Republicans shouldn’t be letting Democrats control the conversation about climate change, but that is what the former have been doing. The current election season gives opportunity for Republicans to reverse course.
With that in mind, this writer suggests the following commentary that GOP candidates can give during speeches.
I want to talk about the subject of climate change, a subject that political partisans try to use as a sledgehammer to tear down the GOP.
Yes, climate change happens. It has been happening for as long as there has been a climate.
What is new is the illogical notion that climate change shouldn’t happen and that it wouldn’t happen were it not for Mankind’s activities.
Climate history exposes that notion as being false.
For example, the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon that took place roughly 500 years before the start of the Industrial Revolution. Its occurrence should inform us that such climate change can happen again. Its occurrence prior to the Industrial Revolution should inform us that such climate change can occur without Mankind’s help.
Yet, as geophysicist Dr. David Deming testified before the U.S. Senate, certain parties want to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period, and they have managed to fool some of the general population. However, climate scientists themselves have not been fooled.
In 2003, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics issued a press release which starts with the following statement:
A review of more than 200 climate studies led by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1000 years. The review also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents. While 20th century temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show the medieval warmth to be greater than that of the 20th century.
In 2012, the science journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters published a study which states that “both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula.”
Climate scientists outside of the USA have openly expressed their belief that global climate is controlled by Nature, not by Man. In July of 2008, India’s national newspaper The Hindu published a science article which states the following:
Russian scientists say climate models are inaccurate since scientific understanding of many natural climate factors is still poor and cannot be properly modelled. Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ocean Studies, and many other Russian scientists maintain that global climate depends predominantly on natural factors, such as solar activity, precession (wobbling) of the Earth’s axis, changes in ocean currents, fluctuations in saltiness of ocean surface water, and some other factors, whereas industrial emissions do not play any significant role.
Regarding climate change, some parties insist on going along with an alleged consensus of climate scientists. American climatologist Dr. John Christy disagrees with any such consensus. Here is part of what he said during a U.S. Senate hearing:
The term “consensus science” will often be appealed to regarding arguments about climate change to bolster an assertion. This is a form of “argument from authority.” Consensus, however, is a political notion, not a scientific notion. As I testified to the Inter-Academy Council in June 2010, wrote in Nature that same year (Christy 2010), and documented in my written House Testimony last year (House Space, Science and Technology, 31 Mar 2011) the IPCC and other similar Assessments do not represent for me a consensus of much more than the consensus of those selected to agree with a particular consensus.
The content of these climate reports is actually under the control of a relatively small number of individuals – I often refer to them as the “climate establishment” – who through the years, in my opinion, came to act as gatekeepers of scientific opinion and information, rather than brokers. The voices of those of us who object to various statements and emphases in these assessments are by-in-large dismissed rather than acknowledged.
This establishment includes the same individuals who become the “experts” called on to promote IPCC claims in trickle-down fashion to government reports such as the endangerment finding by the Environmental Protection Agency. As outlined in my House Testimony, these “experts” become the authors and evaluators of their own research relative to research which challenges their work. But with the luxury of having the “last word” as “expert” authors of the reports, alternative views vanish.
I’ve often stated that climate science is a “murky” science. We do not have laboratory methods of testing our hypotheses as many other sciences do. As a result what passes for science includes, opinion, arguments from authority, dramatic press releases, and fuzzy notions of consensus generated by a preselected group. This is not science.
So, yes, the climate is changing, just as it always has since the Earth was first formed.
Yes, Mankind’s activities can play a role in climate change, even if that role is insignificant.
Yes, we should do all that is reasonable to keep Mankind’s impact on the environment at a minimum. By “reasonable” I mean those things that won’t harm our nation’s economy while producing negligible results.
However, we should be wary of any alleged consensus, because a consensus isn’t science. Instead, it is a political tool used to coerce people to go along with a particular claim regardless of any scientific data that contradicts the claim.
We should also be wary of efforts to punish people for daring to disagree with government-funded climate scientists who give gloom-and-doom predictions in order to keep the government-grant money flowing to them.
Folks, this fuss about climate change is due in part to certain government-funded climate scientists getting their egos bruised whenever their claims are challenged. Climate scientists on the government dole aren’t more noble and altruistic than climate scientists who are privately funded, and the former are just as fallible as the latter, as evident by the way that the climate models used by IPCC keep failing. We are now learning that some climate scientists are manipulating raw temperature data in order to make that data conform to the predictions of computer models. Something is seriously wrong when scientists refuse to allow their claims to be falsifiable.
Finally, we need to acknowledge that Mother Nature doesn’t play by Man’s rules. She was bringing about climate change before the dawn of civilization, and she would still be bringing about climate change even if civilization were to disappear. Anyone who says otherwise is a climate-change denier.
By the way, climate scientists in the UK are now predicting a form of impending climate change that could easily turn this debate on its head, namely the global cooling which will result from the Sun beginning its Maunder Minimum. If such a prediction is correct, then the deniers will be the people who stick their fingers in their ears and say to themselves, “La-la-la. There is a consensus. La-la-la.”
