Global Warming Index,  Directory and Science Forum by P&CR.Org - A Skeptic's Corner

 

In 2008-AD there currently exists among scientists concerning atmospheric science, ignorance and disagreement which can be broken down into over-simplified camps as those scientists supporting the argument that global warming is anthropogenic (man caused) and disaster looms just around the corner requiring mandatory international repairs right now and those scientists supporting the argument that global warming is unstoppable and resulting primarily from 1500 year long solar cycles (sun spot cycles) on earth supported by an abundance of evidence from ancient and verifiable records dating back half a billion years, that even including man's contribution to atmospheric carbon levels, the earth remains well within normalcy.  Within both groups there are many over lapping areas of agreement, especially on environmental clean-up and responsible stewardship of resources. Yet a political war of words, deception, and dubious claims rages on as the 2008 US Presidential Elections near. Ironically the unifying force pulling together diverse political views, is being underwritten not by science, but through Wall Street entrepreneurs, marketeers and corporate flaks creating new perceptions, new consumer needs supported by new products and new jobs all backed of course by government tax subsidy dollars, where scientific realities do not seem to matter for decades at a time. Further violating big-science’s credibility and contributing to a growing lack of trust in privatized government-backed big-science we can observe (a) conflict of interests in privatizing research laboratories such as LLNL, (b) an unfortunate migration of socialist-communist agitators into the Global Warming stage show promoting endless Kyoto-like Protocols through the UN with the sole apparent outcome not of reducing green house gases but merely transferring wealth from rich countries to poor countries, penalizing successful economies, propping up dictators, and all based on agendized science driven by the grand public ignorance of climate studies. One might say the country and the UN are conducting business as usual.    

IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control. Offering a serious counter balance to the IPCC-UNnonsenseand itsnefarious black-ops at IPCC the reader should consider the links to the right on this page especially the peer review articles rapidly compiling atthe Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI). Especially take note of Professor Bob Carter's series of five videos which offer an excellent introduction to the areas of controversy. These five videos are  posted on the SPPI site here.

Atmospheric Climate Reporters bent on selling front page stories with hysteria driven headlines have been frustrated as they run into a wall of resolute, determined climate skeptics that want to learn the supportable truth on climate issues regardless of where it leads. The Reporters sense a change in climate politics as skeptics focus on peer reviewing the deluge of papers written by the IPCC cabal of diverse international governmental and grant supported agencies. Over $1-billion per year grants and subsidies support nearly any PhD research project as long as it contains man-caused global warming conclusions.

Skeptics' dissent is filtered out of climate conclaves as well by black listing all identified skeptics from communications. No nonbelievers allowed. 

In response to all this nonsense, the skeptics have disciplined their peer reviews to be written in plain English understandable without advanced degrees, and are poking holes in all the IPCC climate-alarmist science status reports. 

The tide is changing. As a result of resolute skeptics, some Climate Reporters are beginning to hedge their article headlines from "Global Warming Disaster is Imminent & Man is the Cause" over to a simple "Climate Change" headlines. The term "Climate Change" finds no disagreement among scientists and of course avoids the presumptive political and sociologic implications of man-caused climate change so rabidly foisted upon the ignorant public by climate alarmists and their fellow-traveler worshipers.

This shift in headliner catch phrasing by climate reporters is an obvious hedge against a persistent scientific climate truth that is not cooperating with the "man-caused" mantra. Induced climate hysteria apparently isn't selling too well as it runs into a wall of skeptics doing their homework and reporting to the public, all without government funding. What ever happened to the great sound-bites the alarmists fired from the hip? "The skeptics are all oil industry stooges bought and paid for by big oil."

The climate reporters' purposeful shift is that years (or months) from now, when climate science is no longer front page, their relabeling will conceal their past editorials pushing mass climate hysteria and repainttheir Paparazzi-like reporting as though climatereporters represented the thread of unyieldingscientific truth all along and were, afterall, operating with high ethical standards.

In late December of 2007, profoundly refuting climate alarmists, His Holiness the Pope who knows well the deepest dimensions of socialist-communist agitating, advised by his own in-house trusted experts, independently cautions fellow climate travelers to notrush headlong into ideological driven science andreminds us all"we need to care for the environment. It has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion." Galileo would beproud no doubt, as the Pope falls just short of callingthe entire anthropogenic (man-caused) global climatealarmist movement, a fraud.

