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  <fig rect=(420.2786560058594, 30.058135986328125, 565.2744750976562, 129.38531494140625)></fig> GWPF REPORTS
  Views expressed in the  publications of the  Global  Warming Policy Foundation   are those of the authors,  not those of the GWPF,  its Trustees, its Academic  Advisory Council members  or its Directors.
  THE GLOBAL WARMING   POLICY FOUNDATION Director Dr Benny Peiser
  BOARD OF TRUSTEES
  Sir Martin Jacomb Henri Lepage Baroness Nicholson Lord Turnbull
  Lord Lawson (Chairman) Lord Barnett Lord Donoughue Lord Fellowes Rt Rev Peter Forster Bishop of Chester
  ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL
  Professor Richard Lindzen Professor Ross McKitrick Professor Robert Mendelsohn Professor Sir Alan Peacock Professor Ian Plimer Professor Gwyn Prins Professor B P Radhakrishna Professor Paul Reiter Dr Matt Ridley Sir Alan Rudge Professor Philip Stott Professor Richard Tol Dr David Whitehouse
  Professor David Henderson (Chairman)  Adrian Berry (Viscount Camrose)  Sir Samuel Brittan Sir Ian Byatt  Professor Robert Carter Professor Vincent Courtillot Professor Freeman Dyson Christian Gerondeau Dr Indur Goklany Professor William Happer Professor Terence Kealey Professor Anthony Kelly Professor Deepak Lal <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  The Truth About  Greenhouse Gases 
  Professor William Happer William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at  Princeton University. He is a member of the GWPF’s Academic  Advisory Council.
  <sub>1</sub> The Truth About Greenhouse Gases <sub>1</sub>
  “The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the  most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been  excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to  show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and  gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles  Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his  Extraordinary Popular  Delusions and the Madness of Crowds . I want to discuss a contemporary  moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations  of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous 
  consequences for mankind and for the planet. This contemporary  “climate crusade” has much in common with the medieval crusades  Mackay describes, with true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry  governments, manipulators of various types, and even children’s  crusades.
  Carbon dioxide 
  I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant  to keep our land, air and waters free of real pollution, particulates,  heavy metals, pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2) is not one of these  pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon.  Every day a normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 -- the simplest  chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere.  Before  the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was  about 270 parts per million (ppm). At the present time, the concentration  is about 390 ppm, 0.039% of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1%  of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the  long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels  were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished  abundantly.
  1 “The Truth About Greenhouse Gases” appeared in the June/July issue of  First Things  (www.firstthings.com) and a slightly revised version is published here with permission. 
  <sub>2</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate  atmospheric CO2 as a “pollutant.” According to my Webster’s New  Collegiate Dictionary, to pollute is “to make or render unclean, to  defile, to desecrate, to profane.” By breathing are we rendering the air  unclean, defiling or desecrating it? Efforts are underway to remedy the  old-fashioned, restrictive definition of pollution. The current Wikipedia  entry on air pollution, for example, now asserts that pollution includes:  “carbon dioxide (C02)—a colorless, odorless, non-toxic greenhouse  gas associated with ocean acidification, emitted from sources such as  combustion, cement production, and respiration.” 
  Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII renounced the  British throne, supposedly said “A woman can’t be too rich or too thin.”  But in reality, you can get too much or too little of a good thing. Whether  we should be glad or worried about increasing levels of CO2 depends on  quantitative numbers, not just qualitative considerations.
  As far as green plants are concerned, CO2 is not a pollutant, but part  of their daily bread—like water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other essential  elements. Most green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand  ppm, many times higher than now. Plants grow better and have better  flowers and fruit at higher CO2 levels. Commercial greenhouse operators  recognize this when they artificially increase the CO2 concentrations  inside their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm. 
