Perhaps there are as many professional climate scientists in the world as pro boxers, but at least those lacing up the gloves to enter the ring want a formidable opponent in there against them to prove they are the best.
Not so for the climate scientists making a living off researching and preaching doomsday about global warming. They like it just fine punching at air, and hiring lawyers to sue their critics.
Meantime, climate scientists, equally or more qualified, who say this global warming data being presented is false, are itching for a face-to-face debate. But, alas, that challenge to an old-fashioned public debate, is never granted.
Dr. Shaun Lovejoy, professor of physics at McGill University and an author, arrived down in Cornwall the other night to punch air with a ferocity that left him in a sweat.
It was advertised as the talk of all global warming talks, with new, irrefutable evidence presented, that would certainly bring the last of the global warming deniers into the congregation of the believers.
Despite the carnival barking hype by the St Lawrence River Institute, it didn’t result in people, “coming from miles around,” as Johnny Cash sang in, The Night Hank Williams Came To Town.
About 35 people slipped into the back room of a Cornwall restaurant, when Shaun Lovejoy came to town. The audience ranged from fervent believers to a deeply Christian husband and wife who are fervent deniers.
I took eight pages of scribbler notes on Lovejoy’s topic of “Weather Macroweather Climate” which revealed that there is an 18-year pause in global warming unless you look at the data in a different way.
When it came to data, deterministic or random, “Einstein was wrong there had to be a pattern,” Lovejoy said. “Random is the one to believe.”
Yet, Lovejoy introduced the hockey stick global warming graph as gospel, despite its supposed pattern. The critics were “in the employ of the oil industry,” he said. The 1998 hockey stick graph reveals an almost flatline (hockey stick shaft) global temperature for centuries, with a sudden spike (hockey blade pointing upward) in temperature over the last 100 years. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences later found that the chart was flawed. It took two Canadians to make the discovery. Industry mathematician Steven McIntyre and economics professor Ross McKitrick tried to replicate the hockey stick graph but found the data was filled with errors, including obsolete data and geographical location errors and incorrect calculations.
Admitting that temperatures here in Ontario had not, and probably would not change down the road, Lovejoy predicted “Western Canada will get a lot hotter.”
One wished that Dr. Will Happer, former physics professor at Columbia and Princeton for over 40 years, author of over 200 peer-reviewed papers, including many on how CO2 affects temperature, designer of weather collection data apparatuses, and a strong environmentalist, was on the stage with Lovejoy.
However, one can be content with Happer’s Feb. 5, 2018 five-minute online presentation at Prager U, which stated that, other than the human brain, “climate is the most complex thing on the planet.”
He noted that “CO2 is a minor contributor,” to the earth’s temperature, which includes in the mix an unpredictable sun, wind, cloud cover and industrial man. But water has a huge effect on temperature because we live on a water planet. The atmosphere is made up of water and 70 per cent of the earth is covered by water. We can’t predict future temperatures because we can’t predict cloud formations, weather cycles or the temperature of the ocean.
“It’s devilishly difficult to predict what a fluid will do,” he said. “Trying to figure out what two fluids (atmosphere and ocean) will do in interaction with each other on a planetary scale over long periods of time is close to impossible.”
Happer used the example of Hurricane Irma, where climate experts last year were way off in predicting where the storm would hit once it touched land, only hours before it did.
“All the computer models drawn up by these scientists have been wrong. Instead of admitting this, they have the models tuned to their predictions, putting in the numbers they want,” he said.
Without evidence that the world is going to warm by 2 C due to increased CO2, you input the hypothesis that the temperature will rise anyway and present all the data that flows from that, he pointed out. “That’s not science, that’s science fiction.”
That online speech of Happer’s had over three million hits in three months.
Lovejoy can take comfort in those 35 souls in Cornwall. Some actually believed him.
Ian Cumming is a former Glengarry County dairy farmer and now farms with his son in northern New York state.
