For years the refrain has been “the science is settled,” never mind that actual science is never settled — but from former Vice President Al Gore and “the Earth has a fever” to frenzied warnings that every natural disaster is somehow the fault of “climate change — for decades the mantra has been “we must reduce carbon emissions or we’re all going to die.”
However, prominent climate researchers are beginning to put the brakes on the “science” that has been used to push “renewables” such as solar and wind and devastate the oil and gas industry.
Writing in The Free Press, Climate Scientist and Co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute Patrick T. Brown admits that in a recent paper published in the prestigious journal Nature, he and his co-authors deliberately left out data that didn’t fit the narrative — simply in order to get published.
“I am a climate scientist,” he wrote. “And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.”
He said his most recent paper focused exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior.
“I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell,” he wrote. “This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.”
Brown wrote that climate science has become — well not so much about the science.
“To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change,” he wrote. “However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Brown is far from the only prominent climate researcher sounding warning bells on the way so-called climate change is being approached.
Nobel Prize Laureate John Clauser has faced serious backlash in recent weeks for challenging the “consensus” on climate models.
According to the Epoch Times, Clauser joined another Nobel laureate and more than 1,600 professionals in signing the World Climate Declaration (WCD) organized by Climate Intelligence. This declaration asserts that there’s no “climate emergency,” that climate change science isn’t conclusive, and that the Earth’s history over thousands of years shows a consistently changing climate.
Clauser and his colleagues have found themselves in trouble merely for pointing out the obvious — that current models are insufficient, overemphasize the effects of greenhouse gasses and that they have failed to accurately predict levels of warming and ignore the beneficial effects of increased carbon dioxide levels.
According to Real Clear Investigations, Clauser had a presentation canceled this summer by the International Monetary Fund over his climate views, and the head of the nonprofit with which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other members have been delisted from LinkedIn for their dissident views.
“Meanwhile, a top academic journal retracted published research doubting a climate emergency after negative coverage in legacy media,” RCI reports. “The move was decried by another prominent climate dissenter, Roger Pielke Jr., as ‘one of the most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen’ – criticism muffled because the academic says he has been blocked on Twitter (now X) by reporters on the climate beat.”
Even former President Barack Obama’s science advisor is sounding warning bells about the head-long rush to “decarbonize” the economy.
“What advocates of climate action are trying to do is scare the bejesus out of the public so they’ll think we need to [act] fast,” Steven Koonin, author of ‘Unsettled:?What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,’ told RCI. “You have to balance the certainties and uncertainties of the changing climate – the risks and hazards?– against many other factors.”
RCI notes that the scientists who are skeptical are not of one mind, but are concerned about the way they are systematically being sidelined by government funding agencies, foundation grant-makers, academic journals, and much of the media.
“These dissenters don’t all agree on all scientific questions and do not speak in a single voice. Clauser, for example, is a self-styled “climate denialist” who believes climate is regulated by clouds, while Pielke, a political scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Bjørn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, acknowledge humans are affecting the climate but say there is sufficient time to adapt,” the RCI story reads. “The dissenters do, however, agree that the public and government officials are getting a one-sided, apocalyptic account that stokes fear, politicizes science, misuses climate modeling, and shuts down debate.”
Among their arguments:
• There is no climate crisis or existential threat as expressed in catastrophic predictions by activists in the media and academia. As global temperatures gradually increase, human societies will need to make adjustments in the coming century, just as societies have adapted to earlier climate changes. By and large, humans cannot control the climate, which Pielke describes as “the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.”
• Global temperatures are increasing incrementally, and have been for centuries, but the degree of human influence is uncertain or negligible. Climate skeptics themselves don’t agree on how much humans are contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels, and how much is caused by natural variability from El Niño and other cycles that can take centuries to play out. “The real question is not whether the globe has warmed recently,” writes Koonin, “but rather to what extent this warming is being caused by humans.”
• Rapidly replacing fossil fuels with renewables and electricity by mid-century would be economically risky and may have a negligible effect on global warming. Some say mitigation decrees – such as phasing out the combustion engine and banning gas stoves – are not likely to prevent climate change because humans play a minor role in global climate trends. Others say mitigation is necessary but won’t happen without capable replacement technologies. It’s unrealistic, they say, to force societies to rely on intermittent energy from wind and solar, or wager the future on technologies that are still in experimental stages.
