The corruption of climate science by some misguided individuals in the quest to “save the planet” is the most egregious example of the larger problems facing science in general. The problems are causing rapid erosion of credibility in science and environmental issues.  Some are talking about the growing problems, but few even want to acknowledge them until it directly impinges their work and career. The public is becoming increasingly aware and angry about the intellectual and political elitism that is the source of the decline in standards and values. A central theme to the Brexit vote in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump is the rejection of the elite trio of the financial, political, and academic enclaves that are destroying people’s lives.

Retired professional science writer, Edsel Chromie, enters the arena of online open peer review with a novel hypothesis on electro-magnetic energy that encompasses a number of disciplines including geology, physics and chemistry as well as astronomy.  Below Edsel recounts his 40-year experience seeking to advance a concept that has drawn the ire of establishment experts:

I copyrighted my Hypothesis titled “Electromagnetic Field Energy; The Key to Solution of Scientific Mysteries of the Universe.” on May 6, 1978. I telephoned our local Public Television Station in 1979 to see if they would be interested in discussing it. I was told that if it was not written by a professional Physicist they were not the least bit interested.

I went to our local TV Station in 1979 and demonstrated for our local news reporter, Jack White, how I can assimilate the visual appearance of a sunspot depicted in the encyclopedia with a sheet of paper covered with steel shavings. A sunspot was described as an explosion of hydrogen gas that had seeped from the interior of the Sun.

No need for you to feel “scientifically challenged” anymore; there is an App for nearly everything now. It appears that one of the easiest ways to become a “scientist” (concerned or not, my personal view) is to join the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). That group has already millions of members (so it claims) and you are most welcome to join. No experience or other credentials required — if anything, just a few dollars from your wallet. 

Really; I’m not kidding. The UCS is just one of several so-called “widely recognized scientific bodies” that pretend to know what’s good for you and everyone else on earth. And it’s so easy to join and to become another one of their many “scientists,” concerned or not. You can endorse any of their many campaigns by adding your name, address and contact (email) information, and (may also add) a small donation to support their latest outcry over what is being claimed to ail the world.

The correction of intellectual error is often an arduous task.  At the beginning of what is now known as science Galileo Galilei took on such a challenge and we are quite familiar with his story.  It would seem that we should have learned to not place a great deal of confidence in human reason when the subject of our inquiry involves the natural world or universe.  However, the most recent case involving continental drift and Alfred Wegener discloses that even modern scientists have a great tendency to cling to intellectual reasoning over empirical observation.

To anyone familiar with the history of science and the scientific hypothesis known as the greenhouse effect of certain atmospheric gases, it should be no surprise that I will likely face opposition similar to that faced by Galileo or Wegener as I attempted to disclose the fact that this popular hypothesis is based upon a fundamentally incorrect assumption.

This unstated assumption is that sensible heat can be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body, from a volume of the colder, generally upper, atmosphere to a volume of warmer, generally lower, atmosphere or from the colder atmosphere to the warmer earth’s surface that generally exists during midday.

For almost thirty years, I have taught climate science at three different universities. What I have observed is that students are increasingly being fed climate change advocacy as a surrogate for becoming climate science literate. This makes them easy targets for the climate alarmism that pervades America today. 

Earth’s climate probably is the most complicated non-living system one can study, because it naturally integrates astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, hydrology, oceanography and cryology, and also includes human behavior by both responding to and affecting human activities. Current concerns over climate change have further pushed climate science to the forefront of scientific inquiry.

What should we be teaching college students?

It is indisputable that significant climate change is a never ending condition: Earth’s climate, due to internal and external forces, is inconstant and variable across regions.

Chinese researchers determined that non-CO2 forcings are the principal causes of majors swings in a climate’s temperature, be it cooling and warming. They also determined that the modern 20th century warming, which doomsday alarmists attribute solely to the trace gas CO2, is well below the confirmed warming that took place in earlier, pre-industrial periods.

A new 368-year tree ring temperature reconstruction has established that regional (China) summer temperatures were warmer than they are now (2012) during the mid-1600s and early 1700s, and that the temperature variations can be linked to variations in solar activity, volcanic forcing (cooling), and natural oceanic-atmospheric oscillations (AMO/PDO).

The authors are intent on pointing out that it is “noteworthy that 20th century warming was not very obvious in our reconstruction.”  This “noteworthy” finding is mentioned four different times in the paper.

