I am doing much better and have energy to actually do things. I have a ways to go, so keep praying!
Michael Coffman

Hot Air II – The National Climate Assessment

Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D. July 15, 2014

“They'll find various ways, particularly in the House, to try to stop us from using the authority we have under the Clean Air Act. All I would say is that those have zero percent chance of working. We're committed to moving forward with those rules.” White House Counselor John Podesta,

May 6, 2014

DESPITE ALL THE HOT AIR emanating from the IPCC warning the earth is coming to an end unless we give up civilization, most nations are not paying much attention. Except one; the USA. President Obama and his hell-bent for destruction EPA hang onto every alarmist word uttered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the gospel from on high. The EPA is implementing draconian regulations (not legislation) to implement the IPCC’s self-ordained god-like wisdom. What is most disturbing, they are doing it without one shred of empirical scientific evidence. After dissecting the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Working Group’s reports issued in the fall of 2013 and in February this year, (See Hot Air I) it is obvious that the IPCC has moved from using pseudoscience in its Summary for Policy Makers to a highly politicized jumble of half-truths, hyperbole and outright lying. It should be no surprise then that President Obama’s 800+ page “National Climate Assessment” has only minimal connection to scientific fact. It dwells almost entirely in a swirling matrix of outright lies and propaganda, with only an occasional connection to reality.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) is so bad that sixteen world renowned climate scientists wrote a scathing letter criticizing it. The letter began by claiming: The National Climate Assessment…is a masterpiece of marketing that shows for the first time the full capabilities of the Obama Administration to spin a scientific topic as they see fit, without regard to the underlying facts. With hundreds of pages written by hundreds of captive scientists and marketing specialists, the administration presents their case for extreme climate alarm… The problem with their theory is very simple: It is NOT true. (Emphasis original)

These scientists were not the only ones highly critical of the NCA. John Coleman, cofounder of the Weather Channel letter was so scathing that it borders on being  unprintable: I am deeply disturbed to have to suffer through this total distortion of the data and agenda driven, destructive episode of bad science gone berserk…based on a theory that the increase in the atmosphere from the exhaust from the burning of fossil fuels leads to a dramatic increase in ‘the greenhouse effect’ causing temperatures to skyrocket uncontrollably. This theory has failed to verify and is obviously dead wrong. But the politically funded and agenda driven scientists who have built their careers on this theory and live well on the $2.6 billion dollars a year of Federal grants for global warming, climate change, research cling to this theory and bend the data spread to support the glorified claims in their reports and papers.” 

Dr. Roy Spencer agrees: the facts in the Assessment are “just simply made up,…there is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change.” Spencer was formerly Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. The NCA left no horrifying potential climate extreme unreported; rising temperatures, increasing numbers and severity of tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, droughts, disease, crop failures, killer heat waves, bitter winters, increased forest fires and much more. The Assessment stopped short of actually attributing extreme weather to human activity, but the

average reader would totally miss that technical nuance. “It is not a distant threat,” warns Obama’s Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren, “it is affecting the American people already.”  President Obama has even tweeted that “97% of scientists agree:#climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

White House counselor John Podesta said on May 6 that the report clearly shows that there “is no debate” about climate change. Deniers, he said, are “working themselves in a froth.” Yet, it’s the Obama administration that is apparently running scared, as most of the Assessment is disconnected from reality.

Disconnect from Reality

The National Climate Assessment is long on emotion and extremely short on hard facts to support the premise that the earth suffers from man-caused global warming. There is even less evidence than what was in the IPCC’s AR5 report that unless we do something to stop it, every horror imaginable will soon be upon us. First among the fairytale claims is Obama’s claim that 97 percent of all scientists agree mankind is causing global warming. The study at the root of the 97 percent claim originated with John Cook, an Australian blogger/warming activist and founder of the blog site “Skeptical Science.” Cook and his colleagues claimed that 97 percent of 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” In doing so, Cook excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the grounds that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus whatsoever. Those 8,000 papers were not included in Cook’s calculations of the 97 percent, yet he did include them as if they were part of the 97 percent.

