In a recent interview with National Public Radio
host Diane Rehm, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very
strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the
facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands
climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting
our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We
should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”
While he didn’t vilify us by name, Mr. Schmidt was
certainly targeting us, the climate scientists who collect and summarize
thousands of articles for the NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered
reports, the hundreds who participate in Heartland Institute climate conferences, and the 31,487 US
scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, attesting that there is no
convincing scientific evidence that humans are causing catastrophic warming or
climate disruption.
All of us are firm skeptics of claims that humans are
causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. We are not climate
change “deniers.” We know Earth’s climate and weather are constantly in flux,
undergoing recurrent fluctuations that range from flood and drought cycles to
periods of low or intense hurricane and tornado activity, to the Medieval Warm
Period (950-1250 AD) and Little Ice Age (1350-1850) – and even to Pleistocene
glaciers that repeatedly buried continents under a mile of ice.
What we deny is the notion that humans can prevent these
fluctuations, by ending fossil fuel use and emissions of plant-fertilizing
carbon dioxide, which plays only an insignificant role in climate change.
The real deniers are people who think our climate was and
should remain static and unchanging, such as 1900-1970, supposedly – during
which time Earth actually warmed and then cooled, endured the Dust Bowl, and
experienced periods of devastating hurricanes and tornadoes.
The real deniers refuse to recognize that natural
forces dictate weather and climate events. They deny that computer model
predictions are completely at odds with real world events, that there has been
no warming since 1995, and that several recent winters have been among the
coldest in centuries in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, despite
steadily rising CO2 levels. They refuse to acknowledge that, as of December 25,
it’s been 3,347 days since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland;
this is by far the longest such stretch since record-keeping began in 1900, if
not since the American Civil War.
Worst of all, they deny that their “solutions” hurt our
children and grandchildren, by driving up energy prices, threatening
electricity reliability, thwarting job creation, and limiting economic growth
in poor nations to what can be sustained via expensive wind, solar, biofuel and
geothermal energy. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” From our
perspective, perpetuating poverty, misery, disease and premature death in poor African
and Asian countries – in the name or preventing climate change – is evil.
It is truly disturbing that Mr. Schmidt could make a
statement so thoroughly flawed in its basic premise. He runs a multi-billion
dollar company that uses vast quantities of electricity to disseminate
information throughout the world. Perhaps he should speak out on issues he
actually understands. Perhaps he would be willing to debate us or Roy Spencer,
David Legates, Pat Michaels and other climate experts.
Setting aside the irrational loyalty of alarmists like
Schmidt to a failed “dangerous manmade climate change” hypothesis, equally
disturbing is the money wasted because of it. Consider an article written for
the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers’ summit website by Google
engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork, who worked on Google’s “RE
Beginning in 2007, they say, “Google committed
significant resources to tackle the world’s climate and energy problems. A few
of these efforts proved very successful: Google deployed some of the most
energy efficient data centers in the world, purchased large amounts of
renewable energy, and offset what remained of its carbon footprint.”
It’s wonderful that the company improved the energy
efficiency of its power-hungry data centers. But the project spent untold
millions of dollars and countless man hours. To what actual benefits? To
address precisely what climate and energy problems? And how exactly did
Google offset its carbon footprint? By buying “carbon credits” from outfits
like the New Forests Company, which drove impoverished
Ugandan villagers out of their homes, set fire to their houses and burned a
young boy to death?
What if, as skeptics like us posit and actual evidence
reflects, man-made climate change is not in fact occurring? That would mean there
is no threat to humans or our planet, and lowering Google’s CO2 footprint would
bring no benefits. In fact, it would keep poor nations poverty stricken and
deprived of modern technologies – and thus unable to adapt to climate change.
Imagine what Google could have accomplished if its resources had been channeled
to solving actual problems with actual solutions!
In 2011, the company decided its RE“green energy is simply not economically, viable and
resources that we as a society waste in trying to make it so would be better
used to improve the efficiencies in established energy technologies like coal.”
Skeptics like us reached that conclusion long ago. It is
the primary reason for our impassioned pleas that that the United States and
other developed nations stop making energy policy decisions based on the
flawed climate change hypothesis. However, the article’s most breathtaking
statement was this:
“Climate scientists have definitively shown that the
buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger.... A 2008 paper by James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies… showed the true gravity of the situation. In it,
Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society
should aim for ‘if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on
which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.’ His
climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in
the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already blown past
that limit. Right now, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400
ppm.…”
We would never presume to question the sincerity,
intellect, dedication or talent of these two authors. However, this statement
presents a stunning failure in applying Aristotelian logic. Even a quick
reading would make the following logical conclusions instantly obvious:
1. Hansen theorized that 350 ppm of
atmospheric CO2 would have catastrophic results.
2. CO2 did indeed reach, and then
exceed, this level by a significant amount.
3. There were no consequences,
much less catastrophic results, as our earlier points make clear.
4. Therefore, real-world evidence
clearly demonstrates that Hansen’s hypothesis is wrong.
This kind of reasoning (the scientific method) has served
progress and civilization well since the Seventeenth Century. But the Google
team has failed to apply it. Instead, they resorted to repeating the “slash
fossil fuel use or Earth and humanity are doomed” tautology, without regard for
logic or facts – while Mr. Schmidt impugned our intelligence, character and
ethics as CAGW skeptics.
We enthusiastically support Eric Schmidt’s admonition
that our nation base its policy decisions on facts, even when those facts do
not support an apocalyptic environmental worldview. We also support President
Obama’s advice that people should not “engage in self-censorship,” because of
bullying or “because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of someone
whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”
In fact, we will keep speaking out, regardless of what
Messsrs. Schmidt, Hansen and Obama might say.
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