Global Warming: Fact or Fiction? Featuring Physicists Willie Soon and Elliott D. Bloom
Published: August 16, 2019
Is global warming real? Have any such predictions been established scientifically? Would massive “carbon” taxes and other controls put America and the world - especially the poor—at great risk?
At this special event, geoscientist and astrophysicist Willie Soon separates fact from fiction in the global warming debate. He explains why the forecasts from CO2 climate models have been so wrong and why solar influences on clouds, oceans, and wind drive climate change, not CO2 emissions. Stanford University physicist Elliott Bloom then comments.
“The whole point of science is to question accepted dogmas. For that reason, I respect Willie Soon as a good scientist and a courageous citizen.” - Freeman J. Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study; Templeton Prize Laureate
“I am writing to express my deep admiration and respect for Dr. Willie Soon, a fine astrophysicist and human being.... As Willie has shown in many ways, observational facts do not fit the CO2 dogma, and an enormous amount of evidence points to the Sun as a much more important driver of climate.... Willie was right—whatever the cause of changing temperature, the main driver cannot be the concentration of atmospheric CO2.” - William Happer, Chairman, Presidential Committee on Climate Security; Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Emeritus, Princeton University; Member, National Academy of Sciences
Willie Soon is a geophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He received his Ph.D. (with distinction) in aeronautical engineering from the University of Southern California, and he has been Astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory; Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute; Senior Visiting Fellow at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University; and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Putra Malaysia. The author of 90 scientific papers, he has IEEE received the Nuclear & Plasma Sciences Society Award, Rockwell Dennis Hunt Award, Smithsonian Institution Award, Courage in Defense of Science Award, Petr Beckmann Award for Courage and Achievement in Defense of Scientific Truth and Freedom, and Frederick Seitz Memorial Award.
Elliott D. Bloom is Professor Emeritus in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) at Stanford University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was a member of the SLAC team with Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor who received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Independent Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, public-policy research and educational organization that shapes ideas into profound and lasting impact. The mission of Independent is to boldly advance peaceful, prosperous, and free societies grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity. Applying independent thinking to issues that matter, the Independent Institute creates transformational ideas for today’s most pressing social and economic challenges. By connecting these ideas with other organizations and networks, Independent seeks to inspire action that can unleash an era of unparalleled human flourishing at home and around the globe. http://www.independent.org/publicatio...
Study Finds More of Earth Is Hotter and Says Global Warming Is at Work
- By JUSTIN GILLIS - The New York Times - August 06, 2012
The percentage of the earth’s land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper.
The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.
Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,” Dr. Hansen said in an interview. The findings provoked an immediate split among his scientific colleagues, however.
Some experts said he had come up with a smart new way of understanding the magnitude of the heat extremes that people around the world are noticing. Others suggested that he had presented a weak statistical case for his boldest claims and that the rest of the paper contained little that had not been observed in the scientific literature for years.
The divide is characteristic of the strong reactions that Dr. Hansen has elicited playing dual roles in the debate over climate change and how to combat it. As the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, he is one of NASA’s principal climate scientists and the primary custodian of its records of the earth’s temperature. Yet he has also become an activist who marches in protests to demand new government policies on energy and climate.
The latter role — he has been arrested four times at demonstrations, always while on leave from his government job — has made him a hero to the political left, and particularly to college students involved in climate activism. But it has discomfited some of his fellow researchers, who fear that his political activities may be sowing unnecessary doubts about his scientific findings and climate science in general.
Climate-change skeptics routinely accuse Dr. Hansen of manipulating the temperature record to make global warming seem more serious, although there is no proof that he has done so and the warming trend has repeatedly been confirmed by other researchers.
Scientists have long believed that the warming — roughly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over land in the past century, with most of that occurring since 1980 — was caused largely by the human release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. Such emissions have increased the likelihood of heat waves and some other types of weather extremes, like heavy rains and snowstorms, they say.
But researchers have struggled with the question of whether any particular heat wave or storm can be definitively linked to human-induced climate change.
In the new paper, titled “Perception of Climate Change,” Dr. Hansen and his co-authors compared the global climate of 1951 to 1980, before the bulk of global warming had occurred, with the climate of the years 1981 to 2011.
They computed how much of the earth’s land surface in each period was subjected in June, July and August to heat that would have been considered particularly extreme in the period from 1951 to 1980. In that era, they found, only 0.2 percent of the land surface was subjected to extreme summer heat. But from 2006 to 2011, extreme heat covered from 4 to 13 percent of the world, they found.
“It confirms people’s suspicions that things are happening” to the climate, Dr. Hansen said in the interview. “It’s just going to get worse.”
The findings led his team to assert that the big heat waves and droughts of recent years were a direct consequence of climate change. The authors did not offer formal proof of the sort favored by many climate scientists, instead presenting what amounted to a circumstantial case that the background warming was the only plausible cause of those individual heat extremes.
Dr. Hansen said the heat wave and drought afflicting the country this year were also a likely consequence of climate change.
Some experts said they found the arguments persuasive. Andrew J. Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who reviewed the paper before publication, compared the warming of recent years to a measles outbreak popping up in different places. As with a measles epidemic, he said, it makes sense to suspect a common cause.
“You can actually start to see these patterns emerging whereby in any given year more and more of the globe is covered by anomalously warm events,” Dr. Weaver said.
But some other scientists described the Hansen paper as a muddle. Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist with an organization called Climate Central that seeks to make climate research accessible to the public, said she felt that the paper was on solid ground in asserting a greater overall likelihood of heat waves as a consequence of global warming, but that the finding was not new. The paper’s attribution of specific heat waves to climate change was not backed by persuasive evidence, she said.
Martin P. Hoerling, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the causes of weather extremes, said he shared Dr. Hansen’s general concern about global warming. But he has in the past criticized Dr. Hansen for, in his view, exaggerating the connection between global warming and specific weather extremes. In an interview, he said he felt that Dr. Hansen had done so again.
Dr. Hoerling has published research suggesting that the 2010 Russian heat wave was largely a consequence of natural climate variability, and a forthcoming study he carried out on the Texas drought of 2011 also says natural factors were the main cause.
Dr. Hoerling contended that Dr. Hansen’s new paper confuses drought, caused primarily by a lack of rainfall, with heat waves.
“This isn’t a serious science paper,” Dr. Hoerling said. “It’s mainly about perception, as indicated by the paper’s title. Perception is not a science.”
Also see: https://venusproject.org/exposed/climate-change-theory.html
