It's Not Fascism When We Do It

The Campus Climate Crusade

Liberal groups are out to sully the names of conservative professors and shut down programs funded by the Koch foundation.

By: Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ Opinion, March 26, 2015

Conservative thought on campus these days is rare, though for some it’s still not rare enough. Witness the growing campaign by politicians, unions and environmentalists to intimidate into silence any academic or program that might challenge liberal ideology.

Congressional Democrats have grabbed most of the attention here, with their recent attempt to cow climate skeptics. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT and a Cato Institute scholar, earlier this month described in these pages how House Rep. Raul Grijalva was targeting seven academics skeptical of President Obama’s climate policies, demanding documents about their funding and connections. A trio of Senate Democrats is working to muzzle more than 100 nonprofits and companies that have questioned the climate agenda, with a fishing expedition into their correspondence.

Largely unnoticed is that the congressional climate crusaders didn’t come up with this idea on their own. For several years a coalition of liberal organizations have been using “disclosure” to sully the names of conservative professors and try to shut down their programs. Their particular targets are academics who benefit from funding from the Koch Foundation, which has for decades funded free-market professors and groups on U.S. campuses.

Giving money to universities, and earmarking it for certain purposes, is common, though the left has largely cornered the market. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and his wife several years ago pledged $40 million to Stanford to start the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. The Morningside Foundation, established by the family of the late T.H. Chan, last year gave Harvard $350 million to fund work on, among other things, gun violence and tobacco use. The Helmsley Charitable Trust has given money to several schools to advance Common Core.

Apparently the only kind of thought not allowed is that which might “undermine,” according to UnKochMyCampus, “environmental protection, worker’s rights, health care expansion, and quality public education.” Stopping such research is the mission of this organization, which is spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts (a green outfit focused on climate change), and the American Federation of Teachers.

The group’s website directs student activists to a list of universities to which Koch foundations have given money, and provides a “campus organization guide” with instructions for how to “expose and undermine” any college thought that works against “progressive values.” Students are directed to first recruit “trusted allies and informants” (including liberal faculty, students and alumni) and then are given a step-by-step guide on hounding universities and targeted professors with demands for records disclosure and with Freedom of Information Act requests. The AFT and the National Education Association devoted nearly a full day at a conference this month to training students on the “necessary skills to investigate and expose” any “influence” the Kochs have at universities.

This week Michigan State University released documents to student activists who had targeted political-theory professor Ross Emmett, director of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity. His crime? Using Koch grant money to fund a reading group, called the Koch Scholars, that brings together students to discuss competing political economy ideas. The first two weeks were devoted to Marx, though the activists apparently couldn’t tolerate an equal discussion of capitalism.

Art Hall, who runs the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business, was forced last year to file a lawsuit to try to stop a state records request from student activists demanding his private email correspondence for the past 10 years. Mr. Hall’s sins? His center got a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, and he testified against green energy quotas at the state legislature last year.

As for those defenders of academic freedom and integrity, the American Association of University Professors several years ago defended climate scientist Michael Mann against a conservative group’s demands for his records. Now the Kansas chapter of AAUP helped fund the students’ demand for Mr. Hall’s records.

These UnKoch tactics are spreading. In February, Right to Know, a California nonprofit opposed to genetically modified food, filed freedom of information requests at four universities, demanding correspondence between a dozen academics and outside agriculture companies and trade organizations. The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a left-leaning organization, recently forced the University of Louisville to release information about the founding of a new Free Enterprise Center, partly funded by Koch money.

Congressional Democrats are simply getting in on the game, using the power of government inquiry to up the ante. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin ran a campaign in 2013 against the free-market American Legislative Exchange Council, demanding information from its donors, trying to embarrass them out of funding ALEC. It worked.

Disclosure is becoming the left’s new weapon. And it’s shutting down debate across the country. 

A Word from Obama's Undersecretary of Science

Climate Science Is Not Settled

We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy

By Steven E. Koonin, WSJ Saturday Essay, Sept. 19, 2014

(His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech)

The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.

My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don't know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.

The crucial scientific question for policy isn't whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth's global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.

Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, "How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?" Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.

But—here's the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to "knowing" future climate is today's poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate's heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate's response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modeling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.

For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box's average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted ("tuned," in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.

We often hear that there is a "scientific consensus" about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavor, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of its issue.

