Scientific Consensus Thoughts
Scientific consensus is not a sound argument. Galileo went against the consensus and earned himself house arrest for most of his life (despite being correct). Einstein was required to fight the consensus against his Theory of General Relativity. And he rightly pointed out that proving him wrong could be done by one person (i.e.: a consensus is not required). And up until the Nazis took Eugenics to a new level, the world wide consensus was solidly behind Eugenics. So consensus can provide support for a position but that doesn’t guarantee the position is correct.
The problem with the “Global Warming” consensus is the large volume of scientists that have and are continuing to speak out against the premise of projected catastrophic global warming. An example of this skepticism is the Oregon Petition which was signed by 31,487 American Scientists (9,029 with PhDs). The petition position is stated below.
“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
And to be fair, I’ll point you to skepticalscience.com, a site that dedicates itself to debunking climate skeptics. As usual they provide no actual evidence to dispute the petition statements. They (Skeptical Science) try to minimize the number of signatories (31,487) as only 0.3% of the 10.6 million science graduates since the 1970-71 school year.
That is most likely a correct number. In response, please show me the documents with a similar volume of signatures backing human caused catastrophic global warming. Shouldn’t be any problem given that 10.3 million scientists (based on the so called 97% consensus) should be backing the concept. They do provide a reference to studies that supposedly back up the 97% consensus. One of those studies (Cook et al) is highlighted here.
Cook reviewed 11,944 climate related abstracts to quantify their position on the Scientific consensus stated above. Cook came up with a 97% consensus by discarding the papers (7,930) that had no opinion and including papers (3,896) that agreed that we cause “some”, not the majority of the warming. In actual fact, only 41 (0.3%) of the papers endorsed the consensus as defined. The other studies have also been reviewed and are very subject to interpretation.
As mentioned by Skeptical Science, the petition is a little out of date. But I see the petition as surprisingly prophetic. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases has been harmful to the environment and mankind. Moving to solar and wind has had many unintended harmful consequences. Wind turbines are responsible for millions of bird and bat deaths every year and are responsible for health issues in both humans and livestock (based on harmful sonic frequencies). The wind turbine vibrations also appear to be causing problems with aquifer water quality (releasing fines making the water unusable). Solar is also not environmentally benign. The rare earth minerals required to make solar panels are not obtained in environmentally friendly manners. As the name implies, these minerals are “rare” and require huge tracts of land to be stripped. The same problem applies to both solar and wind on the battery side of the argument. Since both are intermittent, they have huge battery requirements to store energy for when the sun isn’t shining and/or the wind isn’t blowing. Lithium (a basic requirement for today’s batteries) mining is a huge environmental problem. There could also be serious future environmental issues related to cleaning up out of date solar and wind sites. Both solar and wind also require large tracts of land to implement when compared to current options. A few examples are shown below.
| Description | Detail | Energy Density (W/m2) |
| London Array (Offshore Wind) | 630 MW over 100 km2 | 2.5 |
| Desert solar PV farms | 20 | |
| Germany solar PV farms | 5 | |
| Bio Fuel | Corn (or equivalent) ethanol (best case) | 2 |
| Bio Fuel | Corn (or equivalent) ethanol (typical case) | 0.5 |
| Conventional Power Plants | ±1000 |
Apart from requiring huge areas of land, the traditional energy sources (coal, gas, etc.) are still required as backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and/or the sun doesn’t shine. Bottomline, two power generation systems are required when one (coal, natural gas, nuclear) would have been sufficient. The huge amount of capital required to put in unrequired power generation and the associated distribution systems is extremely detrimental to the economy. That money is wasted and could have been used to deal directly with real problems (real pollution, poverty (domestically and internationally), etc.). The overzealous green policies have put a damper on the global economy and that leaves less capital to address real environmental issues. As polls have shown, environmental concerns (especially “Climate Change”) go to the bottom of the priority list when the economy is not performing well. In fact, they’re at the bottom of the public’s priority list now despite the economic boom occurring in the US right now. If you really believe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we should be following the US lead and converting to more natural gas power generation. We should also be pushing for more LNG capacity to export to the Far East. Reducing China’s reliance on coal would have a much more profound effect on local and global air quality. The benefits would extend well beyond the perceived need to fix an unnecessary CO2 emission problem and actually address some of the real pollution problems faced by third world areas. We should also be exporting our cleaner coal combustion technologies. The third world can’t afford solar and wind technologies (which isn’t surprising given that the technologies are not economic here without significant subsidies). Cheap energy (coal and natural gas) would save millions of lives in the third world and reduce overall poverty levels.
The ”Climate Change” agenda has been extremely detrimental to the advancement of science and technology. The IPCC has focused almost exclusively on the anthropogenic contribution to climate change. As a result government funding has also been focussed on human related mechanisms rather than the natural mechanisms (i.e.: solar activity, ocean cycles, cloud and other albedo effects, etc.). Let’s remember that the IPCC is the “Intergovernmental” Panel on Climate Change. The make-up of the panel is more about politics than about science. If they were serious about understanding climate change they would actually promote study of the natural mechanisms. They don’t because their mandate doesn’t allow them that path. Restricting research to one path is a very unscientific approach to any problem. However that premise is understandable given the UN’s ultimate goal (forced wealth transfer from the developed nations to the Third World). Here are a couple of quotes from UN officials that sum up the rationale. You can also research Maurice Strong (sadly a Canadian), who kick started this whole process at the UN.
Ottmar Edenhofer: United Nations Climate Official (Co-chaired the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015)
- “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole”
- “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy”
- Five years earlier he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”
Christiana Figueres: Executive Secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
- “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.
- “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
The Oregon Petition was also correct in stating that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”. As I’ve pointed out earlier in the discussion, there is no empirical data that shows CO2 is a major driver of climate change. CO2 concentrations do play a role in determining temperatures but the other natural mechanisms have always been and always will be the dominating factors.
And yes CO2 increases have been very beneficial to plant life and therefore animal and human life. The earth has greened significantly in the last few decades. NASA’s acknowledgement can be found at www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth. The greening is not a surprise given that greenhouses routinely increase their CO2 concentration levels up to the 1200 – 1500 ppm. CO2 is plant food (i.e.: not a pollutant). In reality, current CO2 levels (410 ppm) are still close to plant starvation levels. At 150 ppm, virtually all life on this planet would cease to exist. During the last ice age we were down to 185 ppm. Higher CO2 levels also allow plants to grow in drier climates because they can process water more efficiently. CO2 levels would actually need to increase substantially for plants to truly thrive. And I personally would welcome higher temperatures. Especially given 2018’s northern hemisphere’s prolonged winter. Warming temperatures would benefit the northern hemisphere immensely. Growing seasons would be extended and the area of arable land would be extended further north. Unfortunately, I still believe that the fate of our climate is tied to solar activity and the future laid out by solar/atmospheric physicists (an area that the IPCC has very little experience with) is not very rosy. The degree of cooling is still a question mark, but even NASA has acknowledged that the coming decrease in solar activity will push global temperatures down. NASA is also predicting that the current solar activity low will occur in 2019/2020. So get ready for a couple more winters like 2018 (only worse). NASA still feels that the effects of CO2 will eventually override the reduction in solar energy. I really hope NASA is right.