This is the momentary array of political, scientific andbusiness plan positions as we enter 2008 within ourprominent local community of Livermore, CA home toLawrence Livermore National Laboratory,LLNL.

LLNL has served our National Interest throughout the Cold War years. All our friends, family, and neighbors in this tight little community of Livermore, CA are in one way or another connected to LLNL. We refer to their staff as “our own” meaning we feel personally affected by anything and everything LLNL is doing. Their people are our people. We feel their pain and we rejoice in their success.

Entire new industries continue to bloom world wide from the excellence in science advancements continued to be produced at LLNL. The chips inside the computer used to print this very document are based on prototype lithography advancements in dark-spectrum ultraviolet steppers, created at LLNL nearly a decade ago, underwriting a huge high-tec global industry today. NIF, the National Ignition Facility being built by LLNL gives hope to much of the world that clean energy with little to no carbon footprint might someday be attainable. We look forward to a day when a US President can rally the nation to the call of clean energy from the next generation of NIF just as JFK rallied a nation to put the first man on the moon. The next big thing flowing from LLNL may well be new industries emerging from the influence of LLNL's atmospheric science department. If any country has a resilience to adapt in a changing world, we will.

LLNL and its newest feeds to the IPCC is now where the action is in Global Warming. We're giving the benefit of the doubt that LLNL's atmospheric science department issomehow serving the broader public interest and apatriotic service in theUS national interest. Yes we have fault with their research staging, or lack of research staging, by not placing solar cycle studies at the top of public research and explaining solar cycles in understandable jargon on the causes of global warming.The average person seems to know that polar caps on Mars are shrinking because of our Sun's solar cycles yet the premiere atmospheric science department of the US still fails to address solar cycles with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) in understandable or convincing language. LLNL and IPCC material underwrite great political decisions (not wars, political decisions) of our era and no one except a scientist can comment as a peer in a process merged with the political as to what actions we should take.(Note: Dr. Santer's report dated 6-28-07, bottom of The Controversy page includes Solar studies[http://globalwarmingindex.googlepages.com/p%26cr.org-globalwarmingscienceindexandfor]) 

All others left out feel alienated from the process. Global Warming is not about national security functions of killing the enemy in worse case survival scenarios where civilian society has ironed out protocols with science. Global Warming is about local politics, taxes, productivity, jobs, industry, agriculture, even how and what we teach our children and now global warming has even found itself a religious following within some liberal Protestant churches, touting biblical scripture in unquestioning support while baptizing the congregations in the gospel: Senator Gore's movie, "The Inconvenient Truth” a church forum where discord of opinion in front of your personal clergy and friends can seem like speaking heresy.Who dare’s to speak out? These liberal Protestant churches are learning their so-called open and objective discussion forums only add to the sense of alienation and division within their congregation as most church discussion is pushed one way on a streetthat is now labeled two way.

The related science can not be separated from the need for absolute trust and integrity of the scientific process, a process currently in doubt (The Controversy).  Should we create a legislature of science at LLNL so politicized and so isolated and vested with so much power? At least one scientist key in LLNL atmospheric sciences department is the same scientist alleged to have altered key scientific papers at the IPCC in 1996 without the consulting scientists' approval totally altering committee findings, which 1996 papers are now being used to justify mission creep into underwriting science soon to control our lives. 

In order to justify its entry into this politically closed system underwriting regulations that will control how we live, an LLNL departmental justification was quickly cobbled together and released to the local newspapers for atmospheric earth sciences stating in effect, the department justifies this broader mission because global warming will stress resources and cause increased competition for limited resources among nations, and this could lead to war. Really? That should put the fear of god in the public. Never mind that we have a working social system of international trade and finance in global resources called "The Free Market" that already formulates this resource distribution for us in good times and bad. Free Markets apparently can no longer be trusted because of global warming. 

But the amorphous free markets have a fungible nature all their own. Give it lemons in hopes of killing it with a useless overdose and it quickly sells lemon aid. Try and tell it carbon foot prints are bad, and it rapidly shifts gears and starts building nuclear reactors (a specialty by the way, of LLNL's new corporate management ownership). Try and tell it African third world societies must starve to protect the environment from industrialization, development of independent energy resources, and the evil carbon foot print and forces so fundamental to human purpose as Pope Benedict the XVI, takes a stand.