  How close is the current atmosphere to the upper or lower limit for  CO2—or to some optimum intermediate level? Did we have just the right  concentration of CO2 at the preindustrial level of 270 ppm? Reading  breathless media reports about CO2 “pollution” and about minimizing  our “carbon footprints,” one might think that the earth cannot have 
  too little CO2, a bit like Wallis Simpson’s view on thinness. This view was  overstated, as we have seen from the sad effects anorexia in so many  young women. Various geo-engineering schemes are being discussed  for scrubbing CO2 from the air. Why not scrub it all out?  Humans would  be perfectly healthy in a world with no atmospheric CO2 -- except that  we would have nothing to eat and a few other minor inconveniences --  most plants stop growing if CO2 levels drop much below 150 ppm. If we 
  <sub>3</sub> want to continue to be fed and clothed by the products of green plants  we can have too little CO2. The preindustrial value of 270 ppm CO2 may  well have been below the optimum level, we are probably better off with  our current 390 ppm, and we would be better off with still more CO2. For  example, there is evidence that California orange groves are about 30  percent more productive today than they were 150 years ago because  of the increase of atmospheric CO2.
  Although humans and many other animals would do just fine with  no CO2 at all in the air, there is an upper limit that we can tolerate.  Inhaling air with a CO2 concentration of a few per cent, similar to the 
  concentration of the air we exhale, hinders the diffusional exchange of  CO2 between the blood and gas in the lung. Both the United States Navy  (for submariners) and NASA (for astronauts) have performed extensive  studies of human tolerance to CO2. As a result of these studies, the Navy  recommends an upper limit of about 8000 ppm for cruises of ninety  days, and NASA recommends an upper limit of 5000 ppm for missions of  one thousand days, both assuming a total pressure of one atmosphere.  Higher levels are acceptable for missions of only a few days.
  We conclude that atmospheric CO2 levels should be above about 150  ppm to avoid harming green plants and below about 5000 ppm to avoid  harming people. That is a big range, and our atmosphere is much closer  to the lower end than the upper end. We were not that far from CO2  anorexia when massive burning of fossil fuels began. At the current rate  of burning fossil fuels, we are adding about 2 ppm of CO2 per year to the  atmosphere, so getting from our current level to 1000 ppm would take  about 300 years—and 1000 ppm is still less than what most plants would  prefer, and much less than either the NASA or the Navy limit.
  Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in  CO2 levels and reducing the current level (with 1990 levels the arbitrary  benchmark). As we have discussed, animals would not even notice  a doubling of CO2 and plants would love it. The supposed reason for  limiting CO2 is to stop global warming—or since the predicted warming  has failed to be nearly as large as computer models forecast—to  stop climate change. Climate change itself has been embarrassingly 
  <sub>4</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  uneventful, so another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to  stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes  or tornados. But dispassionate data show that the frequency of extreme  events has hardly changed and in some cases has decreased in the 150  years that it has taken CO2 levels to increase from 270 ppm to 390 ppm.
  The effects of CO2 
  Let me turn to some of the problems the non-pollutant CO2 is supposed  to cause. CO2 does indeed cause some warming of our planet, and  we should thank Providence for that, because without the greenhouse  warming of CO2 and its more potent partners, water vapor and clouds,  the earth would be too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. Other  things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is  how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming  it causes will be good or bad for the planet. More CO2 is supposed to  cause cities to flood, parched agriculture, tropical diseases in Alaska,  etc., and even an epidemic of kidney stones.
  The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from  about 270 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth  has warmed by about 0.8 C during that time. Therefore the warming is  due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. The local rooster crows every  morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to  rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for  Sunday dinner.
  There have been many warmings and coolings in the past when the CO2  levels did not change. A well known example is the medieval warming,  about the year 1000, when the Vikings settled Greenland (when it was  greener) and wine was exported from England. This warm period was  followed by the “Little Ice Age” when the Thames would frequently freeze  over during the winter. There is no evidence for significant increase of  CO2 at the Medieval Warm Period, nor for a significant decrease at the  time of the subsequent Little Ice Age. Documented famines with millions  of deaths occurred during the Little Ice Age because of crop failures due 
  <sub>5</sub> to cold weather. The earth has been warming in fits and starts since the  end of the Little Ice Age, a few centuries ago, and humanity’s quality of  life has improved accordingly.