Of the remaining 4,000 articles, any mention of man-caused warming was treated as if the authors believed man was responsible—including many articles written by skeptics. Most skeptics readily include a caveat that a small part of the measured warming might be caused by mankind, but not to the extent of what alarmists claim. Yet, Cook included them as if they actually endorsed man-caused global warming, when the paper overall provided strong evidence man was not causing global warming. Out of the 12,000 articles only 65 specifically stated man could cause the warming. Of that 65, 23 were written by skeptics providing the weak caveat that man could cause some warming, but not most of it. That left only 41 papers, or 0.3 percent, that explicitly said that man has caused most of the warming. The rest of the 4000 merely mentioned it in some way. Ironically, 78 papers specifically claimed that man had no significant impact!

This is not science. At best it is garbage pseudoscience. At worst, it is lie to support blatant propaganda. It worked. With the help of the activist media, the 97% was headlined around the world and most people believe it is a fact. This is a massive and totally dishonest disconnect from reality. Hot Air I discussed hard evidence that there has been no warming for nearly eighteen years now. The climate models show the temperature should have increased 0.5oF in the same time period. It has not, and the alarmist scientists have frantically tried to explain where the heat went. Their best explanation is that the heat somehow traveled to the deep ocean—without any plausible mechanism of how that could possibly happen. They have been spectacularly unsuccessful and they still remain disconnected from reality today.

In spite of this, the National Climate Assessment says the 18 year lack of warming is merely a “short-term” pause. The Assessment conveniently doesn’t mention the fact the most recent warming started in 1978 and ended in 1997; a 19 year period. Why does 19 years of warming prove man is causing the warming, but 17 years of no warming does not prove that there is no warming, but merely a pause? The assessment even gives the impression that temperatures are still rising; a blatant lie and another disconnect from reality. Then there are the claims in the Assessment that we are witnessing climate extremes today. Yet, climatologist Rodger

Pielke Jr. confirms that “the five-year period ending 2013 has seen 2 hurricane landfalls. That is a record low since 1900…There is no evidence to support more or more intense US hurricanes. The data actually suggests much the opposite.”Likewise for tornadoes. 2014 is shaping up to have a record low number of tornadoes. Pielke Jr. states “with some certainty is that the number of years with very large tornado losses has actually decreased. Consider that from 1950 to 1970 the U.S. saw 15 years with tornado damage in excess of $5 billion a year. From 1993 to 2013 there were only four such years, with three since 2008.” Once again, the Assessment is disconnected from reality. Then there is the proclaimed threat of coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. An interesting new paper in Global and Planetary Change 113: 11- 22 by S. Jevrejeva andcolleagues found that a renewed global sea level reconstruction using monthly mean sea level data collected by the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level showed “a linear trend of 1.9 ± 0.3 mm/yr. during the 20^th century" and "1.8 ± 0.5 mm/yr. for the period 1970- 2008.” Simply stated, the hyped claim that the rate sea level is accelerating due toice melt is false. Another disconnect from reality. Which brings the discussion to the alarming rhetoric in the NCA that we should expect increasing deaths in the elderly due to more extreme heat waves. This false claim is especially disturbing because the scientific literature is full of studies that clearly show that the population’s sensitivity to extreme heat is decreasing, resulting in lower rates of people dying during heat waves. One Harvard study found that the risk in the older population has dropped so far that it is now indistinguishable from the risk to the younger populations. The claim that the elderly face mounting deaths from heat waves is not only false, it is a deliberate lie.

The Assessment goes on to describe many more supposed sever consequences to global warming. Very few have any merit. Like those cited above, it is pure conjecture disconnected from reality, or just plain lies. It is astonishing that the Obama administration can claim their allegations are true, even become incensed  whenever anyone challenges them, and keep a straight face while doing so. The one thing that is becoming clear within the administration is their lying; be it Fast and Furious, threats against the AP and James Rosen of Fox News, Benghazi, the IRS, and of course, the real whopper, Obamacare. Climate change can now be added to the list.

Just What is Extreme?

