Limbaugh rose to No. 1 in the market, doubling the size of his audience in just a year. . . . When a radio consultant told his friend Ed McLaughlin about Limbaugh’s popularity there, the ABC Radio Networks President traveled to Sacramento to hear him firsthand. . . . McLaughlin, who credited Limbaugh with rescuing AM radio from oblivion in a 1994 Forbes profile, recruited the local host to New York. He debuted a two-hour talk show on WABC in August 1988 that they soon began syndicating across the country. At the time, AM radio was facing an existential crisis. Listeners had gravitated to FM for music, leaving AM radio in search of a winning programming format. Talk filled the silence.

Limbaugh’s program in Sacramento that launched his nationally syndicated “The Rush Limbaugh Show” was only possible after the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the suffocating Fairness Doctrine (created in 1949) had opened up AM radio to free speech and new programming competition. For over three decades, Limbaugh’s program was by far the most popular radio show in America, airing on more than 650 stations nationwide across the Premiere Radio Networks with a weekly audience of 25 million, and on May 7, 2020, Limbaugh announced on air that Premiere had calculated an audience that day of 43 million people with an average listening time of two hours and 28 minutes. But throughout his career, he never lost affection for his successful radio roots in the Sacramento area, regularly returning to the area and often on his show humorously singling out comments “For those of you in Rio Linda.”

We had the memorable opportunity to work with Rush Limbaugh on two pivotal occasions.

The first occurred in the mid-1980s, when I was in the process of producing the paperback edition of a book on the growing problem of affordable housing in California, Resolving the Housing Crisis: Government Policy, Decontrol and the Public Interest. Edited by the late, renowned economist M. Bruce Johnson (U.C. Santa Barbara), who would become the founding Research Director at the Independent Institute, the book assembled the most comprehensive-ever critical analysis of government housing and land-use controls restricting the supply of housing and new construction and creating the unaffordable housing tragedy that has only greatly worsened today, including contributing to the massive problem of homelessness.

The acclaimed Clemson U. economist Thomas W. Hazlett (Ph.D., UCLA) at the time was a new assistant professor at the University of California at Davis (U.C. Davis). Tom had contributed the superb Chapter 10 in Resolving the Housing Crisis, “Rent Controls and the Housing Crisis,” and he had further assisted Bruce in completing details for his Introduction to the book.*

Bruce and I were planning to be in Sacramento in spring of 1984 for a one-day conference I had organized on the housing crisis in California with the California Chamber of Commerce and other groups. Bruce was to be a keynote speaker along with the housing and land-use expert Ward A. Connerly, and all attendees would receive a free copy of the book.

Tom had first met Rush Limbaugh at an event at U.C. Davis at which former U.N. Ambassador Jeane D. Kirkpatrick (1926-2006) spoke, and Tom and Rush became good friends. As a result, Tom helped us arrange for Bruce and me to visit with Rush while we were in town for the housing conference to discuss the book’s findings in the KFBK studio.

We had already arranged for Bruce to be interviewed about the book on numerous radio programs, but none of the show hosts understood the housing issue and were quite clueless of government’s culpability in creating the problem. But in visiting with Rush, we found that just as Tom had promised, he had clearly done his homework on the book and understood its findings, interviewing Bruce at considerable detail for an entire hour.

I recall Bruce’s delight, excitement, and amazement with the interview by this guy who neither of us had ever heard of but who, unlike other radio hosts, fully understood what Bruce was saying and the central need for deregulation, free markets and private property rights.

The second time we connected directly with Rush was when we had published the first edition of the Independent Institute’s book, Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate by our Research Fellow, the late S. Fred Singer, and featuring a foreword by Frederick Seitz, former President of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rush enthusiastically interviewed Fred, who at the time was in Bonn, Germany, having addressed the Austrian Parliament in Vienna a few days earlier, and Rush subsequently published the interview in The Limbaugh Letter (December 1997):

Fasten your seatbelts—you are about to get some real science from one of the foremost experts on global climate change. In fact, Dr. Singer devised the basic instrument for measuring stratospheric ozone. He was somewhat reluctant to discuss the political aspects of the global warming debate—though I tried. Still, as a scientist, he backed me up . . . and confirmed things I’ve been saying for years. . . .

The book became a major seller with extensive media coverage featuring Fred, and was instrumental in redefining and redirecting public climate debate away from unscientific alarmism, leading up to the U.S.’s refusal to ratify the deeply flawed 1992 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Incidentally, we have just released Hot Talk, Cold Science in a Third Revised and Expanded Edition (twice the size of the previous editions in 1997 and 1999), completed by Fred before his death in 2020 and co-authored with the climatologists David R. Legates (U. of Delaware) and Anthony R. Lupo (U. of Missouri), and with a new foreword by the eminent physicist William Happer (Princeton U.)

