Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Leaving the Church of Environmentalism


By Alan Caruba

In March 2009 while the Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to fulfill a presidential campaign pledge to document that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment, a longtime employee, Alan Carlin, put out a 93-page report challenging the science being cited and the drift of the agency from its initial role to one captured by fanatical activists and alarmists, treating environmentalism more as a religion than based in science.

At the time Carlin was a 72-year-old analyst and economist who, as The New York Times put it, “had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.” His EPA career would span 38 years. 

The website for his new book, “Environmentalism Gone Mad” says, “Dr. Alan Carlin is an economist and physical scientist with degrees from Caltech and MIT and publications in both economics and climate/energy, who became actively involved in the Sierra Club in the 1960s as an activist and Chapter Chairman. This led to a career as a manager and senior analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency.”

As he says in the preface “The purpose of this book is to explain why I changed from my lifelong support of the environmental movement to extreme skepticism concern their current primary objective of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide.”

“Although I and the many other climate skeptics are now referred to as ‘deniers’ by the climate alarmists, that does not change the science—and there is no valid scientific basis for the alarmists’ catastrophic climate predictions—or justify their fantastically expensive and useless ‘solution.’”

Carlin went from being a dedicated environmentalist, based on its initial philosophy of conservation, to an observer of the movement that was taken over and distorted to advocate falsehoods about global warming and a transition from fossil-fuels to “clean energy” meaning wind, solar and bio-fuels. As an economist he understood how absurd it was to suggest rejecting fossil-fuels, the key element of modern industry and society.

“The climate alarmists,” says Carlin, “have now been making their apocalyptic predictions for almost thirty years and it is now possible to compare their predictions with actual physical observations.”  Suffice to say all the predictions of a significantly higher temperature—the warming—have been wrong.

In fact, the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since 1998 and shows no indication of warming

Predictions about the North and South Poles melting, a major rise in ocean levels, increased hurricanes and other climate events have been wrong along with countless other climate-related apocalyptic predictions.

Having observed how the EPA has functioned for more than three decades, Carlin warns that its current “environmental policy has been hijacked by radicals intent on imposing their ideology by government fiat on the rest of us whether we like it or not…If environmental policy is based on government fiat or ‘green’ policy prescriptions the results have been and are very likely to continue to be disastrous.”

At 625 pages, Carlin’s book takes the reader from his early days as a Sierra Club activist and chapter leader to being an EPA outcast, denounced for telling the truth about the false claims of global warming, climate change, and what is now being called extreme weather.

As an economist, Carlin is particularly upset that “the Obama Administration’s climate/energy policy is wasting very large sums on non-solutions to minor or non-problems.”  The book has come along as President Obama has been flogging “climate change” as the greatest threat to the nation and the world.

“It has been long recognized that weather is chaotic," says Carlin. While we operate within the four seasons, the weather that occurs can only be predicted in the most general terms. Suggesting that humans actually have any effect on the weather is absurd.

That is why the predictions made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and all the others based on computer models are, by definition, worthless. Computer models cannot predict anything about the vast chaotic global climate system. Even today, meteorologists are mystified by the actions of clouds which can form and disappear in minutes.

It’s useful to keep in mind that climate is measured in centuries, while the weather is reported as what is occurring today and forecast, at best, for no more than a week. Weather records are maintained for purposes of comparison and within the larger context of determining the Earth’s climate cycles. Like those in the past, the present cooling cycle is based on a comparable one of the Sun that is producing lower levels of radiation. You don’t need a Ph.D. in meteorology to understand this.

Carlin does not hesitate to excoriate the blather put forth by the alarmists; particularly their claims that the weather is affected in any significant fashion by human activity and development in particular. “There is simply no evidence thus far that the normal activities of man have or will result in catastrophic outcomes for either man or nature.”

The actions the alarmists call for do nothing to enhance and benefit our lives. They drive up the cost of energy and food. They ignore how dependent modern life is on the use of fossil fuels.

“Despite all the lavish funding by liberal foundations and the federal government on their global warming doctrine-inspired programs, the radical environmental movement has long since gone so far beyond rationality that it is counter-productive in achieving its own ends.”

So long as it remains heavily funded and backed by the federal government, we must, like Carlin, speak out against environmental extremism. We must elect new people to govern in a more realistic, science-based fashion. We must urge our current legislators to rein in the rogue Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

4 comments:

Harry Dale Huffman said...

