Greens. Myth versus reality

What they say:	What they do:
We're 'saving the planet'	Destroy natural environments by plastering world with inefficient, land intensive, weather and season dependent wind and solar power
We must all move to zero CO2-emitting energy now	Oppose zero CO2-emitting, reliable, nuclear electricity
All our critics are shills for Big Oil	Take money from billionaires like Steyer, Grantham, ... to promote wind and solar
We support radical decentred democaracy	Support authoritarian top-down laws concocted by anti-humanity 'experts'

Hal Lewis Resignation Letter from the American Physical Society

December 8, 2010

By Hal Lewis

The following resignation letter was sent by Hal Lewis, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to the American Physical Society:Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal LewisFrom: Hal Lewis, University of California,

The following resignation letter was sent by Hal Lewis, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to the American Physical Society:

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

The Sun changes earth's climate, not plant food.

Changes in the sun's activity cause earthquakes. Earthquakes happen around tectonic plate junctions, in the same place where volcanoes happen. If solar activity alters behaviour around tectonic plates it must affect volcanism too. Volcanoes cool earth's climate by ejecting tiny particles into the upper atmosphere which reflect sunlight away from earth. The last time we saw it dramatically was 29 years ago with the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. It cooled the Northern hemisphere by at least ½°C, for more than 1 year.

"In this paper, we analyze 20 years of proton density and velocity data, as recorded by the SOHO satellite, and the worldwide seismicity in the corresponding period, as reported by the ISC-GEM catalogue. We found clear correlation between proton density and the occurrence of large earthquakes (M> 5.6), with a time shift of one day. The signifcance of such correlation is very high, with with probability to be wrong lower than 10^-5 " [meaning one in 10000] ... In this paper, we demonstrate that it [the correlation] can likely be due to the efect of solar wind, modulating the proton density and hence the electrical potential between the ionosphere and the Earth ... our hypothesis only implies that the proton density would act as a further, small trigger to cause the fracture on already critically charged faults, thus producing the observed large scale earthquake correlation."

Links: Salon | Nature (paper, open access)

Note: Volcanos also happen at seismic fault lines.

Why "climate science" is not good science.

Keywords: Hypothesis, hypothesis testing, scientific method, null hypothesis, testable hypothesis, scientific hypothesis

Greenhouse effect

AKA Greenhouse gas effect, GHGE, was never formulated as a scientific, testable hypothesis. It is pre-science, not science, a thought experiment, or model, currently summarized in (mainly) 2 papers: Manabe & Wetherald 1967, and Held & Soden 2000. Using a model of how they think the atmosphere works, plus calculations from those papers GHGE supporters calculate their greenhouse gas warming effect. The details of this calculation are obscured because its supporters never discuss nor debate it. They call it "settled science" or "basic physics". In fact it is neither science nor physics. This is the basic lie at the heart of climate doom propaganda.

GHGE is not even a scientific hypothesis because it is not validated. There aren't even any rigorous tests proposed for it. There are many alternative ways the calculation can be done using other models of how the atmosphere behaves. I can think of 4 models which calculate a negligible "greenhouse gas effect" because their model of atmospheric behaviour is different. In science, we decide between competing models of how something works by formulating each as a "testable hypothesis". The "hypothesis" part is the explanation for it. The "testable" part is the proof of the pudding. Supporters and critics of a hypothesis should formulate real world experiments to test the idea. Every valid test must pass, meaning the predicted hypothesis results must agree with experiment and observation. If any single test fails, the hypothesis is abandoned or reformulated.

So far, greenhouse gas effect supporters have succeeded by corrupting science. They by-passed the "testable hypothesis" requirement for science and just declared their idea "settled science".

"climate science"

Before it became "climate science", the study of climate was called climatology. Modelers behind the greenhouse gas effect renamed their work as "climate science" because it wasn't any kind of science at all. It was modeling. Not very good modeling either because the modelers ride roughshod over rules for making good forecasts. Science involves empirical observation and/or experiment done under controlled conditions. At its worst: modeling is just making stuff up.

Alternatives to 'consensus' GHGE model:

• David Evans,
• Ferenc Miskolczi,
• Dai Davies,
• Nasif Nahle, ...

How to argue with climate alarmists

1. Stop bandying insults with them. It does not help. Insults help neither you, by-standers, nor lefties. It annoys people. Bystanders will mute you to stop you boring them.

To be clear: never insult them - even when they provoke you. It distracts you (from your aim of presenting the evidence). It makes you look bad in the eyes of neutrals. It makes you feel bad in your own minds-eye. Insults harm you more than they harm your opponent. This isn't a Christian thing = be meek; it's a rationalist thing - use reason.

2. Ask them for their evidence. In fact: demand: evidence, evidence, evidence. Or demand they evaluate your evidence.

They will, most likely, give you some general statements. Don't accept generalities from them as evidence. Generalities are never evidence; they are conclusions. Demand specifics.

Lefties (Wokes, climate alarmists and Marxians) think in generalities. For example:

• all men are sexist
• all whites are racist
• all climate change is the fault of humans
• everything bad in society is due to capitalism

This is why we should ask for specific evidence, such as an actual example. It forces the alarmist to think and even question themselves about whether they really understand anything. If they cannot give a specific, clear example of something it becomes harder for them to generalize about everything. Then they begin to wonder whether they are right or wrong.

Don't let them distract you with: insults, bluster, projection, argument from authority, whataboutery and red-herrings. Stick to your point. Force them to at least say yay or nay to your evidence.

Discipline yourself. Discuss one issue at a time. Don't let them make the discussion about something else; which they'll try to do. Do not stop asking for evidence or demanding they look at evidence until they give you a clear reply such as: already looked at that, I reject it because blah, ... Force them to, at least, consider the evidence. Make it clear that if they want to move on to something else, they must first deal with your evidence. At the very least, they must tell you why they reject it.

3. Don't bother telling the left they are moral degenerates or anything like that. They'll find you incomprehensible. The reason they are the left is because they're morally superior to you (in their minds)! You can only win an argument about ethics/morality by presenting a careful argument which requires a discussion or a slideshow, or a video. Not bandying. Not labeling. You are allowed to make a side-snipe at the end: provided you already gave your evidence.