  A rare case of good correlation between CO2 levels and temperature  is provided by ice-core records of the cycles of glacial and interglacial  periods of the last million years of so. But these records show that changes  in temperature preceded changes in CO2 levels, so that CO2 levels were  an effect of temperature changes. Much of this was probably due to  outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans or the reverse on cooling.  The most recent continental ice sheets began to melt some twenty 
  thousand years ago. During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago,  the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed -- as much 10 C in fifty  years -- with no apparent change in CO2 levels, and with life -- including  our human ancestors -- surviving the rapid change in temperature just  fine.
  The earth’s climate has always been changing. Our present global  warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history,  and the mild warming is probably benefiting the biosphere. Indeed,  there is very little correlation between the estimates of CO2 levels in the  atmosphere and the estimates of the earth’s temperature over the past  550 million years (the “phanerozoic” period). The message is clear that  several factors must influence the earth’s temperature, and that while  CO2 is one of these factors, it is seldom the dominant one. Other factors  that influence the earth’s temperature are spontaneous variations of  the complicated fluid flow patterns in the oceans and atmosphere of  the earth (perhaps influenced by continental drift), volcanoes, variations  of the earth’s orbital parameters (ellipticity, spin-axis orientation, etc.),  asteroid and comet impacts, variations in the sun’s output (not only the  visible radiation but the amount of ultraviolet light, and the solar wind with  its magnetic field), variations in cosmic rays leading to variations in cloud  cover, and other causes.
  <sub>6</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  The Hockey Stick 
  The existence of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period was  an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment because it  showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous  warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning of fossil  fuels. The organization charged with producing scientific support for  the climate crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the  past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record.  The first IPCC report, issued in 1990, showed both the Medieval Warm 
  Period and the Little Ice Age very clearly. In the IPCC’s 2001 report was  a graph that purported to show the earth’s mean temperature since the  year 1000. A yet more extreme version of the hockey stick graph made  the cover of the 50th Anniversary Report of the United Nation’s World  Meteorological Organization. To the surprise of everyone who knew  about the strong evidence for the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm  Period, the graph showed a nearly constant temperature from the year  1000 until about 150 years ago, when the temperature began to rise  abruptly like the blade of a hockey stick. The inference was that this was  due to the anthropogenic “pollutant” CO2. 
  This  damnatia memoriae  of inconvenient truths was simply expunged  from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed  from Stalin’s photographs by accommodating dark-room specialists in  the later years of the dictator’s reign. There was no explanation for why  both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, very clearly shown  in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later.
  The IPCC and its worshipful supporters did their best to promote the 
  hockey-stick temperature curve. But as John Adams remarked,  “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our  inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state  of facts and evidence.” The hockey stick curve caught the attention  of two Canadians, Steve McIntyre, a retired mining consultant, and  an academic statistician, Ross McKitrick. As they began to look more  carefully at the original data—much of it from tree rings—and at the 
  <sub>7</sub> analysis that led to the hockey stick, they became more and more  puzzled. By hard, remarkably detailed, and persistent work over many  years, consistently frustrated in their efforts to obtain original data and  data-analysis methods, they showed that the hockey stick was not  supported by observational data. An excellent, recent history of this  episode is Andrew Montford’s  The Hockey Stick Illusion .
  About the time of the Copenhagen Climate Conference in the  fall of 2009, another nasty thing happened to the global-warming  establishment. A Russian server released large numbers of e-mails and  other files from computers of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the 
  University of East Anglia. Among the files released were e-mails between  members of the power structure of the climate crusade, “the team.”  These files were, or should have been, very embarrassing to their senders  and recipients. A senior scientist from CRU wrote, for example: “PS,  I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station  temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has  a Freedom Of Information Act.” One of the most consistent themes of  the e-mails is the need to hide raw data from anyone outside the team.  Why the obsession on withholding data? Because the hockey stick lost  credibility when it was possible to see the raw, unmanipulated data on  which it was based.
