Growing Skepticism: 150 Scientific Papers in 2017 Support Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm

By Kenneth Richard on 3. April 2017

650+ Skeptic Papers

Published Since 2016


During the first 3 months of 2017, over 150 papers have already been published in scientific  journals that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob.

Skeptic Papers 2017 (1)

Skeptic Papers 2017 (2)

The 2017 publication rate (~50 scientific papers per month) is slightly ahead of last year’s pace.  That’s because in 2016 there were 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published in scholarly journals (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) challenging the “consensus” claim that weather and climate changes are significantly determined by changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

These 150 new papers support the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate, and that natural factors — the Sun, multi-decadal oceanic oscillations (NAO, AMO/PDO, ENSO), cloud and aerosol albedo variations  — have exerted a significant or dominant influence on weather and climate changes during both the past and present.


The guideline for the list of 150 scientific papers with links and summaries and graphs has been divided into 3 parts on 2 pages (Parts 1 and 2 are on the same page).  

Part 1. Natural Mechanisms Of Weather, Climate Change  

Solar Influence On Climate (37)
ENSO, NAO, AMO, PDO Climate Influence (20)
Modern Climate In Phase With Natural Variability (8)
Cloud/Aerosol Climate Influence (3)
Volcanic/Tectonic Climate Influence (1)

Part 2. Unsettled Science, Failed Climate Modeling

Climate Model Unreliability/Biases/Errors and the Pause (12)
Failing Renewable Energy, Climate Policies (2)
Warming Beneficial, Does Not Harm Humans, Wildlife (3)
No Trends In Extreme, Unstable Weather In Recent Decades (3)
Natural CO2 Sources Out-Emit Humans (2)
Fires, Anthropogenic Climate Change Disconnect (1)
Miscellaneous (5)

Part 3. Natural Climate Change Observation, Reconstruction

Lack Of Anthropogenic/CO2 Signal In Sea Level Rise (9)
No Net Warming During 20th (21st) Century (10)
A Warmer Past: Non-Hockey Stick Reconstructions (22)
Abrupt, Degrees-Per-Decade Natural Global Warming (1)
A Model-Defying Cryosphere, Polar Ice (10)

– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/03/growing-skepticism-already-150-new-2017-scientific-papers-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.FQuYLxYX.dpuf…

Wildflowers bloom big across California’s desert

Julie Watson Associated Press

Rain-fed wildflowers have been sprouting from California’s desert sands after lying dormant for years — producing a spectacular display that has drawn record crowds and traffic jams to tiny towns like Borrego Springs.

An estimated 150,000 people in the past month have converged on this town of about 3,500, roughly 85 miles northeast of San Diego, for the so-called super bloom.

Wildflowers are springing up in different landscapes across the state and the western United States thanks to a wet winter. In the Antelope Valley, an arid plateau northeast of Los Angeles, blazing orange poppies are lighting up the ground.

But a “super bloom” is a term for when a mass amount of desert plants bloom at one time. In California, that happens about once in a decade in a given area. It has been occurring less frequently with the drought. Last year, the right amount of rainfall and warm temperatures produced carpets of flowers in Death Valley.

So far this year, the natural show has been concentrated in the 640,000-acre (1,000-square-mile) Anza Borrego State Park that abuts Borrego Springs.

How dare he!? EPA scientific integrity office reviewing Pruitt’s comments that CO2 is not climate control knob

By Emily Flitter | NEW YORK

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific integrity watchdog is reviewing whether EPA chief Scott Pruitt violated the agency’s policies when he said in a television interview he does not believe carbon dioxide is driving global climate change, according to an email seen by Reuters on Friday.

Lawyers for environmental group the Sierra Club had asked the EPA’s Office of Inspector General to check whether Pruitt violated policy when he told a CNBC interviewer on March 9, “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

The EPA Inspector General’s office responded to the Sierra Club on Thursday in an email, saying it had referred the matter to the EPA’s Scientific Integrity Officer, Francesca Grifo, for review.

“If after the SIO review, she concludes there is some aspect of the letter itself, or her findings or conclusions that she believes are appropriate for further consideration by the OIG, she will so notify the OIG,” the email stated.

A spokeswoman for the EPA defended Pruitt’s comments.

“Administrator Pruitt makes no apologies for having a candid dialogue about climate science and commonsense regulations that will protect our environment, without creating unnecessary regulatory burdens that kill jobs,” said Liz Bowman in an emailed statement.

“Differing views and opinions on scientific and technical matters is a legitimate and necessary part of EPA’s decision-making process, which is consistent with EPA’s scientific integrity policy that was in place even during the Obama administration,” she added.

The EPA website says its scientific integrity policy requires EPA officials and staff to ensure the agency’s work respects the findings of the broader scientific community.…

Trump’s Next Step on Climate: Reconsider EPA’s CO2 is a ‘pollutant’ finding

On Tuesday, in a series of orders, Mr. Trump instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to rework its Clean Power Plan, which would restrict carbon emissions from existing power plants, mainly coal-fired ones. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP pending judicial review.