We will forever be grateful for the very kind and generous assistance of the late Rush Limbaugh.

Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

* * * * * * * *

*Other distinguished scholars who were contributing authors to Resolving the Housing Crisis include Peter Colwell (U. of Illinois), Carl Dahlman (U. of Wisconsin), Robert Ellickson (Yale U.), Bernard Frieden (MIT), Norman Karlin (Southwestern U. Law), James Kau (U. of Georgia), Richard Muth (Stanford U.), Roger Pilon (U.S. Office of Personal Management), Judith Robert (U. of Michigan), Bernard Siegan (U. of San Diego), and Robert Weintraub (U.S. Joint Economic Committee), as well as Stephen DeCanio, H. E. Frech III, Alan Gin, Lloyd Mercer, Douglas Morgan, and Jon Sonstelie (all from U.C. Santa Barbara).

The post Rush Limbaugh on Air appeared first on The Beacon.

Their message to policymakers?

There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to “decarbonize” the world’s economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically. . . . Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of “incontrovertible” evidence.

This statement follows up on the public resignation of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever from the American Physical Society (APS) in which he states:

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?

The group of scientists note the following facts that refute climate alarmist claims:

1. 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.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections–suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

2. 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.

3. The smear campaigns by the warming establishment are outrageous:

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the Journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

4. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to “do something” about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

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.

The scientists then address the key issue of why there is so much intolerance and corruption among global-warming proponents, and the answer they give is sadly, “Follow the money.”

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Signatories:

Claude Allegre, former Director, Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris
J. Scott Armstrong, Co-Founder, Journal of Forecasting and International Journal of Forecasting
Jan Breslow, Head, Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University
Roger Cohen, Fellow, American Physical Society
Edward David, Member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences
William Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton University
Michael Kelly, Professor of Technology, University of Cambridge
William Kininmonth, former Head of Climate Research, Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, MIT
James McGrath, Professor of Chemistry, Virginia Technical University
Rodney Nichols, former President and CEO, New York Academy of Sciences
Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne
Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. Senator
Nir Shaviv, Professor of Astrophysics, Hebrew University
Henk Tennekes, former Director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service
Antonio Zichichi, President, World Federation of Scientists, Geneva

UPDATE: (Sunday, January 29, 2012) In “Forget global warming—it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again): Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years,” The Daily Mail of London now reports that despite massive bias from climate alarmists, the sun may be showing us that the CO2-based climate models are wrong and we may be entering a new period of cooling and perhaps even an ice age:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

. . . .

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

The post Leading Scientists Debunk Climate Alarmism appeared first on The Beacon.

One marked difference from the original 2009 release is that the person or persons responsible has included a message headed “background and context” which, for the first time, gives an insight into their motivations. Following some bullet-pointed quotes such as “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day” and, “Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels,” the message states:

“Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets. The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase. We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics.” . . .

One of the most damaging claims in 2009 was that Prof Phil Jones, the head of the UEA’s Climatic Research Institute had deleted emails to avoid FOI request. One of the reviews into the content of the emails, conducted by Sir Muir Russell, concluded that “emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them” – something that Jones has denied. At the time CRU was coming under sustained pressure by an organised campaign to release information, which the scientists saw as distracting from their work.

The new emails include similar statements apparently made by the scientists about avoiding requests for information. In one email, which has not yet been specifically confirmed as genuine, Jones writes: “I’ve been told that IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all emails at the end of the process”.

In a statement, the University of East Anglia said: “While we have had only a limited opportunity to look at this latest post of 5,000 emails, we have no evidence of a recent breach of our systems. If genuine, (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to confirm at present that they are all genuine) these emails have the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks.”

It continued: “As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of context. Following the previous release of emails scientists highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted are entirely unsupported. They, the university and the wider research community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so.”

James Delingpole in The Telegraph of London states the following:

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.

In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower ‘FOIA 2011’ (or “thief”, as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.

Here is a selection of the revealed emails.

