Confessions of a Lukewarmist

[Selected by Rael]

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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http://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/confessions-of-lukewarmist.html#more
Friday, January 27, 2012

Confessions of a Lukewarmist

Today, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from 16 distinguished
scientists addressed to political candidates entitled, No Need to Panic
About Global Warming.

"Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well
over 10 years now," they write, a fact that "is known to the warming
establishment."

The piece directly attacks the notion that carbon dioxide emissions are
warming the globe, concluding with:

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our
environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that
divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable
claims of 'incontrovertible' evidence.

The term 'incontrovertible' refers to a policy statement of the American
Physical Society which states, "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global
warming is occurring."

These guys are no lightweights. The group includes a Nobel Prize-winning
physicist, the aerospace engineer who designed Voyager, past and present
editors of scientific journals; professors from Princeton, Cambridge and
MIT, and the president of the World Federation of Scientists.

This letter propels my shift from ardent warmist to lukewarmist, to,
eventually, full blown skeptic, it seems.

In 2006, I was amused at the irony of my global warming action on a street
corner in frigid temperatures, though I understood that anecdotal data is
not a mathematically sound method of discerning trends. A slick patch of ice
at the curb prompted warnings from me that people heeded probably far more
than my warmist sign. My inner sadist was even more amused when people
didn't absorb my ice patch warning, though I still feel a little guilty by
the hurt look in one guy's eyes when he caught me snickering as he
slip-slided away.

My own doubts about global warming did not begin until Climategate 2009,
when the University of East Anglia was caught publishing false data showing
temperature increases. Significant errors in a report by the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where it grossly
exaggerated glacial retreat, also raised a question.

But I held fast to the belief that global warming must be real because
forests are being denuded, deserts are growing, mass tracts of prairie and
wetlands are being converted to asphalt and concrete, and the toxicity of
our atmosphere is directly attributable to 15 centuries of military and
industrial pollution.

In 2010, an independent investigative body told the IPCC to stop lobbying on
behalf of global warming programs. Members of the IPCC were also ordered to
reveal their financial connections to such programs. In the end, the
warmists were found innocent of any wrongdoing.

Cognitive dissonance is bearable with topics that seem remote. But because
chemtrails feel like a more immediate threat than global warming, IPCC
promotion of geoengineering strengthened my doubts about warming.

In UN Climate Concern Morphs into Chemtrail Glee Club (Dec. 2010), I wrote
of the connections between Indian businessman and economist, Rajendra
Pachauri, who chairs the IPCC. In his comments at Cancun's opening
ceremony, he stated, "The scope of the AR5 has also been expanded over and
above previous reports, and would include, for instance, focused treatment
of subjects like clouds and aerosols, geo-engineering options," and the
usual climate-related issues.

A close look at Pachauri revealed his extensive interests in companies that
stand to benefit from geoengineering schemes. In the Science and Public
Policy Institute's April 2010 investigative report entitled, "Dr Rajendra
Pachauri and the IPCC - No Fossil Fool," Pachauri is criticized for using
his IPCC position "to attract major funding to his own organization, The
Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)."

The IPCC's assertion that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 "was based
on a decade-old interview of one climate scientist in a science magazine,
The New Scientist," which apparently misquoted him, reported the New York
Times in January 2010. The scientist, Dr. Syed Hasnain, is a glacier
specialist who works at Pachauri's TERI research institute.

But my doubts did not develop into full-blown skepticism until Climategate
2.0, when the November 2011 leaked emails showed that IPCC scientists
discussed manipulating the data to agree with policy, and began deleting
their emails.

"The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for
all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run," wrote one IPCC
scientist, Peter Thorne.

In journalist Andrew Orlowski's first look at the Climategate 2.0 emails:

To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the
selective approach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence
to make it suitably dramatic, and quietly hiding caveats. 'We need to
communicate the uncertainty and be honest," pleads Thorne, in another email
from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale 'signature' of greenhouse gas
warming was absent. 'Observations do not show rising temperatures
throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and
approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.'

Charges of intellectual corruption stem from the fact that the IPCC did not
clarify that its conclusions were based on a fair amount of uncertainty: the
data was based "on modern temperature trends and historical temperature
reconstructions," Orlowski summarized. With that speculative data as its
starting point, models were then built to predict future temperature trends
and impacts, which East Anglia climatologist Phil Jones describes as "all
wrong" in one of the leaked emails.

But what is most shocking to me is that those scientists deliberately
deleted emails to hide their uncertainty from the public. No doubt that is
what triggered someone to snag them before the evidence disappeared.

Global Warming Initiatives

Like 95% of the public, I'm reliant on scientific integrity, no matter how
wary I am of corporations and governments. As I morph from science-educated
warmist to skeptic, I follow a variety of sources to give myself the best
chance of ascertaining the truth of climate change. The models presented in
college made logical sense, but, I have since learned, failed to include
decades of deliberately altering the atmosphere with aerosols aimed at
altering the weather.

No one at Ohio State mentioned the 1977 United Nations ban on hostile
environmental modification programs enacted after the US chemtrailed
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, creating deluge after deluge. I doubt the
school mentions to undergraduates the 2010 ban on "friendly" ENMOD programs,
either, despite the incredibly toxic effects of these programs.

While industry-funded organizations posing as populist fronts continue to
deny decades of geoengineering activities, simple logic refutes this. The
UN would not ban fictional activities based on conspiracy theories. They
have hard evidence. Some of that evidence led the UN's World Meteorological
Organization to complain in 2007, "In recent years there has been a decline
in the support for weather modification research, and a tendency to move
directly into operational projects."
When governments actually admit to chemtrails, they advise it is done to
combat global warming, to provide rain or drought as needed, or to weaken or
redirect hurricanes and other storms.

The extent of government-industry deception over climate and ENMOD is deeply
disturbing, while indisputably toxic drilling on land and sea remains legal.
Hypocrisy can be cynically amusing, but overturned paradigms can be
emotionally devastating.

While warmists may eventually be proven correct that industrial pollution is
warming the planet and changing its climate, honest climatologists at the
IPCC admit that the evidence is not yet solid.

While watching Fargo, my college roommate, who delivered newspapers in
Cleveland during the wee hours of the morning, repeatedly replayed the scene
where a kid tosses a paper from his bike, causing it to slide out from under
him. She bellowed with laughter. I think her inner sadist is bigger than
mine. I also think Frances McDormand is one of the most talented actors in
Hollywood, though she did attend an Oscar party in 2006 to benefit "global
warming initiatives."

It is those initiatives that concern me the most. Geoengineering
deliberately alters the chemistry of the sky and seas. Regardless of
whether humans have suicidally warmed the planet, the last thing we need to
do is pile more pollution on top of what the military-industrial complex has
already pummeled the biosphere with.

Rady Ananda is an investigative reporter and researcher in the areas of
health, environment, politics, and civil liberties. Her two websites, Food
Freedom and COTO Report are essential reading.

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