There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. Pictured, an estuary in Patgonia.

For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth's climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:

• The models differ in their descriptions of the past century's global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere's energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate's inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.

• Although the Earth's average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.

Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.

• The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.

• The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that "hot spot" has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.

• Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.

• A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today's best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.

These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not "minor" issues to be "cleaned up" by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.

Yet a public official reading only the IPCC's "Summary for Policy Makers" would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that "climate science is settled."

While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: Understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.

We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, "red team" reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is "settled" (or is a "hoax") demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

Society's choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

But climate strategies beyond such "no regrets" efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.

Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about "believing" or "denying" the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity's deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama's first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP,where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

When (More) Real Information Comes Out

What do you do?

Whatever Happened to Global Warming?
Now come climate scientists' implausible explanations for why the 'hiatus' has passed the 15-year mark.

By MATT RIDLEY, WSJ Opinion, Sept. 4, 2014

On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won't attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely. Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?

In effect, this is all that's left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990. The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).

Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.

First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or "hiatus"), but that it doesn't after all invalidate their theories.

Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.


When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was "wrong, completely wrong," and was "deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public."

We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse's article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. "The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998," wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: "Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn't statistically significant."

If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: "The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more."

Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That's according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.

It has been roughly two decades since there was a trend in temperature significantly different from zero. The burst of warming that preceded the millennium lasted about 20 years and was preceded by 30 years of slight cooling after 1940.

This has taken me by surprise. I was among those who thought the pause was a blip. As a "lukewarmer," I've long thought that man-made carbon-dioxide emissions will raise global temperatures, but that this effect will not be amplified much by feedbacks from extra water vapor and clouds, so the world will probably be only a bit more than one degree Celsius warmer in 2100 than today. By contrast, the assumption built into the average climate model is that water-vapor feedback will treble the effect of carbon dioxide.

But now I worry that I am exaggerating, rather than underplaying, the likely warming.

Most science journalists, who are strongly biased in favor of reporting alarming predictions, rather than neutral facts, chose to ignore the pause until very recently, when there were explanations available for it. Nearly 40 different excuses for the pause have been advanced, including Chinese economic growth that supposedly pushed cooling sulfate particles into the air, the removal of ozone-eating chemicals, an excess of volcanic emissions, and a slowdown in magnetic activity in the sun.

The favorite explanation earlier this year was that strong trade winds in the Pacific Ocean had been taking warmth from the air and sequestering it in the ocean. This was based on a few sketchy observations, suggesting a very tiny change in water temperature—a few hundredths of a degree—at depths of up to 200 meters.

Last month two scientists wrote in Science that they had instead found the explanation in natural fluctuations in currents in the Atlantic Ocean. For the last 30 years of the 20th century, Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung suggested, these currents had been boosting the warming by bringing heat to the surface, then for the past 15 years the currents had been counteracting it by taking heat down deep.

The warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, to quote the news release that accompanied their paper, "was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle." In other words, even the modest warming in the 1980s and 1990s—which never achieved the 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade necessary to satisfy the feedback-enhanced models that predict about three degrees of warming by the end of the century—had been exaggerated by natural causes. The man-made warming of the past 20 years has been so feeble that a shifting current in one ocean was enough to wipe it out altogether.

Putting the icing on the cake of good news, Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung think the Atlantic Ocean may continue to prevent any warming for the next two decades. So in their quest to explain the pause, scientists have made the future sound even less alarming than before. Let's hope that the United Nations admits as much on day one of its coming jamboree and asks the delegates to pack up, go home and concentrate on more pressing global problems like war, terror, disease, poverty, habitat loss and the 1.3 billion people with no electricity.

Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" (HarperCollins, 2010) and a member of the British House of Lords.

A Quick Answer

'What's the Worst That Can Happen?'

John Kerry makes a revealing statement in the form of a question.

WSJ Editorial, May 20, 2014

Secretaries of State may want to stop making statements in the form of questions, à la "Jeopardy." First Hillary Clinton declared "what difference at this point does it make?" regarding the reasons that four Americans died in Benghazi. Then on Monday John Kerry told graduates of Boston College that even if he's wrong about climate change, it won't cost a thing.