Mr. Trump also directed the Interior Department to lift its current moratorium on federal coal leasing and loosen restrictions on oil and gas development (including methane flaring) on federal lands. And he instructed all government agencies to stop factoring climate change into the environmental-review process for federal projects. The federal government will recalculate the “social cost of carbon.”

Because they don’t attack the climate-change regulatory problem at its root, Mr. Trump’s orders will not provide enough clarity to U.S. energy companies—particularly electric utilities and coal-mining companies—for their long-term business forecasting or short-term capital investment and head-count planning.

To accomplish that, the Trump administration, led by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, needs to target the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which labeled carbon dioxide as a pollutant. That foundational ruling provided the legal underpinnings for all of the EPA’s follow-on carbon regulations, including the CPP.

It also provided the rationale for the previous administration’s anti-fossil-fuel agenda and its various climate-change initiatives and programs, which spanned more than a dozen federal agencies and cost the American taxpayer roughly $20 billion to $25 billion a year during Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The endangerment finding was the product of a rush to judgment. Much of the scientific data upon which it was predicated—chiefly, the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—was already dated by the time of its publication and arguably not properly peer-reviewed as federal law requires.

Although this initially reported “pause” was subsequently eliminated through the downward manipulation of historical temperature data, this latest IPCC assessment calls into question both the predictive power and input data quality of most global climate models, and further highlights the scientific uncertainty surrounding the basic premise of anthropogenic climate change.

An updated EPA endangerment finding based on an objective review of the latest available scientific data is warranted, along with a more sober discussion of the threat posed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the “public health and welfare of current and future generations,” in the words of the original endangerment finding.

As long as the 2009 finding remains on the books, it will …

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on EPA chief Pruitt’s CO2 comments: ‘I think these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct’

What Scott Pruitt actually said

Listen to what Scott Pruitt actually said on CNBC and then compare it to the portrayal in the media.  Here is the key text:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.  But we don’t know that yet.  We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

Can you square what Pruitt actually said with the distorted quotes and headlines about this?  I can’t.

I think that these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact

We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

The other two statements give slightly conflicting messages:

I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.  But we don’t know that yet.

The main statement of controversy is:

I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.

You can interpret this in two ways:

1.Pruitt is denying that CO2 is a primary contributor to recent global warming

OR

2.Pruitt is saying that he does not accept as a ‘fact’ that CO2 is a primary contributor because we simply don’t know.

Since his subsequent statement is “But we don’t know that yet”, #2 is obviously the correct interpretation.

I think he is saying that he is not convinced that we know with certainty that humans have caused 100% of the recent warming (which is what some climate modelers are saying, see recent tweets from Gavin Schmidt), or that humans have caused ‘more than half’ of the recent warming (which was the conclusion from the IPCC AR5.

JC reflections

If I am interpreting Pruitt’s statements correctly, I do not find anything to disagree with in what he said: we don’t know how much of recent warming can be attributed to humans. In my opinion, this is correct and is a healthy position for both the science and policy debates.

Exactly what the Trump administration intends to do regarding funding climate science, energy policy and the Paris climate …

Esquire Mag Features Climate Depot…Again: ‘It’s the Golden Age’ of Climate Skeptics – ‘Grinning ear-to-ear’

BY JACK HOLMES
MAR 12, 2017

Excerpts;

“We’re sleeping much better now,” said Marc Morano, the executive director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Morano, a former aide to Senator James Inhofe—of snowball infamy—has for decades disputed the scientific consensus on climate change in various capacities. He denies that the Earth is warming, that we could know for sure humans are predominantly causing it, and that we could do anything about it even if we did. (It’s important to cover your bases.) “We are grinning ear-to-ear, climate skeptics,” Morano said. “We have a rational, scientific approach coming to Washington under the Trump administration.” Morano, who has a B.A. in political science from George Mason University, is more of a traditionalist climate skeptic: Happer’s group takes a more proactive approach, but its message is still a distortion of the science…

In our conversations, both Happer and Morano said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who left his post as CEO of ExxonMobil to take the job, could be the biggest obstacle to their agenda in the White House. (That ExxonMobil has donated over half a million dollars to Morano’s organization over the years doesn’t seem to complicate things for him. Happer, whose organizations have also received funding from large fossil fuel companies and prominent conservative donor networks like the Bradley Foundation, described a “David and Goliath” scenario where the Sierra Club is Goliath.) …

Morano claims, that climate science is manufactured as part of a U.N. conspiracy. From a more practical standpoint, Morano wants the Trump administration to overturn Obama-era executive orders like the Clean Power Plan, defund the United Nations climate panel, and to “Clexit” (or “climate exit”) from the Paris Climate Accords. He also suggested, in glowing terms, that fellow traveler Happer may join the Trump administration as a “science czar.” After that, Morano wants the president to “unleash” fracking, oil drilling, and coal production, the latter of which he somewhat agreed was no longer even competitive due to the rise of cheap natural gas.

 …