  Peer review
  A traditional way to maintain integrity in science is through peer  review, the anonymous examination of a scientific paper by qualified,  competing scientists before publication. In a responsible peer review,  the authors may be required to make substantial revisions to correct any  flaws in the science or methodology before their paper is published. But  peer review has completely failed in climate science. Global warming  alarmists have something like Gadaffi’s initial air superiority over rag-tag  opponents in Libya. Consider this comment from one of the most  respected IPCC leaders, as revealed in the CRU e-mails: “I can’t see  either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth]  and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what 
  <sub>8</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  the peer-review literature is.” And consider the CRU e-mail comment on  a journal that committed the mortal sin of publishing one of the heretical  papers: “I think we have to stop considering  Climate Research  as a  legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our  colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or  cite papers in, this journal.” 
  Peer review in climate science means that the ”team” recommends  publication of each other’s work, and tries to keep any off-message  paper from being accepted for publication.  Why this obsession with  cleansing the “scientific” literature of any opposing views?  Because 
  it allows climate extremists to claim that they represent all of science  and anyone who questions their message is at war with all of science,  except for a few “flat-earthers”, “deniers,” or others scorned with carefully  researched epithets, designed to discredit dissenting scientific opinion.  All  of this reminds me of the opposition in medieval Western Europe to the  translation of the Bible into the vernacular. The Scriptures were useless for  the large numbers of people who could read their own language, but  who had not been privileged to learn to read Latin, Greek or Hebrew.  The Climategate e-mails show the same fierce determination of “the  team” to deny the general scientific public the chance to form their own  conclusions about raw data --the old and the new testaments of science.
  In the last half of the 18th century, “the Age of Enlightenment,” the  founding fathers of the United States studied all political systems known  to them, from the classical Greek city states to the Dutch republic. They  hoped to select the best form of government for their new nation. One  of them, James Madison, reminds his fellow citizens in The Federalist  Papers: (The Federalist 10) “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own  cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not  improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason,  a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same  time.” Madison goes on to observe that the smaller the community, the  more likely that parties and judges will be one and the same. Climate  scientists are trying to convince the world that they are so righteous that  they can judge their own cause. The notion that climate science should 
  <sub>9</sub> be immune to criticism from anyone outside of the “team” is warmly  supported by the large numbers of people who stand to benefit from  global warming hysteria, as well as by a few who have a  sincere and  touching faith in the incorruptibility of science.
  Let me summarize how the key issues appear to me, a working scientist  with a better background than most in the physics of climate. CO2 really  is a greenhouse gas and, other things being equal, adding CO2 to the  atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas will modestly increase  the surface temperature of the earth. Other things being equal, doubling  the CO2 concentration, from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly  cause about one degree Celsius warming. At the current rate of CO2  increase in the atmosphere —about 2 ppm per year— it would take  about 195 years to achieve this doubling. The combination of a slightly  warmer earth and more CO2 will greatly increase the production of  food, wood, fiber, and other products by green plants, so the increased  CO2 will be good for the planet, and will easily outweigh any negative  effects. Supposed calamities like the accelerated rise of sea level, ocean  acidification, more extreme climate, tropical diseases near the poles, etc.  are greatly exaggerated.
  “Mitigation” and control efforts that have been proposed will enrich  a favoured few with good political ties—at the expense of the great  majority of mankind, including, especially, the poor and the citizens of  developing nations. These efforts will make almost no change in earth’s  temperature. Spain’s recent experiment with green energy destroyed  several pre-existing jobs for every green job it created, and it was one of  the reasons for the near bankruptcy of the country. 
  Climate models
  The frightening warnings that alarmists raise about the effects of doubling  CO2 are based on computer models. These models assume that the  direct warming effect of CO2 is multiplied by a large and positive  “feedback factor” from CO2-induced changes in water vapor and  clouds, which supposedly contribute much more to the greenhouse 
  <sub>10</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  warming of the earth than CO2. But there is observational evidence  that the feedback factor is small and may even be negative. Climate  models appear to fit the temperature rise over the last 150 years very well.  But the values of various parameters like clouds and the concentrations  of anthropogenic aerosols are adjusted to get the best fit to past  observations. The real values of most parameters, and the physics of how  they affect the earth’s climate, are in most cases only roughly known,  too roughly to supply data accurate enough for computer predictions.  The great mathematician John von Neumann once said, “With four  parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle  his trunk.”  Climate models have dozens of parameters, not unlike the  epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. And they have done poorly at  predicting the future. No model predicted the lack of net warming of the  earth’s temperature that we have experienced over the past ten years.