"The solution is actually staring us in the face. It is energy policy. Make the right energy policy choices and America can lead a $6 trillion market with four billion users today and growing to nine billion users in the next 50 years," Mr. Kerry said in his commencement address, referring to climate change. Then came the odd poser.

 "If we make the necessary efforts to address this challenge—and supposing I'm wrong or scientists are wrong, 97% of them all wrong—supposing they are, what's the worst that can happen?" Mr. Kerry said. "We put millions of people to work transitioning our energy, creating new and renewable and alternative; we make life healthier because we have less particulates in the air and cleaner air and more health; we give ourselves greater security through greater energy independence—that's the downside."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers
the Commencement Address at Boston College

So the "downside" of addressing climate policy is more jobs, cleaner air, more energy security, and we save the planet too. Makes you wonder why there aren't already 100 Senate votes for this miracle. Perhaps that's because the "energy policy" Mr. Kerry is talking about includes vast new political control over the economy, starting with taxes and limits on carbon energy, subsidies for his favored energy sources, and new and costly regulations on much of the American Midwest, South and West.

The "worst that can happen" is that we spend trillions of dollars trying to solve a problem that we can't do anything to stop; that we misallocate scarce resources in a way that slows economic growth; that slower growth leads to less economic opportunity for Boston College grads and especially the world's poor, and that America and the world become much less wealthy and technologically advanced than we would otherwise. All of which would make the world less able to cope with the costs of climate change if Mr. Kerry is right. 

It's Really All About Them

Why Can't the Left Govern?

The Left can win elections. Why can't it run a government?

By Daniel Henninger, WSJ Opinion, March 26, 2014

Surveying the fall in support for the governments of Barack Obama, New York City's progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and France's Socialist President François Hollande, a diagnosis of the current crisis begins to emerge: The political left can win elections but it's unable to govern.

Once in office, the left stumbles from fiasco to fiasco. ObamaCare, enacted without a single vote from the opposition party, is an impossible labyrinth of endless complexity. Bill de Blasio's war on charter schools degenerated into an unseemly attack on poor New York minority children. François Hollande's first act in 2012, like a character in a medieval fable, was to order that more tax revenue be squeezed from the French turnips.

Mr. Obama's approval rating is about 43%, Mr. de Blasio's has sunk to 45% after just two months in office, and Mr. Hollande hit the lowest approvals ever recorded in the modern French presidency. The left inevitably says their leaders failed them. The failure looks self-inflicted.

Three European academics asked themselves recently how 19 United Nations summit meetings have been unable to produce a treaty on global warming. Why the cause of climate change has fallen apart is described in "Melting Summits," a paper and cautionary tale just published in the Academy of Management Journal by Elke Schüssler of Germany, Charles Clemens Rüling of France and Bettina Wittneben of the U.K.

No idea in our time has had deeper political support. Al Gore and John Kerry have described disbelievers in global warming as basically idiots—"shoddy scientists" in Mr. Kerry's words. But somehow, an idea with which "no serious scientist disagrees" has gone nowhere as policy. The collapse of the U.N.'s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was a meltdown for the ages.

In an interview with the Academy of Management about her paper, Bettina Wittneben of Oxford University, who supports a climate-change treaty and has attended 13 climate meetings, summarized the wheel-spinning: "Sometimes I just find myself shaking my head after talking to participants in recent COPs [the U.N.'s climate meetings]. They'll come back from the meetings simply brimming with enthusiasm about the networking they've done, the contacts they've made, the new ideas about their research they had or the new angles to lobbying they thought of. But ask what progress was made in terms of global policy initiatives, and all you get is a shrug."

Put differently, it's not about doing something serious about global warming. It's really all about them (a virus threatening American conservatism as well). The "them" at the U.N. summits included not just the participating nations but a galaxy of well-financed nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs.

They travel under their own acronyms. The environmentalists are ENGOs, the trade unions are TUNGOS, indigenous peoples are IPOs, business and industry are BINGOs and women, gender and youth groups are YOUNGOs.

These are the left's famous change agents. The authors dryly describe what they actually do as "field maintenance." Instead of being "catalysts for change," they write that "more and more actors find COP participation useful for their purposes, but their activity is increasingly disconnected from the issue of mitigating climate change."

And little wonder. The failed efforts to get the global-warming treaty done reflect the issue's departure from anything practical. It's impossible to read this history of global warming's demise without hearing resonances of ObamaCare's problems.