Great numbers of credible scientists pooh-pooh the notion of anthropogenic (man caused) global warming. They hold back their comments afraid to speak out against LLNL management's designated spokespersons, including many of our personal friends in private circles in the community hosting LLNL. The scientists disagree.Great lists are formed and names are taken.  If you are hosting a party in Livermore, be careful who you pair together, climate science is explosive among scientists.The host is wise to change the subject to something less emotional, like this year's premium grapeharvest.

The public deserves far more and is rightfully skeptical regardless of so called"denial machine"[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3069943905833454241&q=Global+Warming+

Video&total=23859&start=0&num=10&so=0&type

=search&plindex=7] one side puts down and writes-off the other side as representing. Yet the so-called denial machine the climate-alarmists (for lack of a better term) put down has become a badge of honor and the only source for ordinary folks to receive understandable lay language input on earth atmospheric science, translated by willing scientists using the raw material of unintelligible scientific jargon and converting it to English while risking their careers to go against the bigger politically correct climate-alarmists machine which seems hell bent on ignoring our thirst for truth. Skeptics are constantly misrepresented through the allied environmental media. Skeptics are neither anti-environmentalists nor anti-conservationists. The climate-alarmists' politically correct machine is acting instead with alleged manipulation of the truth (See TheControversy). [http://globalwarmingindex.googlepages.com/p&cr.org-globalwarmingscienceindexandfor]    And while the climate-alarmists charge the denial machine for changing the argument from denial of global warming to denial of anthropogenic global warming (a change in argument that never happened), the climate-alarmists themselves have mastered the art of deception and keep changing the relevant science keeping it highly technical, scary, and outside the envelope of real understanding for the vast majority of us. To non-scientist and scientist skeptics, it appears the fix is in.

We'regiving LLNL the benefit of the doubt because somesecrets are above our right to know especially in time of war when back room deal making inreturn for allied support may serve more critical interests of the US. It is easy to deduce that the current Bush Administration has at the highest level made some concessions towards the protocols of the Kyoto Accords. LLNL atmospheric sciences has its growing league of doubters and skeptics, but the LLNL atmospheric sciences department may well be the right department at the right place at the right time with the right level of deceptiveness outside close public scrutiny or real public understanding, lacking any sort of credible checks and balances, serving as prosecutor, judge and jury, to rope in critical lawmakers who know or acknowledge nothing of controversy surrounding anthropogenic global warming, to break from endless US dependence on hydrocarbon based fuels, a goal we believe ironically, a vast segment of the population in the West do indeed agree upon.

How ironic that while deception may reign supreme, and scientific process integrity systemically corrupt at the highest levels of the IPCC, that we may nonetheless find overlapping majority agreement (in spite of environmental extremists) and an international political rally point among skeptics joining with a sufficient number of moderate climate-alarmists, that a unifying consensus of clean energy and energy independence emerges. The engine to underwrite and hold together such a consensus will likely come from the free markets.

In the long run however, science ultimately trumps politics and dogma on global warming. So do the ends justify the means? The IPCC still appears to function more as a controversial * political body cutting secretive "back room" deals, than a trustworthy science department.Their decisions are in fact political.

Loss of integrity in the scientific process leads to problems on several levels. Among those problems caused for LLNL, the IPCC, US interests, and the world, the most egregious is that so much becomes vested in camp theory that no one can undo the directional momentum driven by political agenda instead of hard science, when new discoveries lead to different truths. Everything that might shed light on newly discovered counter trends for earth cooling such as great cooling plumes near the equator serving more efficiently than expected or MIT’s recent discovery of the “Iris Effect” are squelched, denied peer review, and blocked from funding further research. This is done so current vested, camp interests both inside and outside of government in this unholy alliance, are not embarrassed and done so that research money flows only to research carrying the imprimatur of central committee of IPCC. 

Equally consequential are real world inflationary impacts. Energy and resources become needlessly diverted into make believe solutions of Gordian Knott complexity, cheating the very neediest fringes of global societies and blocking their development and relief by none other than the climate-alarmists themselves. It is this depraved dimension of the climate alarmist movement that is particularly noted byHis Holiness The Pope, among other influencing concerns. 

Who are we to question scientific process integrity? We are the skeptics and we are made to feel very alone. Hopefully when the roles eventually reverse, we skeptics do not then impose equivalent intolerant measures on others.Following scientific evidence can be a frustrating and painful process to deeply held beliefs. It is a sword of light that cuts both ways.