There is a separate concern with the Assessment that is also deeply troubling. It treats every extreme weather   event (floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.) as climate change. It takes years of weather events to even begin to define climate or climate change. Weather is  made up of extremes as well as small year-to-year variations. A three foot snowfall in Minnesota may be unusual, but it’s not extreme. The same event in Southern Alabama would be extreme, but not indicative of climate change. Risk of exposure to an extreme weather event has more to do with where you live than any gradual increase in temperature.

The number of violent tornadoes (greater than F3) has declined since the first half of the 20th century, not increased as the NCA claims. Red line is the statistical trend line showing a decline of nearly 40 percent. Ironically, the 2014 tornado season is shaping up to be a record low season for violent tornadoes. Source: NOAA Mean sea level declines and increases since 1800s. Sea levels declined during the Little Ice Age, then increased at a steady rate following the peak of the Dalton Minimum in the 1850s. There has been no acceleration in rising sea levels in recent history that gives credence to the projection by the National Climate Assessment of an increase of 1 to 4 feet in this century. If anything there has been a slight decline. Source: After Jevrejeva, S., et. al. 2014. Trends and acceleration in global and regional sea levels since 1807. Global and Planetary Change 113: 11-22. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/20/new-study-finds-sea-levels-rising-only-7-inper- century-with-no-acceleration/4

We have become the “Chicken Little,” the “Sky is Falling,” society. This is not just a disconnect from reality, but a blatant attempt to equate “weather” with “climate change” in the minds of the American people. By doing so, every unusual weather event has become another headline example of extreme climate change. The federal government is already doing that. Hurricane Sandy is now accepted as an example of extreme weather resulting from climate change. In fact, Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it came ashore and would have been uneventful except the wind and super high tide combined into a super storm. It wasn’t even unique, as the same combination of weather and tide events had occurred several times in the 200 years preceding Sandy. There just weren’t as many  people living in the hard-hit areas a hundred years ago and the media at that time was not possessed by agenda-driven progressive group-think mentality.Finally, the question could be asked, “why even bother?”

Even if all carbon dioxide-emitting vehicles, power plants, and factories in the U.S. would be immediately and totally shutdown, it would only decrease global warming by a hypothetical and undetectable three-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit by 2100. Over half of the carbon emissions today come from China and India, which are opening a new CO2 and pollution-belching coal-fired power plant every week. It is absurd to imply, as the report does, that the Obama administration’s climate policies can provide any measurable protection from extreme weather events or have any long term reductions of earth’s temperature. To make that claim is not only a disconnect from reality, it is insane. The Assessment is clearly designed to make the uninformed reader believe that earth is doomed unless we take drastic action immediately. That is exactly what the report is designed to do—scare people senseless, with absolutely no facts to back up their outrageous claims. It is scaremongering at its worst. Fortunately, poll after poll shows that while most Americans still believe man is causing global warming, they place concern for climate change at the bottom of their list of priorities. That is why the NCA is so over the top alarmists. It is a blatant attempt to scare Americans into supporting Obama’s draconian effort to put carbon emissions under the  control of the federal government, and by doing so, control the economic engine of the U.S. In the process, the Assessment and the alarmist scientists who support it are making a mockery of real science that will harm credible scientific evidence on anything for decades to come. Until the Obama administration took over, scientists promoting man-caused warming at least tried to root their conclusions in plausibility. No more. With the IPCC’s AR5 Summary for Policy Makers and Obama’s National Climate Assessment, all pretense of credible science has been abandoned for outright lies and hyperbole.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been shown to be cooking the books on temperature data that it provides to the rest of the world. By using an algorithm allegedly “improving” the data, the algorithm actually reduced the U.S. temperature data in the first half of the twentieth century by 0.8oF and increased it slightly for the 21st century, giving a false result of so-called man-caused global warming. If lies and hyperbole was all there was to Obama’s National Climate Assessment, it would be frustrating, but not dangerous to the American people. However, the EPA is using those lies and pseudoscience as justification for slashing carbon emissions allegedly to minimize non-existent man-caused global warming. This sojourn by the EPA into never, never land will produce incalculable damage to the U.S. economy. Some analysts believe it is being done deliberately, while others believe it is the result of delusional ideology. It doesn’t matter which one is true, or whether it is a combination of both. The proposed regulations are extremely destructive and can very well put the U.S. into an economic death spiral from which would take years to recover, even if Republican conservatives capture the U.S. Senate in November. Things may become so dire that the only solution is to stop the EPA dead in its tracks, which would be impossible as long as Obama is still president. If the EPA does impose these draconian regulations, it is up to all of us to raise our voices with the truth about global warming and demand that the EPA rescind their onerous regulations that are not justified by facts, but by hot air with no connection to reality. Support those who are leading in this battle. Our very future is at stake.