The text of the climate-change treaty at Copenhagen in 2009 included "thousands of 'brackets,' or alternative wordings." A participant described the puzzle palace: "There are more and more parallel processes, and everything must be negotiated at the same time. The number of . . . negotiation issues has increased and many of these issues . . . are discussed in different places at the same time. . . . Very few people understand the whole thing." Maybe they could just pass it to find out what's in it.

One organization specialist calls this phenomenon "social deadlock." ObamaCare is social deadlock. But the American left keeps doing it. This isn't the 1930s, and smart people on the left might come to grips with the fact that the one-grand-scheme-fits-all compulsion is out of sync with the individualization that technology lets people design into their lives today.

Rather than resolve the complexities of public policy in the world we inhabit, the left's default is to simply acquire power, then cram down what they want to do with one-party votes or by fiat, figuring they can muddle through the wreckage later. Thus the ObamaCare mandates. Thus candidate de Blasio's determination, cheered on by the city's left-wing establishment, to jam all its kids through an antique public-school system. The ObamaCare mandates are a mess, and the war on charter schools is an embarrassment.

Making the unworkable work by executive decree or court-ordered obedience is one way to rule, and maybe they like it that way. But it isn't governing.

Flattening Scientific Dialogue

Why Kerry Is Flat Wrong on Climate Change
It was the scientific skeptics who bucked the 'consensus' and said the Earth was round.

By Richard McNider and John Christy, Opinion February 19, 2014

In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the "Flat Earth Society" for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said, "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts."

But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts? In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today's scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round?

Click Image to Enlarge

Most of us who are skeptical about the dangers of climate change actually embrace many of the facts that people like Bill Nye, the ubiquitous TV "science guy," say we ignore. The two fundamental facts are that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat before it can escape into space.

What is not a known fact is by how much the Earth's atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.

We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.

For instance, in 1994 we published an article in the journal Nature showing that the actual global temperature trend was "one-quarter of the magnitude of climate model results." As the nearby graph shows, the disparity between the predicted temperature increases and real-world evidence has only grown in the past 20 years.

When the failure of its predictions become clear, the modeling industry always comes back with new models that soften their previous warming forecasts, claiming, for instance, that an unexpected increase in the human use of aerosols had skewed the results. After these changes, the models tended to agree better with the actual numbers that came in—but the forecasts for future temperatures have continued to be too warm.

The modelers insist that they are unlucky because natural temperature variability is masking the real warming. They might be right, but when a batter goes 0 for 10, he's better off questioning his swing than blaming the umpire.

The models mostly miss warming in the deep atmosphere—from the Earth's surface to 75,000 feet—which is supposed to be one of the real signals of warming caused by carbon dioxide. Here, the consensus ignores the reality of temperature observations of the deep atmosphere collected by satellites and balloons, which have continually shown less than half of the warming shown in the average model forecasts.

The climate-change-consensus community points to such indirect evidence of warming as glaciers melting, coral being bleached, more droughts and stronger storms. Yet observations show that the warming of the deep atmosphere (the fundamental sign of carbon-dioxide-caused climate change, which is supposedly behind these natural phenomena) is not occurring at an alarming rate: Instruments aboard NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association satellites put the Mid-Tropospheric warming rate since late 1978 at about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, per 100 years. For the same period, the models on average give 2.1 degrees Celsius, or 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit, per 100 years (see graph above).

The models also fail to get details of the past climate right. For example, most of the observed warming over land in the past century occurred at night. The same models used to predict future warming models showed day and night warming over the last century at nearly the same rates.

Past models also missed the dramatic recent warming found in observations in the Arctic. With this information as hindsight, the latest, adjusted set of climate models did manage to show more warming in the Arctic. But the tweaking resulted in too-warm predictions—disproved by real-world evidence—for the rest of the planet compared with earlier models.

Shouldn't modelers be more humble and open to saying that perhaps the Arctic warming is due to something we don't understand?

While none of these inconsistencies refutes the fundamental concern about greenhouse-gas-enhanced climate change, it is disturbing that "consensus science" will not acknowledge that such discrepancies are major problems. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's beginning, that largely self-selected panel of scientists has embraced the notion that consensus on climate change is the necessary path to taking action and reducing man-made carbon emissions around the world. The consensus community uses this to push the view that "the science is settled" and hold up skeptics to ridicule, as John Kerry did on Sunday.

