A group of independent scientists, economists, and meteorologists has issued a pointed response to the scientific foundation of the Obama administration’s claims that humans are drastically changing the climate by burning fossil fuels.
With expertise in multiple disciplines, including climate research, weather modeling, physics, geology, statistical analysis, engineering, and economics, the 15 signers make the case that the foundation of the White House National Climate Assessment (NCA) is a “masterpiece of marketing” that crumbles like a “house of cards” under the weight of real-world evidence.
“They promote their ‘Climate Models’ as a reliable way to predict the future climate. But these models dramatically fail basic verification tests. Nowhere do they admit to these well-known failures. Instead, we are led to believe that their climate models are close to perfection,” assert the scientists.
The 829-page NCA report was released on May 6 and was characterized by administration officials as “the most comprehensive, authoritative, transparent scientific report on U.S. climate change impacts ever generated.”
Editor’s Note: CIA Global Forecast: Prepare for the Worst
The administration seized on the NCA findings as justification for its push to further regulate the fossil-fuel industry and to bolster alternative green-energy sources.
The scientists’ rebuttal, however, strongly challenges the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), which it says is “based on a string of inferences that begins with the assumptions” that human burning of fossil fuels is driving up atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and “is so grossly flawed it should play no role in U.S. Energy Policy Analyses and CO2 regulatory processes.”
The scientists do not have any affiliation with any particular organization and have worked together pro bono for several years.
Among the signatories are: Dr. George Wolff, who formerly chaired the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee; Joseph S. D’Aleo, a fellow with the American Meteorological Society; Dr. Neil Laverne Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center in Florida; and William M. “Bill” Gray, emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.
The authors criticize the NCA report for a lack of objectivity and its failure to include input from scientists who may question whether climate change is irrefutable and that a robust regulatory response is required.
“Science derives its objectivity from robust logic and honest evidence repeatedly tested by all knowledgeable scientists, not just those paid to support the administration’s version of “Global Warming,’ ‘Climate Change,’ ‘Climate Disruption,’ or whatever their marketing specialists call it today,” they said.
The NCA and the White House assert that urgent action is needed because increasing average temperatures in the United States are responsible for a greater frequency of extreme weather events.
According to the NCA, average temperatures have increased between 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit and 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 and forecasting models show a potential increase of an additional 4 degrees Fahrenheit if countermeasures are not adopted, including cap-and-trade, greater subsidization of green energy, and reduced fossil fuel production.
According to the NCA, “human influences are the primary driver of recent climate change is based on multiple lines of independent evidence.”
The scientists describe that contention as “grossly flawed” and take issue with the EPA’s claim — used to justify greenhouse gas regulation — that there is “90-99 percent certainty that observed warming in the latter half of the twentieth century resulted from human activity.”
That claim “is totally at odds with multiple robust, consistent, independently-derived empirical datasets, all showing no statistically significant positive (or negative) trend in temperature,” they wrote. “Therefore, EPA’s theory … must be rejected.”
The group of scientists made similar points in a Supreme Court amicus involving EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles.
In the brief the scientists assert EPA’s entire hypothesis that CO2 emissions endanger human health and safety has been falsified by real-world evidence.
“As the most important example, EPA asserts as its central ‘line of evidence’ for CO2 ‘endangerment’ that CO2 will warm the surface temperature of the earth through a mechanism by which rising CO2 concentrations in the troposphere in the tropics block heat transfer into outer space.”
They said that if EPA’s hypothesis were accurate there would necessarily be an observable “hot spot” in the tropical upper troposphere. But that has not been proven to exist, therefore, they write “the basis that EPA has for this rulemaking is no basis,” they wrote.
According to their rebuttal report, “over the last 130 years the decade of the 1930s still has the most U.S. state high temperatures records.”
Their assertion that climate disruptions are not increasing, ironically, is echoed in the most recent report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the White House often cites to support its own argument.
Globally, according to the IPCC in its 2012 special report on extreme events, “since the 1950s some regions of the world have experienced a trend to more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.”
Furthermore, the IPCC in 2013 concluded that “current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century” and “no robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
The scientists also dispute the administration’s claims that proposed regulation of carbon dioxide can be achieved in a cost-effective manner that will create jobs and produce economic benefit. Rather, they argue, those policies will restrict economic growth causing harm to the poor.
“Unilateral CO2 emission control by the United States promises to damage the economy of the United States without any benefits. In fact, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere facilitates achieving the goal of raising the poor out of poverty through increasing food production,” the scientists wrote in their amicus brief.