About the Photo

About the Author

Dr. Coffman is President of Environmental Perspectives

Incorporated (epi-us.com) and CEO of Sovereignty International

(sovereignty.net) in Bangor Maine. He has had over 30 years of

university teaching, research and consulting experience in

forestry and environmental sciences. He produced the acclaimed

DVD Global Warming, Emerging Science (emergingscience.com).

His newest books, Plundered, How Progressive Ideology is

Destroying America and Radical Islam at the Door In the House

(AmericaPlundered.com) are receiving wide acclaim. He can be

reached at 207-945-9878 or mcoffman@epi-us.com

Hot Air—UN IPCC AR5

Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D. July 12, 2014

THE UNITED NATIONS INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) in their Assessment Report #5 (AR5) released in late 2013 and early 2014 glosses over the enormous discrepancies between results of individual climate model and between model results and actual earth temperatures.

Instead, the IPCC states: “The scenarios should be considered plausible and illustrative, and do not have probabilities attached to them.” In other words, accuracy (more appropriately, inaccuracy) of the climate models is not even considered. Instead, their use is dependent on the models plausibility to predict future warming and whether they can convince the unwashed masses that man-caused warming is real. One look at the widely contrary graphic model results should shatter any illusion that the IPCC’s  claim that it is 95 percent certain that man is causing global warming. The dismal failure of the models  was…, well, it was ignored completely. To understand how this is possible, readers need to understand how AR5’s Summaries for Policy Makers (SPM) were written.

The IPCC’s AR5 was released in three documents in late 2013 and early 2014. The lead authors of each of the three documents met with bureaucrats representing 195 governments to write each SPM. They hashed out every word in every line over period of about a week. The process is totally corrupt. Dr.Robert Stavins, one of the lead authors of Working Group II wrote a highly critical letter about the SPM process asserting: “the resulting document should probably be called the Summary by policymakers, rather than the Summary for Policymakers.” (Emphasis original) Stavins explained: it became clear that the only way the assembled government representatives would approve text for SPM.5.2 was essentially to remove all “controversial” text (that is, text that was uncomfortable for any one individual government), which meant deleting almost 75% of the text, including nearly all explications and examples under the bolded headings. In more than one instance, specific examples or sentences were removed at the will of only one or two countries, because under IPCC rules, the dissent of one country is sufficient to grind the entire approval process to a halt unless and until that country can be appeased.

In reality, then, government bureaucrats wrote the SPMs to fit the narratives of their governments, including that of the Obama administration. The SPM is not a science report, but an alarmist political report at best, and outright propaganda at worst. The SPM has been a political document since the first one was written in 1990. Yet, it is reported as a science document, which would be laughable if trillions of dollars and the lives of billions Only about 5 percent of the 90 climate models used by the IPCC even come close to earth’s actual temperature since the mid-1990s. Yet, these models are the only “evidence” the IPCC has that man is causing global warming. Everything else is circumstantial evidence (i.e. glaciers melting, etc.). This circumstantial evidence may demonstrate warming but it does not prove why we are having warming. These models are used to predict the UN’s alleged catastrophic increase in earth’s temperature when it is obvious they can’t predict even a few years ahead. Source: Dr. Roy Spencer, http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/02/95-of-climate-models-agree-the-observations-must-be-wrong/. HadCRUt4 temperatures are surface station measured temperatures managed by Britain’s CRU – the organization at the center of the 2009 email scandal showing that they manipulated the data. The UAH Lower Troposphere temperatures are highly accurate satellite temperature measurements of the lower troposphere. 2 of people weren’t at stake. To believe that the information the average person gets through the news media represents the true science is not only fool-hardy, it labels the believer as a dupe willing to believe raw propaganda of the worst kind.