We are reminded of the dangers of consensus science in the past. For example, in the 18th century, more British sailors died of scurvy than died in battle. In this disease, brought on by a lack of vitamin C, the body loses its ability to manufacture collagen, and gums and other tissues bleed and disintegrate. These deaths were especially tragic because many sea captains and some ships' doctors knew, based on observations early in the century, that fresh vegetables and citrus cured scurvy.

Nonetheless, the British Admiralty's onshore Sick and Health Board of scientists and physicians (somewhat akin to the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) dismissed this evidence for more than 50 years because it did not fit their consensus theory that putrefaction (or internal decay) caused scurvy, which they felt could be cured by fresh air, exercise and laxatives.

"Consensus" science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.

Messrs. McNider and Christy are professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.

Seriously Clever or Totally Oblivious?

Seriously Out of Credibility

The only people who've predicted anything right so far are those who foresaw that the Kyoto Protocol would fail, that renewable energies didn't really work, and that climate bureaucrats accountable to nobody but their own sense of virtue and taste for profit were a danger to everyone.

Climate Prophets and Profiteers

The most cynical part of John Kerry's climate-change speech.

By Bret Stephens, WSJ, February 18, 2014

The weirdest thing about John Kerry's weekend speech on climate-change—other than the fact that this is the same guy who in 1997 voted to forbid the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol—is that it begins by quoting something Maurice Strong said at the U.N.'s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro: "Every bit of evidence I've seen persuades me that we are on a course leading to tragedy."

Maurice who?

Mr. Strong, a former oil executive from Canada (he was Pierre Trudeau's pick to run state-owned Petro-Canada in the mid-1970s), was for many years the U.N.'s ultimate mandarin. He organized many of its environmental mega-confabs, including the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio summit, before rising to become Kofi Annan's right-hand man. At various times Mr. Strong has served as director at the World Economic Forum, chairman of the Earth Council and the World Resources Institute, vice chairman of the Chicago Climate Exchange and chairman of the China Carbon Corporation, to name just a few of his many prominent affiliations.

In 2005 it emerged that Mr. Strong, who was the chairman of the U.N. panel that created the Office of the Iraq Program, had accepted a check for close to $1 million from a South Korean businessman named Tongsun Park, who in the 1970s had been involved in an effort to bribe U.S. politicians. Mr. Strong claimed that the check, from a Jordanian bank, was meant as an investment in a family company that later went bankrupt. Mr. Park (who also sublet office space from Mr. Strong) later went to prison for trying to bribe U.N. officials overseeing the Oil-for-Food program that was propping up Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Mr. Strong was accused of no wrongdoing and has denied involvement in Oil-for-Food. He left the U.N. that year and moved to Beijing.

Draw your own conclusions. Ask yourself: Is this a guy who deserves a shout-out from the U.S. Secretary of State?

When John Kerry speaks, people wonder: Is he seriously clever or totally oblivious? Profound or void? Detective Columbo or Chance the gardener?

The secretary devoted much of his speech to venting spleen at those in the "Flat Earth Society" who dispute the 97% of climate scientists who believe in man-made global warming. "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact," he said. Once upon a time people understood that skepticism was essential to good science. Now Mr. Kerry is trying to invoke a specious democracy among scientists to shut down democratic debate for everyone else.

This is of a piece with the amusing notion that the only thing standing in the way of climate salvation is a shadowy, greedy and powerful conspiracy involving the Koch Brothers, MIT's Dick Lindzen, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and this newspaper's editorial page. Oh, the power!

And yet there goes Mr. Kerry extolling Mr. Strong, who really does stand at the obscure intersection of public policy, private profits and the climate science that joins the two. "I have to disclose my own association with this process in my earlier role in the United Nations negotiations which established the basis for the development of these new [market] opportunities," Mr. Strong said in a 2007 speech, noting his roles in the Chicago Climate Exchange and the China Carbon Corporation.

If George W. Bush had left office and immediately joined the boards of defense contractors building MRAPs for Iraq, hard questions would be raised. When Maurice Strong, Al Gore and other climate profiteers seek to enrich themselves from policies they put into place while in office, it scarcely raises an eyebrow.