Radical environmentalism--which is now being preached as politically and morally correct by all of our authoritative institutions--is not just a church, or religion, but a religion on a jihad, a holy war as it were. And they are out for revenge (against the Bush years, "Capitalism"--as they see it, "Big Oil", "Big Corporations", etc. ad infinitum); their self-righteousness is what is driving them, what has in fact made them insane in so many of their ridiculous claims and demands, without regard for how many innocents they are harming (including the false education of recent generations and the reputation of modern science itself). And they are but one part of the coalition of radical groups that now feel supremely empowered by the Obama administration--and by a man clearly lacking in character.

Mankind needs to learn from the many varieties of war being waged because of religiously-held, but patently false, beliefs now.

There is a basic--inalienable--right of Man that needs to be brought out and explicitly made a foundational part of all our laws. A new injunction must be strictly enforced upon all merely religiously-held beliefs (those lacking observational support, i.e., for which there is objective evidence AGAINST the belief): "No coercion, in any form, of unbelievers." We should already know this; millennia of hard experience already gave birth to "the separation of church and state" in the U.S.A..

Anonymous said...

Well said Alan and well said Harry. The battle we face is bigger than anything we've ever faced before. The one and only physical effect that adding more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is one of increased cooling efficiency, see http://www.principia-scientific.org/the-four-known-scientific-ways-carbon-dioxide-cools-earth-s-climate.html To those who understand these proper physics it is no surprise at all that there has been no continued warming despite ever-increasing amount of naturally occurring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Dr Norman Page said...

Marc
I agree with Carlin as quoted in the Caruba article.
For a complete discussion of the uselessness of the IPCC’s modeling approach to forecasting climate see Section 1 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Here are the conclusions
“In summary the temperature projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.”
Some think that the IPCC reductionist approach is the only one available -that that is all we reliably have. That is patently not the case. Quasi- repetitive patterns are clearly present in the changing temperature data which we use as the symbol of climate change, We can think of these emergent patterns as the product of the real world as a virtual computer if that makes the numerical and digitally minded more comfortable. Similar patterns are seen e.g. in the solar data ,the ocean data (PDO AMO etc) and as is well known in the planetary orbits and the Milankovic cycles,. The human brain is at this time superior to computers in seeing these patterns . Think about it – computers cannot produce ( see )patterns unless they have been fed the input data and algorithms on which they run . Computer outputs at the core are always tautologous ie circular in the sense that they depend upon what was fed into them by human programmers.
I think that if we stand back and view the climate data with the right time scale perspective and have a wide knowledge of the relevant data time series so that we can judge its reliability, that patterns are clearly obvious ,that their period and amplitude ranges can be reasonably estimated and projected forward and that the relationships between the driver and temperature data may be reasonably well inferred without being necessarily precisely calculated..
The biggest and on-going mistake of the establishment is to ignore the longer term cycles and to project forward several decades of data linearly when we are obviously approaching, at or just past a peak in a millennial cycle. This is more than scientific inadequacy – it is a lack of basic common sense. It is like taking the temperature trend from say Jan – June and projecting it forward linearly for ten years or so.The modelers approach is analogous to looking at a pointillist painting from 6 inches – they simply can’t see the wood for the trees or the pattern for the dots. ( In a recent paper Mann has finally after much manipulation managed to discover the 60 +/- year cycle which any schoolboy can see by looking at Fig 15 at the linked post above).
The same post also provides estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling based on the 60 and especially the millennial quasi- periodicity so obvious in the temperature data and using the neutron count and 10 Be data as the most useful proxy for solar “activity”.
It now appears that we are just past a peak in the millennial temperature cycle and the cooling trend since the 2003 temperature trend peak is just the start of a general cooling trend towards the depths of the next LIA at about 2635. See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
It is time for the skeptical blogosphere and realist commentators to stop playing the game by the IPCC rules i.e. discussing climate from modified versions or a subset of the reductionist modeling approach and move on to basing discussion. argument and investigation on the timing and amplitude of the natural cycles

Unknown said...

There is a recently released book that goes into the history of the hoax of man-made global warming and the science of why the hypotheses of the greenhouse gas effect does not exist. The book is" Vapor tiger" by Adrian Vance. It is a Kindle book available from Amazon.
It is a confirmation Dr. Carlin original EPA paper that there is no correlation between CO2 concentration and atmospheric temperature.