What about the larger patriotic national interest demonstrated at LLNL that helped bring us through the Cold War years?  Less we fail to see the forest through the trees we miss the far greater plan unfolding in which controversy in science plays a key positive role. Atmospheric science is still a young science dealing with big questions. LLNL has always dealt with the big questions, probing proof of a grand unifying mathematical model of the universe.Is the universe an open or closed system? Are there parallel universes? If so how many can be mathematically determined? Is the earth operating normally within its historic parameters generous for continued human expansion or is disaster right around the corner and the Marshall Law-like demands of climate-alarmists somehow justified? No small questions these.

Pull your lofty soaring thoughts back to planet earth and think graduate school business plan instead. Think industrial development opportunities. Take comfort. Follow the money. The old game is afoot. All is well. What’s happening is fully within our understanding to reason through with existing information. A decade ago the Board of Regents of the University of California set a new direction at the University in adopting a controversial (at the time) theme of corporate joint venturing with corporate sponsors, in effect tipping its hat in acknowledgement to the success of its great rival across the Bay, Stanford University!

Stanford's Story: In 1909 Stanford grad Cyril Elwell goes to work for Federal Telegraph getting US Naval contracts in WWI. Then Federal Telegraph engineers quit and form Magnvox making PA systems for the battleships your great granddads served on. By 1932 Stanford engineer, Litton, is making vacuum tubes better with his little engineering company. In 1938 along comes Stanford Research Associates started by two brothers called Varian building klystron tubes for the Allies during WWII. Then comes image magic not yet popularized by two young engineers Hewlett and Packard. In 1951 a little industrial subdivision that understood the value of PR starts Stanford Research Park.A local Livermore family who I will not embarrass owned more property in this park on leased lands than any other property owner in the development. In 1957 engineers seeking freedom from the tyranny of their boss, started Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of those engineers by the name of Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore start a company called Intel. You may have heard of them. In 1971 a Don Hoeflier coins a catchy term “Silicon Valley.” Intel engineers meantime create the microprocessor. Two long hairs in 1975 emerge on the front pages with a little known Home Brew Computer Club, I believe their names were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. I always got the two mixed up back them. They formed a company called Apple Computer Inc. in 1976. In 1981 Stanford trained Bechtolsheim designs the Sun Microsystems workstation with Stanford’s Vinod Khosla’s help. In 1984 Stanford incubates Cisco Systems networking equipment company. Then critical mass occurs around the internet with an explosion of companies like Netscape in 1995. The rest is history. Enter about this time the University of California Board of Regents, better late than never, with a big question: Can we do the same thing as Stanford, sort of? LLNL had seen ideas migrate out of its control into the public sector during the 1990’s without directly participating in the rewards. Great issues where discussed. Should the University pursue only pure research or might it joint venture research and enjoy spin-offs and resultant profits? What about conflicts of interest? What to do?

2007, Enter new LLNL management.“With our broadly based capabilities and leadership in mission-focused areas of science and engineering, the Laboratory is able to also make major advances to meet other national needs. LLNL pursues major research programs in energy and environment, bioscience and biotechnology, and basic science and advanced technology.”

Regarding Partnerships: (Latest on LLNL 12/20/2007)

"The Laboratory has established organizations that are committed to enabling collaborations of potential mutual benefit. Specifically, the University Relations Program and its “University Gateway” can assist those from academe who would like to know more about research partnering opportunities. Industrial Partnerships and Commercialization is similarly available to explore business partnering opportunities and mechanisms that range from simple licensing agreements through large-scale consortium agreements."

Translated: "We’re open for business" (sort of like Stanford).

Now we see the larger forest. LLNL is building a huge job market potential for tomorrow managed by an assemblage of the nation’s great integrated engineering companies taking on the big issues facing mankind. The service atmospheric earth science provides aligns a fledgling science politically in the middle ground as leadership in the US faces the 2008 elections, working to achieve name recognition at LLNL for great job creating opportunities. In the end the department is a tool being used by LLNL management in a high stakes job market game of remaining relevant in a changing world, and not to be confused with major national security functions retained in other LLNL departments.

There will be no less than 600 buildings at LLNL rededicated to a 21st century enterprise at the forefront of technology in the decade ahead. One branch of this self-supporting joint venturing-wing of LLNL  will likely be reflected through atmospheric science, another perhaps through bio-research, and still others in energy research and applications wherever creative minds are moved to couple practical solutions with consumer business applications ... all of which is, after all, a wonderful outcome, in spite of our passing follies. We are a nation that adapts and learns through our mistakes.

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