The Wall Street Journal is the nation’s most widely read and respected newspaper. It is the ‘newspaper of record’ (not the New York Times) in regard to business and has long been sound on economic public policy matters.
I reproduce two letters I have had published in the WSJ: one recent, one five years old. I believe that time will not significantly diminish either my past or present opinions because they are grounded in energy and climate reality, not hyperbole.
————–
“Doubts on Climate Are Reasonable” (May 5, 2010)
Kerry Emanuel’s letter of April 28 illustrates some of the major points of Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial” (April 22). It is bad enough that Mr. Emanuel refers to major misrepresentations, errors and unethical behavior among scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as “minor errors.” But claiming that Mr. Lindzen’s opinions are at odds with basic climate theory, which does not support climate alarmism, is worse.
Mr. Emanuel suggests that such disputed matters as sea-level rise and glacier dynamics (which depend on factors other than global warming) form a “vast body of evidence” for climate change. But no one disputes that climate is changing and has always been changing. So what is his point?
Mr. Emanuel implicitly attacks a recent paper by Mr. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi (2009) that, indeed, did have important errors as acknowledged by Mr. Lindzen. But according to the authors, corrections have not altered its conclusion of a low climate sensitivity to man-made greenhouse gases.
The majority of the public is right to discount anthropogenic climate change as an environmental concern. But when will many climate scientists, including Mr. Emanuel, face Climategate and the fact that the human influence on climate, on net, is as likely to be positive than negative?
———————-
“Armageddon Redux at Paris Climate Debate: Is it too much to hope that the futile global climate crusade collapses to free public and private resources for here-and-now problems, not distant, hypothetical, unlikely ones?”
The day before “Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate” by Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser was published as a Nov. 28 op-ed, former NASA scientist James Hansen, considered by many to be the father of the U.S. climate concern, wrote: “The danger is that Paris will lay a Kyoto” wherein “each country promises to do better.”
He warned: “Watch what happens in Paris carefully to see if all that the leaders do is sign off on the pap that U.N. bureaucrats are putting together, indulgences and promises to reduce future emissions, and then clap each other on the back and declare success.”
The same James Hansen warned back in 2006: “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions” before it is too late.
Is it too much to hope that the futile global climate crusade collapses to free public and private resources for here-and-now problems, not distant, hypothetical, unlikely ones?
Robert L. Bradley Jr.
The only way to validate climate models is to see, over time, whether the changes projected by the models actually occur. James Hansen presented three modeled potential future scenarios to a congressional hearing in 1988, 27 years ago, or almost one climate period of 30 years. This was on the occasion of then Senator Tim Wirth”s (in)famous “warm hearing room trick”.
Hansen’s scenarios included: (A) exponential increase in CO2 emissions; (B) linear increase in CO2 emissions; and, (C) rapid CO2 emissions reductions (no increased forcings after 2000). The global near-surface temperature anomaly produced by NASA GISS, of which Hansen was the Director, is less than predicted by Hansen in scenario “C”, even though CO2 emissions have risen more rapidly than in Hansen’s scenario “A”, thus effectively falsifying Hansen’s model. http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/16/thoughts-on-hansen-et-al-1988/
There is certainly an argument that GCMs have improved since 1988. Only the passage of time will determine whether and to what extent that is the case. However, at present, virtually all of the modeled scenarios show warming greater than reported by the three primary producers of global near-surface temperature anomalies based on their “adjusted” data.
Climate science remains the science of data that aren’t and models that don’t.
Hanson says: “It’s a fraud really, a fake,” speaking of the CO21 agreement.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/12/james-hansen-paris-talks-are-a-fraud/