The Summary for Policy Makers II was so disgusting that another well known and respected lead author, Dr. Richard Tol, asked to be removed from the working group he was leading because the report was too distorted by alarmism and group think. Dr. Tol had been involved with the IPCC since 1994 and had almost resigned when the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 reported environmental dogma from a green advocacy group as peer-reviewed science. IPCC’s AR5 Challenged To confront the misleading and false information in AR5, a group of over 35 leading international climate scientists wrote or reviewed a 1000 plus page analysis of the peer-reviewed science entitled Climate Change Reconsidered II. Not surprisingly, their conclusions radically refuted those of the IPCC. For instance, rather than depending on climate models to support conclusions of doom and gloom, as does the IPCC, Reconsidered II rightly concluded that “global climate models are unable to make accurate projections of climate even 10 years ahead, let alone the 100-year period that has been adopted by policy planners. They in no way should be used to guide public policy formulation.”

While the IPCC remains adamant that the sun plays no significant role in warming (or cooling), NIPCC cites thousands of research papers showing just the opposite. It’s no wonder the IPCC did not cite them. Up to 66 percent of twentieth century warming may have been caused by solar effects, or solar/cosmic radiation interactions (See “It’s the Sun After All,” Range, Fall 2013). Also contrary to the claims of the IPCC, Reconsidered II reported that “neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth century surface warming (1979–2000) lay outside the range of normal natural variability, nor were they in any way unusual compared to earlier episodes in Earth’s climatic history.” Finally, the Reconsidered II scientists found that “no unambiguous evidence exists of dangerous interference in the global climate caused by human-related CO2 emissions.” Reconsidered II systematically refuted with hard science every fear mongering claim made by the IPCC in AR5 and the Obama administration in the National Climate Assessment.

While the IPCC and Obama administration treats CO2 as a worlddestroying  pollutant, Reconsidered II shows how CO2 is absolutely required for life on earth. Hundreds of research studies demonstrate “numerous growth-enhancing, water-conserving, and stress-alleviating effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 on plants growing in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.” At the same time, CO2 “does not seriously affect human health until the CO2 content of the air reaches approximately 15,000 ppm;” about 37 times higher than current atmospheric levels.

The earth is literally greening because of the rise of CO2—in spite of the real and imagined assaults on earth’s vegetation by fires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climate change. Annual net carbon uptake globally has doubled since 1960 (2.4 billion tons to 5 billion tons in 2010). Satellite-based analyses determined that net primary terrestrial biomass has increased 6 to 13 percent since the 1980s. That includes food production. Poor farmers in Third World Nations are benefiting as much as Developed Nations. Along with increased crop production, a higher CO2 concentration makes crops more resistant to drought, disease and insects;which could make the difference between life and death in many countries whose citizens live in abject poverty. There is nothing to fear and everything to gain with earth’s warming temperatures and increasing CO2. About the Author Dr. Coffman is President of Environmental Perspectives incorporated (epi-us.com) and CEO of Sovereignty International (sovereignty.net) in Bangor Maine. He has had over 30 years of university teaching, research and consulting experience in forestry and environmental sciences. He produced the acclaimed DVD Global Warming, Emerging Science (emergingscience.com). His newest books, Plundered, How Progressive Ideology is Destroying America and Radical Islam at the Door In the House (AmericaPlundered.com) are receiving wide acclaim. He can be reached at 207-945-9878 or mcoffman@epi-us.com.

Climate Change Reconsidered was published just as AR5-III was made public. Thirty-five international climate scientists systematically refuted the science and results of the UN’s IPCC AR5 report using peer-reviewed science.