Letter to the Editor: Countering views on man-made climate change

To the Editor:

In response to the January 19, 2022 letter to the editor by Gary M. Stewart, it does not take much to discern that this gentleman is a disciple of the demise of the earth due to man-made climate change and that it is going to come really, really quick - “The Earth doesn’t have time for this,” as he ended his letter to the editor. His cognitive dissonance began immediately when he began his letter to the editor with, “He (that’s me) revisits and recycles a litany of repeatedly and thoroughly debunked climate change denial claims.”

Mr. Stewart must have missed the 440 scientific papers that were published in 2019 that challenged the human-caused carbon emissions that are causing a so-called dramatic warming of our planet. He must have missed the 135, and counting, papers that find extremely low CO2 climate sensitivity such as those published by Coe et al.2021, Schildknecht, 2020, Easterbrook, 2016, Davis, 2017, Smirnov, 2018, and Florides and Christodoulides, 2009, etc.

So what experts does Mr. Stewart wish you, the reader, to direct your attention to? He would like you to read “The New Climate War,” by Michael Mann. Mann is famous for Climate Gate and the Hockey Stick Graph. Mann claimed with his famous graph that we had stable climate temperatures and then, “Boom!”, the temperatures took off, rising upwards at an alarming rate.

This graph was so effective that world governments, the main stream media, the sciences, and academia gushed all over this mind-blowing discovery. Many studies followed, complete with hockey stick-style graphs of their own, appearing to support Mann’s conclusions.

But all good things must come to an end. In 2006 the Wegman Report commissioned by Congress exposed this exercise of fraud. The report found at least 43 authors having direct ties to Mann by virtue of having co-authored papers with him. Thus, independent studies did not look so independent.

Also, Mann’s study completely ignored the dramatic Middle Ages warming period. Scientists from the United Kingdom (UK) Royal Statistical Society to the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia discovered that Mann’s figures were manipulated to comply to Mann’s agenda of dramatic temperature rises.

Climate Gate emails exposed this fraud even more.  Mr. Stewart, in his letter to the editor, attempted to downplay my reference to Climate Gate and the Middle Ages Warming Period in my January 5 letter to the editor as “misleading and/or factually incorrect, as even cursory reading about those topics makes clear.”

The Medieval Warm Period, also called the Medieval Climate Optimum, happened. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change reported in 2017 that this period was global, was at least as warm, but likely warmer than today, and its duration significantly longer than that of the Current Warm Period to date. The Science and Public Policy Institute reported in 2009, “More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was real, global, and warmer than the present.  And the numbers grow larger daily.”

A 2003 study by researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using more than two hundred paleoclimate studies from all over the planet, confirmed that this warming period was real.

Climate Gate involved hacked emails that exposed the fraudulent practices of different elements of the anthropogenic climate crowd.  Data manipulation, manipulation of the peer-review process, blacklisting, data destruction, and willful violations of the Freedom of Information Act requests were revelations that were leaked to the press and are historical fact.

Let’s talk satellite data.  John Christy, the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, home for the UAH Satellite, in Huntsville, AL gave an online talk for the Irish Climate Science Forum in 2019. The actual warming record as measured by satellites from 1979 to 2019 showed: 0.16 degrees C per decade, or about 1.6 degrees per century (weather balloon measurements are virtually identical), obviously not “warming 140% faster,” as Mr. Stewart stated in his letter to the editor.

Then, Mr. Stewart downplays Dr. Lubos Motl as not a climate scientist or researcher, but just a physicist. Then later in his letter to the editor he lauds NASA scientist James Hansen, and what are his degrees in? His degrees were in Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics.

Mr. Stewart references James Hansen endorsing the plan to bill fossil fuels, “to make the system honest.”  Does not anybody see that when you tax any corporation or business, they do not absorb the costs, but pass it on to you and me?

Mr. Stewart’s letter to the editor concludes with “Don’t be fooled or distracted.” Good advice, do not fall for this climate crowd as they have been wrong for the last two centuries.  Remember, James Hansen, the Pied Piper for these people, advocating that we are destroying the planet with our destructive use of fossil fuels, warming the planet to a grisly end, was a major proponent of global cooling for a considerable amount of time until he “saw the light.” If you listen to these “the sky is falling” advocates and adopt their policies, the next Iowa winter you will be using a bicycle to commute to work because cars are evil and are polluters.

David M. Johnson
Waukon