  In my judgment, and in that of many other scientists familiar with the  issues, the main problem with models could well be their treatment  of clouds and water vapor, changes of which can affect the earth’s  temperature as much or more than changing levels of CO2. 
  What is wrong with climate science?
  What, besides the bias toward a particular, desired result, is wrong with  the science? Scientific progress proceeds by the interplay of theory  and observation. Theory explains observations and makes predictions  about what will be observed in the future. Observations anchor our  understanding and weed out the theories that do not work. This has been  the scientific method for more than three hundred years. Recently, the  advent of the computer has made possible another branch of inquiry:  computer simulation models. Properly used, computer models can  enhance and speed up scientific progress. But they are not meant to  replace theory and observation and to serve as an authority of their own.  We know they fail in economics. All of the proposed controls that would  have such a significant impact on the world’s economic future are based  on computer models that are so complex and chaotic that many runs  are needed before we can get an “average” answer. Yet the models 
  <sub>11</sub> have failed the simple scientific test of prediction. We don’t even have a  theory for how accurate the models should be.
  There are many honest, hardworking climate scientists who are trying  to understand the effects of CO2 on climate, but their work has fallen  under suspicion because of the hockey-stick scandal and many  other exaggerations about the dangers of increasing CO2. What has  transformed climate science from a normal intellectual discipline to a  matter of so much controversy?
  A major problem has been the co-option of climate science by politics,  ambition, greed, and what seems to be a hereditary human need for a  righteous cause. What better cause than saving the planet, especially  if one can get ample, secure funding at the same time? Huge amounts  of money are available from governments and wealthy foundations for  climate institutes and for climate-related research. Funding for climate  studies is second only to funding for biological sciences. Large academic  empires, prizes, elections to honorary societies, fellowships, consulting  fees and other perquisites go to those researchers whose results may  help “save the planet.” Every day we read about some real or contrived  environmental or ecological effect “proved” to arise from global  warming. The total of such claimed effects now runs in the hundreds,  all the alleged result of an unexceptional century-long warming of less  than one degree Celsius. Government subsidies, loan guarantees, and  captive customers go to green companies. Carbon-tax revenues flow  to governments. As the great Russian poet Pushkin said in his novella  Dubrovsky, “If there happens to be a trough, there will be pigs.” Any  doubt about apocalyptic climate scenarios could remove many troughs.
  Many Americans still remember the wise words of President Eisenhower  in his farewell address of 1960, where he warned us against the “military- industrial complex.” Few remember the following paragraphs in the same  speech:
  “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our  industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during  recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also  becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing 
  <sub>12</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.  Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed  by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same  fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas  and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct  of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government  contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every  old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.  The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal  employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever  present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research  and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the  equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the  captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to  mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old,  within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the  supreme goals of our free society.” 
  Does this sound familiar? What would Eisenhower say about the frenzy  over supposed human-induced climate change and the amazing  scientific, industrial and governmental crusade that has coalesced  around it?
  What about those who doubt the scientific basis of these claims, or who  simply don’t like what is being done to the scientific method they were  taught to apply and uphold? Publications of contrary research results in  mainstream journals are rare. The occasional heretical article is the result  of an inevitable, protracted battle with those who support the dogma  and who control the levers of peer review. As mentioned above, we  know from the Climategate emails that the team conspired to prevent  contrary publications from seeing the light of day and even discussed  getting rid of an editor who seemed to be inclined to admit such  contentious material. 
  Skeptics’ motives are publicly impugned; denigrating names are used  routinely in media reports and in the blogosphere; and we now see  attempts to use the same tactics that Big Brother applied to Winston 
  <sub>13</sub> Smith in Orwell’s 1984. In 2009, a conference of “ecopsychologists”  was held at the University of West England to discuss the obvious  psychological problems resident in those who do not adhere to the  global warming dogma. These ecopsychologists, who knew almost  nothing themselves about climate science, told us that scientists and  members of the general population who express objective doubt about  alarmist views of global warming are suffering from a kind of mental  illness. We know from the Soviet experience that a totalitarian society can  find it convenient to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act  accordingly.  
