Hundreds of members of the US National Academy of Scientists have signed an open letter in support of Hillary because of global warming.
The signatories ‚Äì 375 in all ‚Äì don’t actually mention Donald Trump by name. But it’s pretty clear that that’s whom they’re getting at when they deliver their hectoring screed about certain candidates during the Presidential primary campaign who claimed “that the Earth is not warming, or that warming is due to purely natural causes outside of human control.”
Calling themselves Responsible Scientists, they warn:
Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy. It is a physical reality. Fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution. But the burning of oil, coal, and gas also caused most of the historical increase in atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This increase in greenhouse gases is changing Earth’s climate.
Our fingerprints on the climate system are visible everywhere. They are seen in warming of the oceans, the land surface, and the lower atmosphere. They are identifiable in sea level rise, altered rainfall patterns, retreat of Arctic sea ice, ocean acidification, and many other aspects of the climate system. Human-caused climate change is not something far removed from our day-to-day experience, affecting only the remote Arctic. It is present here and now, in our own country, in our own states, and in our own communities.
And so on.
If it sounds like stuff you’ve heard a thousand times before from the usual shrill, grant-troughing, rent-seeking, data-fudging, jet-setting, money-grubbing, scientific-method-abusing, FOI-dodging, lying, cheating, climate alarmist scum bags, that’s because you have.
The list of signatories is like a Who’s Who of the very worst perpetrators of the man-made global warming scare. (Well almost: it seems they couldn’t quite bring themselves to associate themselves with figures as tainted as Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann or NASA GISS’s resident data-adjuster Gavin Schmidt). Their livelihoods depend on this scam ‚Äì or hoax or conspiracy: it’s both those things too, whatever they may state ‚Äì and the last thing they need is a Donald Trump presidency coming to slaughter their milch cow.
Next to their names are their seats of academe: Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and so on.
As a disinterested reader, you’re supposed to be impressed by the lofty distinction of such credentialled expertise.
But to anyone who knows about what’s been happening in the field of climate science and related environmental studies these last few decades, a more natural response is sheer disgust.
How did every one of our learned institutions get captured by these charlatans?
How do all these tenured professors and PhDs and beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse have the nerve and gall and bravado to append their names to a public statement so dishonest and unscientific?
The first two paragraphs, quoted above, make a mountain out of a molehill. While few scientists doubt that there may be some anthropogenic influence on climate, all the evidence suggests that such difference as we humans make to it is so trivial as to be meaningless.
It is a flat-out lie to claim, as these ‘Responsible Scientists’ do in the paragraph below, that the debate is over:
We are certain beyond a reasonable doubt, however, that the problem of human-caused climate change is real, serious, and immediate, and that this problem poses significant risks: to our ability to thrive and build a better future, to national security, to human health and food production, and to the interconnected web of living systems.
And the rest – which warns of the terrible consequences if Trump were to become US president and fulfil his threat to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement – is pure politicking.
If the US did pull out of the Paris climate agreement the effect on “global warming” would be zero ‚Äì not least because, being toothless and non-binding the agreement at Paris does not commit its 190 signatories to doing anything other than make soothing noises about their good intentions.
