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