  The role of scientific societies 
  The management of most scientific societies has enthusiastically signed  on to the global warming bandwagon. This is not surprising, since  government, as well as many states and foundations, generously fund  those who reinforce their desired outcomes under the cover of saving  the planet. Certain private industries are also involved: those positioned  to profit from enacted controls as well as financial institutions heavily  invested in “green technologies” – technologies whose rationale  disappears the moment global warming is widely understood to be a  non-problem. There are known connections and movements of people  involved in government policy, scientific societies, private industry and  foundations -- all with the common thread of influencing the outcome of  a set of programs and investments underpinned by the supposed threat  of global warming. 
  My own trade union, the American Physical Society (APS), is a good  example, but hardly the worst. An APS Council statement issued on  November 18, 2007 states: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global  warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant  disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems,  security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions  of greenhouse gases beginning now.” This is pretty strong language for  physicists, for whom skepticism about evidence was once considered a  virtue, and nothing was incontrovertible.
  <sub>14</sub> <sub>The Truth About Greenhouse Gases </sub>
  In the fall of 2009 a petition, organized by a Fellow of the American  Physical Society, Roger Cohen, and containing the signatures of  hundreds of distinguished APS members, was presented to the APS  management with a request that at least the truly embarrassing word  “incontrovertible” be taken out of the statement. The APS management’s  response was to threaten the petitioners, while grudgingly appointing a  committee to consider the request. It was exactly what James Madison  warned against. The committee included members whose careers  depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result  was that not one word was changed. Bad as the actions of the APS  leadership were, they were far better than those of most other scientific  societies -- that rejected any reconsideration of extreme statements by  the society leadership on climate.
  The situation is even more lamentable for the general public, which is fed  a constant stream of propaganda by specialists in environmental issues  from the mainstream media and well-funded alarmist blogs. Not unlike  functionaries of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, with its motto “Ignorance  is Strength,” many of the environmental news media dutifully and  uncritically promote the party line of the climate crusade. 
  But Abraham Lincoln got it right when he (supposedly) said, “You can  fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all  of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” The  situation is slowly getting better. Skeptics are more numerous and better  organized than before. In a few cases, leading former adherents have  publicly and courageously spoken out against the dogma and its core  of establishment promoters. The IPCC itself has come under severe  criticism by the international scientific establishment for its series of  bizarre errors and organizational failings. Under pressure from a dissident  group of Fellows, the Royal Society moved to meaningfully moderate its  former radically alarmist position on global warming. And perhaps most  important of all, public skepticism has increased significantly, and with it  has come a major drop in support of the climate crusade’s attempt to  seize control of the “pollutant,” CO2.
  <sub>15</sub> Conclusion
  I began with a quote from the preface of the first edition of Mackay’s  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , and I  will end with a quote from the preface of the second edition: “Men,  it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in  herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” In our  efforts to conserve the beautiful planet that is our home, we should  not fixate on CO2. We should instead focus on issues like damage to  local landscapes and waterways by strip mining, inadequate cleanup,  hazards to underground miners, the excessive release of real pollutants 
  such as mercury, other heavy metals, organic carcinogens, etc. Much  of the potential harm from strip mining can be eliminated, for example,  by requirements that the land be restored to a condition that is as least  as good as, and preferably better than, when the mining began. And it  is high time that we assess great expanses of windmills and solar-panels  in the previously unspoiled open spaces of the world with the same  objectiveness that we apply to other human perturbations of nature.   Looking at once beautiful hilltops, now cluttered with windmills, I am  reminded of an exchange between Winston Churchill and a woman  who indignantly said, “Sir, you are drunk.” Churchill responded, “Madam,  you are ugly. In the morning I shall be sober.” The hilltops will be ugly for a  long, long time.
  Life is about making decisions and decisions are about trade-offs. We  can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real  problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems  more efficiently. Or we can be caught up in a crusade that seeks to  suppress energy use, economic growth, and the benefits that come from  the creation of wealth for all of mankind.
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