It should. The carbon-trading schemes enacted with such fanfare just a few years ago have effectively ceased to operate amid collapsing prices. The sustainable-energy craze produced the expensive bankruptcies of solar-panel maker Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and battery maker A123 Systems, to name a few. Germany, which has taken its climate-change fetish further than any other major economy, is now coming to grips with a comprehensive fiasco of higher energy prices and higher carbon emissions. Who would have thought that when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, people might still want to switch on the lights?

It is now the dogma of the left that any hint of doubt when it comes to predictions of climate doom is evidence of greed, stupidity, moral turpitude or psychological derangement. "Climate denial" is intended to be the equivalent of Holocaust denial. And yet the only people who've predicted anything right so far are those who foresaw that the Kyoto Protocol would fail, that renewable energies didn't really work, and that climate bureaucrats accountable to nobody but their own sense of virtue and taste for profit were a danger to everyone.

Rereading Mr. Kerry's speech, I have to say he really does come across as a true believer. That it begins by citing Maurice Strong, the ultimate cynic, tells you what you need to know about where this strain of true belief leads.

California Dreamin' (the continuing saga)

California's Green Reality Check

A new Energy Department study shows the state's carbon emissions goals are unattainable.

WSJ Editorial, Nov. 11, 2013

Governor Jerry Brown ought to be canonized as the patron saint of hopeless environmental causes. Consider a new U.S. Department of Energy study that finds that California will fall far short of its 2050 emissions goal even under the most ambitious (i.e., unrealistic) policies.

The California Air Resources Board asked the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to analyze how various environmental policies help achieve the state's goal of reducing statewide emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The lab's conclusion: Dream on.

Assuming California's implausible and economically damaging policies were implemented in totality—cap and trade, low carbon fuel and renewable electricity standards, zero-emissions-vehicle mandate, and more—emissions in 2050 would be virtually unchanged from today. Even if the state were to adopt more aggressive measures, emissions would exceed the state's target by 100%.

For example, the state could obtain 50% of its electricity from wind, solar, geothermal and biomass; grow its fleet of zero-emission vehicles to 17 million from 50,000 today; increase fuel efficiency to 78 miles per gallon, and expand rooftop solar generation by 800%. It would still miss its target by a green mile.

According to the study's lead researcher, Jeffery Greenblatt, California would in effect have to squeeze 90% of emissions out of every corner of its economy to meet its goal. That can't be done purely with more renewable energy, electric cars or high-speed rail. Demand for energy must also significantly be reduced. But demand is primarily driven by population and economic growth, which Sacramento can't control, try as the politicians might to reduce both.

Meantime, California is spending billions every year on electric car and rooftop solar subsidies, energy efficiency upgrades and alternative fuel development to achieve its pie-in-the-sky emissions goal. And don't forget the Governor's $100 billion bullet train, which during its first few decades will increase emissions. All of which underscores how modern environmental policies are less about solving problems than they are about indulging faith-based dreams.

If You Can't Feel The Heat, Get Out of the Freezer

Climate of Uncertainty 

A U.N. report can't explain the hiatus in global warming.

WSJ Editorial, September 30, 2013

Between 1998 and 2012 the global economy more than doubled in size—to some $71 trillion in GDP from $30 trillion. That's the good news. Over the same period the world pumped more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is supposedly the bad news. Yet global surface temperatures have remained essentially flat. That's the mystery: If emitting CO2 into the atmosphere causes global warming, why hasn't the globe been warming?

That's the question we would have liked to see answered by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which Friday published the summary of its fifth report on what co-chairman Thomas Stocker calls "the greatest challenge of our times." It would have also been nice to see some humility from the IPCC, which since its last report in 2007 has seen some of its leading scientists exposed as bullies, and some of its most eye-catching predictions debunked. (Remember the vanishing Himalayan glaciers?)

No such luck. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," insists the report in its first bold-face conclusion, followed by the claim that "each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850." What follows are warnings of shrinking ice sheets, rapidly rising sea levels and other scary events.

So what about the warming that hasn't been happening since 1998? Here's the key paragraph, buried on page 10: "The observed reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998-2012 as compared to the period 1951-2012, is due in roughly equal measure to a reduced trend in radiative forcing and a cooling contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean."

After noting that scientists have only low or medium confidence in various theories for this reduced warming trend, the report adds that "there may also be a contribution from forcing inadequacies and, in some models, an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing." (Our emphasis.)

