Scientists: No Need to Panic over Global Warming

We've been told over and over again that the scientific consensus is in and we must take drastic action to stop global warming climate change. (Of course it was once the scientific consensus that the sun went around the Earth and that light waves traveled through a mysterious substance called "ether").

Now sixteen scientists have chosen to come off the reservation and say there's no need to panic, as they wrote today (sub possibly required) in the Wall Street Journal.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

That's because global warming is political, not scientific. But according to the sixteen signers of the article:

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Yes, you could call them "inconvenient truths"!

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO₂.

Which is why the "climate scientists" wanted to "hide the decline."

The fact is that CO₂ is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO₂ that greenhouse operators often increase the CO₂ concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO₂ concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO₂ in the atmosphere.

What, you mean there was 10 times the CO₂ in the atmosphere than there is today, before SUVs and coal-fired power plants?  Maybe it occured  . . . naturally?

The scientists go on to talk about how those who oppose the global we'-re all-going-to-die warming orthodoxy are ostracized and even can lose their jobs.

Global warming Climate change is not about saving the planet, it's about controlling the citizens and getting rich as Al Gore has done. Global warming enthusiasts are watermelons: green on the outside and red in the center.  They are socialists who lost the battle to control the world in 1989 so now need another excuse to run the economy.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

No, it's not.  But when you mix political power with science, it's what you get.