UPDATE: Our Research Fellow S. Fred Singer is discussed in a Climategate 2.0 email note from Edward Cook (Columbia University) to fellow climate alarmist Keith Briffa (University of East Anglia). In the note, Cook admits that in a recent talk at Columbia by Singer and based on his new peer-reviewed paper, “Lack of Consistency Between Modeled and Observed Temperature Trends” (Energy & Environment, vol. 22, no. 4, 2011) Singer correctly showed a key point that Thomas Wigley misused statistics to exaggerate greenhouse attribution to temperature levels. Nevertheless and even when he agreed with Singer’s scientific findings, Cook reveals his own bias by then still dismissing Singer’s presentation. Here is the email note:

Fred Singer was here on Monday and gave a rather uninspired talk criticizing global warming, etc. He did show an example of the mis-use of statistics in the greenhouse attribution debate and it was one of Wigley’s papers. It was the one in which Tom tried to show that the autocorrelation function of instrumental temperatures was far greater than the acf of temperatures from unforced OAGCM models, therefore “proving” that greenhouse gases were forcing instrumental temperatures. It was a pathetically poor paper that had Mark Cane, Yochanan Kushnir, Upmanu Lall, Balaji Rajagoplan (all good maths/stats people), and me just shaking our collective heads wondering what the fuck Wigley was trying to do. Needless to say, Singer quite easily showed how hopelessly flawed and ridiculous the analysis was, and everyone agreed with him for once. Other than that he pretty much fell on his face.

The post Climategate 2.0 appeared first on The Beacon.

Dr. Evans recently proclaimed:

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings.

Among other questions Dr. Evans poses: “Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?”

As the work of Independent Institute Research Fellow Dr. S. Fred Singer also shows, Dr. Evans notes that it’s to conceal the truth of actual change in global temperatures:

One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.

The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings.

Further:

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

When the carbon dioxide theory was posited in 1980, scientists guessed that every bit of warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide would be “multiplied” up to three times by creating extra moist air. Yet although this “multiplier effect” has been proven as flawed as the Keynesian multiplier, neither theory apparently will die.

Why?

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory—that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

Read his full commentary, here. Bottom line:

Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: Sorry, but you’ve been had. Yes, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it’s so minor it’s not worth doing much about.

The post Australian Government Climate Scientist: Carbon Warming Too Minor to Be Worth Worrying About appeared first on The Beacon.

As reported in the London Telegraph, the highly respected physicist Harold Lewis has sent a scathing letter of resignation to the American Physical Society (APS) protesting the corruption of science as a result of the politicization of climate research and as he states, “the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” Dr. Lewis was a student of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and joins a growing number of prominent scientists such as William Happer (Princeton University) and Robert Austin (Princeton University) who are circulating a petition saying that:

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen... We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

In an article by Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com, he notes that:

In the aftermath of the embarrassing data leaks, however, Princeton’s Happer says that about half of the APS members they’ve contacted now support the petition (which, after all, is only asking for an independent analysis of the science involved).

Of the signatories so far, Happer says, 77 are fellows of major scientific societies, 14 members of the National Academies, one is a Nobel laureate, and there is a large number of authors of major scientific books and recipients of prizes and awards for scientific research. He adds: “Some have accepted a career risk by signing the petition. The 230 odd signatories can hardly be dismissed as lightweights compared to those who spread the message of impending climate disaster.”

Here also is the full letter from Dr. Lewis:

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics and former Chairman of the Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara; former Member and Chairman of Technology Panel, Defense Science Board; Chairman, DSB Study on Nuclear Winter; former Member, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; former Member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman, APS Study on Nuclear Reactor Safety; Chairman, Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; former Member, USAF Scientific Advisory Board; and author of the books, Technological Risk and Why Flip a Coin.

For further information on the science of climate change and the claims of global warming, please see the following:

Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, by S. Fred Singer, with a foreword by Frederick Seitz

New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn’t Telling Us, by John R. Christy, Robert E. Davis, David R. Legates, Wendy M. Novicoff, and S. Fred Singer

HT: David E. Shellenberger

The post Top Physicists Protest the Corruption of Science appeared first on The Beacon.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia—the university of Climategate fame—is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on “Climate scenario development” for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

The referenced paper by Hulme and Mahony is “Climate Change: what do we know about the IPCC?” Hulme, also author of the recent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, is a key proponent of what is called “post-normal science” (see here and here), a postmodern narrative that consists of a complete perversion of standard scientific practice that he supports in order to propagandize for his socialist agenda. As he explained in portions of his book and his article, “The appliance of science,” in the Guardian (March 17, 2007):

“Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs...where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken.”

“It has been labelled ‘post-normal’ science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus...on the process of science—who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy...The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.”

“Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.”

“The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen...I attended the Conference, chaired a session...[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team...contained...a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee...interpreting it for a political audience...And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.”

“The danger of a ‘normal’ reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow...exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.”

“...’self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking...scientists—and politicians—must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.”

“Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world...”

“The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved...It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change—the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals—to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.”

“There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.”

“Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one...It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.”

“Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves...mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition...”

“The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us...Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”

“...climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences...climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes...climate change has become ‘the mother of all issues’, the key narrative within which all environmental politics—from global to local—is now framed...Rather than asking ‘how do we solve climate change?’ we need to turn the question around and ask: ‘how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations...?'”