The lack of a conspicuous 20th century warming — and the warmer periods during the 1600s and 1700s — are clearly shown in the summer temperature graph below:

NOAA claims global temperatures are the hottest ever, based on some rather spectacular junk science. NOAA doesn’t actually have any temperature data over most of the land surface.

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They never had any data from most of the southern hemisphere.

Writing in the journal Nature, a group of scientists have documented that temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula have been falling steadily for the last 18 years at the rate of nearly one degree Fahrenheit per decade, countering earlier warming trends. 

During the second half of the 20^th century, the Antarctic Peninsula experienced an extended warming period igniting fears of apocalyptic catastrophes like that depicted in the 2004 Hollywood climate change disaster film, “The Day After Tomorrow.” According to the new essay, however, titled “Climate science: Cooling in the Antarctic,” scientists are now saying that the warming trend was caused by natural factors and reversed itself again by natural causes just before the turn of the millennium.

Nature’s editor noted that although the Antarctic Peninsula is “frequently presented as a case study of rapid warming,” scientists John Turner and colleagues have now shown that warming trends have abated and “for the early years of the twenty-first century the peninsula has in the main been cooling.”

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT.

Previous post.

Some interesting consequences about the nature of the soul here, which we flesh out later (get it?). Also, more proof that Equality is not part of the system. 

Chapter 44 That distinction among things did not result from the diversity of merits or demerits (alternate translation)

1 IT remains now for us to show that the distinction among things did not result from different movements of the free-will of rational creatures, as Origen maintained in his Peri Archon. For he wished to refute the objections and errors of the early heretics, who strove to prove that the different nature of good and evil in things is owing to contrary agents.

But on account of the great difference which he observed both in natural and in human things, which difference apparently is not preceded by any merits,–for instance that some bodies are lightsome, some dark, that some are born of pagans, some of Christians,–he was compelled to assert that all differences to be found in things have proceeded from a difference of merits, in accordance with the justice of God.

Karl Popper, the master mind who described and made readily available to us the modern scientific method has a great piece on pre-scientific and pseudo-scientific theories in his lecture:
Science as Falsification

“These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, open your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse to see it …”

The best answer to most of the claims by climate activists and their political allies is simply: so what?

“Climate change is real,” they say. So what? Gravity and sunrise are also real. That doesn’t mean we cause them or we would be better off without them. Climate has been changing since the origin of the atmosphere billions of years ago. 

But, “manmade climate change is a fact,” they respond. So what? It is obviously warmer in urban areas than in the countryside because of manmade impacts. But the only place where carbon dioxide (CO2) increase causes a temperature increase is in computer models preprogrammed to show exactly that. All records show that temperature increase precedes CO2 increase.

All that should matter to public officials is whether our CO2 emissions are in any way dangerous. Since they are almost certainly not, the $1 billion spent every day across the world on climate finance is mostly wasted.

Today, a negative correlation is observed in the amount of rainfall in north-western Africa and north-western Europe. If a humid winter climate prevails in north-western Europe, the climate in north-western Africa is dry. Due to melting ice sheets, this correlation was reversed in the early Holocene period; this resulted in both regions being humid respectively dry at the same time. Radical climate change occurred. The researchers have published their report in the current edition of Nature Geoscience.

I found a previously undiscovered version of 1999 NASA US temperatures, and made an updated animation of NASA’s US temperature fraud. Note that the old version is in degrees F.

NASA used to show about 1 degree F cooling from the 1930’s to the mid-1990’s, now they show warming.

Drought is a natural hazard that climate models have predicted will increase in the future in consequence of CO₂-induced global warming. One way to gauge the validity of such predictions is by examining long-term historic trends in drought to see if there is anything unusual about their occurrence over the past few decades, during which time climate alarmists claim the Earth has experienced unprecedented global warming due to rising atmospheric CO₂ emissions.  And that is exactly what the seven member research team of Biet al. (2015) did in assessing drought variability for southwest China over the past three-and-a-half centuries.

To accomplish their objective, Bi et al. analyzed 39 tree ring cores obtained from 23 Picea likiangensis trees growing on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (27.14°N, 100.23°E), located at the southern part of the Hengduan Mountains, southwest China, to reconstruct a historical spring season Palmer Drought Severity Index (PSDI) for this region.

A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice. 

The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”

There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.