Translation: Temperatures have been flat for 15 years, nobody can properly explain it (though there are some theories), and the IPCC doesn't want to spend much time doing so because it is politically inconvenient and shows that the computer models on which all climate-change predictions depend remain unreliable.

Though the IPCC doesn't admit it, the real lesson of its report is uncertainty. Droughts and hurricanes? Contrary to Al Gore's hype, the report acknowledges there's little evidence to suggest that climate change caused by man has had much to do with the duration of droughts or the intensity of hurricanes, although it might in the far future.

Unbearable heat? The IPCC predicts that temperatures are "likely" to rise by somewhat more than 1.5 degrees Celsius throughout the rest of the century. But in 2007 the IPCC said they were "likely" to increase by more than 2 degrees, and "very unlikely" to increase by less than 1.5 degrees.

It's also hard to take any of this as gospel when the IPCC's climate models haven't been able to predict past warming. As Canadian economist and longtime climate student Ross McKitrick points out, IPCC models based on CO2 emissions predicted that temperatures should have risen between 0.2 and 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1990. Instead they have increased by about 0.1 degrees.

One lesson of the IPCC report is that now is the time for policy caution. Let's see if the nonwarming trend continues, in which case the climate models will need remodeling. But that's far less costly than trying to undo grand global redistribution schemes like carbon cap and trade.

The other lesson is that amid such uncertainty the best insurance against adverse climate risks is robust economic growth. The wealthier the world is in 50 or 100 years, the more resources and technology it will have to cope if the worst predictions come true. But that requires free-market, pro-growth policies that are the opposite of the statist fixes pushed by the climate alarmists.

They use the flimsy intellectual scaffolding of the IPCC report to justify killing the U.S. coal industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, banning natural gas drilling, imposing costly efficiency requirements for automobiles, light bulbs, washing machines and refrigerators, and using scarce resources to subsidize technologies that even after decades can't compete on their own in the marketplace.

All of these involve giving more economic control to political actors whose interventions make the world poorer than it would otherwise be. When even the climate-change lobbyists at the IPCC concede that the world is warming at a slower pace than they once thought, it's no time for panicky rearranging of the global economy.

Jihadist Zeal for that Old Time Global Warming Religion

MIT professor: global warming is a ‘religion’

4:57 PM 08/29/2013

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  Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

According to Lindzen, scientists make essentially “meaningless” claims about certain phenomenon. Activists for certain causes take up claims made by scientists and politicians respond to the alarmism spread by activists by doling out more research funding. — creating an “Iron Triangle” of poor incentives.

“How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?” Lindzen asks.

Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.

“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”

“There may be a growing realization that this may not add all that much meaning to one’s life, but, outside the pages of the Wall Street Journal, this has not been widely promulgated, and people with no other source of meaning will defend their religion with jihadist zeal,” he added.

President Obama announced his plan to tackle global warming this summer.

“I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing,” Obama said. “And that’s why, today, I’m announcing a new national climate action plan, and I’m here to enlist your generation’s help in keeping the United States of America a leader — a global leader — in the fight against climate change.”

A recently leaked report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims there is a 95 percent chance that human activity — mostly from burning fossil fuels — is the main cause of global warming.

However, there has been no rise in global temperatures for the past 15 years.

“[T]he cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend,” writes Lindzen. “Despite official whitewashes, the Climategate scandal was a clear manifestation of pathology. Opposition to alarm is having some impact among certain groups including physicists.”

Lindzen also muses that politicized scientific movements may have a natural life cycle before they die out, comparing the about 30 year lifespan of global warming alarmism to the roughly equal lifespans of the eugenics and Lysenkoism movements.

Activists have ratcheted up their claims about global warming as some scientists have scaled theirs back.

“Environmental advocates are responding by making increasingly extreme claims,” Lindzen writes. “Politicians are recognizing that these claims are implausible, and are backing away from both the issue and support for climate science. The incentive is then for scientists to look elsewhere for support. Regardless of whether this will be sufficient, one can only hope that some path will emerge that will end the present irrational obsession with climate and carbon footprints.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/29/mit-professor-global-warming-is-a-religion/#ixzz2davchezg

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/29/mit-professor-global-warming-is-a-religion/#ixzz2datsOQDL