“We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us...we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit...As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways...it can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future....We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.”

Such a deception could only have gone on as long and far as it has because of the cultural cover provided by contemporary Western elites who have embraced environmentalism as the new secular religion. This development and its implications are examined in detail in the Independent Institute’s award-winning, new book:

The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, by Robert H. Nelson

The post IPCC Insider Admits Climate Consensus Claim Was a Lie appeared first on The Beacon.

* Data for the IPCC’s vital “hockey stick graph” used by climate alarmists has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before, such as the Medieval Warm Period—but NOT due to man-made changes

The interview of Jones was conducted by the still pro-alarmist BBC, which continues to insist that the leaked emails were “stolen,” even though they legally were supposed to have been released years ago as a result of requests filed through the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act. Nevertheless, this stunning series of retractions of key positions that Jones and others have long claimed to be “settled” further places the entire global warming mantra in doubt. As the Mail notes:

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. . . . The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now—suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Yet, Jones continued to defend his illegal refusal to provide the data to others for verification or explain why he could not do so:

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

But Dr. Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s “excuses” for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

In a further article in the Times of London, “World may not be warming, say scientists,” a series of additional scientists are confirming that there may in fact be no warming at all.

[N]ew research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The Independent Institute’s publications on the science of climate change have consistently been shown to have been accurate, refuting the junk science used to defend the IPCC’s claims of climate alarmism:

Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, by S. Fred Singer, foreword by Frederick Seitz

New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn’t Telling Us, by S. Fred Singer, John R. Christy, Robert E. Davis, David R. Legates, and Wendy M. Novicoff

The post “There has been no warming since 1995” appeared first on The Beacon.

Alex Berezow is a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at the University of Washington.

Remember when President Obama said that he was going to “restore science to its rightful place”? Apparently, that statement needed to be translated from the vagaries of “hope and change” to modern English: Right-wing anti-science policies are out; left-wing anti-science policies are in.

For starters, President Obama appointed Cass Sunstein as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Sunstein believes that all recreational hunting should be banned. He also believes that meat consumption should be phased out in the United States, and he holds the unique belief that animals should have the right to sue humans in court. Naturally, the animal would be represented by a human lawyer—a policy other than that would just be silly. But who exactly would represent the animals in court is unclear at this point. Dr. Doolittle might be available, though.

All satire aside, with someone this disconnected from reality working in the White House, one wonders what impact he could have on the ability of scientists to conduct biomedical animal research.

Also, remember Mr. Obama’s obsession with creating green technology jobs as a way of leading us out of the recession? According to a report described by George Will in his Washington Post column, Spain’s massive subsidization of renewable energy has cost that country 110,000 jobs. Far from helping Spain’s economic crisis, this foolish subsidization appears to have contributed to its mind-blowing 19.3% unemployment rate.

As if this weren’t bad enough, a fantastic op/ed by Joel Frezza brought up several more examples of “junk science” coming from the White House, a few of which I’ll summarize and expand upon.

Mr. Frezza describes how the Obama Administration is asking for areas of Alaska to be deemed “critical habitat” for polar bears. This move could severely limit the ability to drill for oil and gas in the region, in a time when our nation is in desperate need of energy sources. It appears that, once again, Mr. Obama has caved to propaganda-spewing environmentalists who have ignored recent evidence indicating that polar bear populations are increasing. In fact, polar bear researcher Mitch Taylor claims that of the 19 populations of polar bears, only two have exhibited declining numbers. As a side issue, it’s also interesting to note that people like Captain Planet (Al Gore) who refer to polar bears as “endangered” don’t even have their facts straight: Polar bears are officially listed as “vulnerable”—an entirely different conservation status. This status is given to animals which may become endangered if conditions don’t change. Arguably, however, conditions are changing because their population has been increasing.

Finally, Mr. Frezza points out the economically ludicrous and scientifically unsound subsidization of biofuels. Liberals see the subsidization of biofuels as killing two birds with one stone: Fixing the planet and helping out America’s farmers. However, science has something entirely different to say about biofuels. The production of biofuels emits nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. The planet, unfortunately, doesn’t find it very funny, since nitrous oxide is a much more potent contributor to the greenhouse effect than is carbon dioxide. As The Economist points out in this article, a policy meant to make things better is merely an expensive way of making things worse.

Honestly, this list could go on and on. What is so infuriating is the fact that Mr. Obama self-righteously proclaimed to be the protector of science, when the truth is that he simply replaced Mr. Bush’s special interests with his own. In what has to be the most stunning broken promise in Mr. Obama’s presidency, instead of “restoring science,” he has simply resorted to “politics as usual.”

The post They Blinded Us With Science: Alex Berezow on the Not-So-New “Science Presidency” appeared first on The Beacon.