Members of the anthropogenic climate change establishment fear for their funding, so they claim President-elect Trump and the head of his EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, are out to lunch.
President Eisenhower predicted this funding dilemma in his 1961 farewell address, famous for warning of the “military industrial complex.” Just a few paragraphs later, he warned about the incestuous relationship growing between politicians and scientists.
Scientists need federal funding. Politicians need credibility. So scientists trumpet “problems” they can “solve” if adequately funded. Politicians gain credibility by supporting such research.
For the past several decades, enormous funds, dwarfing those dedicated to classic meteorological services, have poured into climate research that promises to avert apocalypse. They have vastly altered the complexion of atmospheric science. For example, in the federal laboratory that my friend and I dealt with for years, the applied meteorological services group is a small unit.
This has created a vast global community with massive political and economic momentum that focuses on climate change with the assumption that industrial CO2 emissions are the primary cause of global warming.
Entire careers rest on that assumption. Entire university departments and federal labs depend on it.
Then along come folks who question it.
Who are they? Some, like me, are meteorologists or other climate and related scientists. Most are retired, because anyone questioning the claim that climate change is potentially catastrophic and caused primarily by man faces unemployment and blacklisting by major climate journals.
Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of atmospheric science at MIT and author of at least one textbook on atmospheric physics, could publish only in Asian journals before he fully retired. Willie Soon of the Harvard Observatory was so frequently attacked personally in print that his health suffered and he largely dropped off the stage for a while. Ditto and worse for Lennart Bengtsson of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. As “Climategate” showed, there is corrupt politics in the climate science community.
Business leaders are involved because they recognize the harmful economic impacts of carbon asceticism, especially on the poor. Their conflicts of interest are no different from those of the alarmist climate scientists.
Fossil fuel has raised billions out of poverty because it is relatively cheap, widely available, easily used and consistently productive. Wind and solar energy technologies need to be prove themselves equally or more cost-effective before we can replace fossil fuels with them. Their intermittency requires more energy storage, a new distribution system and constant backup by nuclear and fossil-fuel plants. All are expensive.
Myron Ebell recognizes this.
Ethicists like Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation point out the bad impacts on the world’s poor and underdeveloped peoples of too-rapid replacement of fossil fuels with wind and solar. Windmills and solar panels can’t lift billions of poor out of poverty. They need reliable power for pumping clean water, running farm equipment, powering lights and machines, etc.
Even developed nations suffer from carbon asceticism. In recent winters in the United Kingdom, thousands more than in the past died due to energy poverty.
Global socialists use climate change as a vehicle to push redistribution of the world’s wealth, as the European Union and United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change candidly admit.
In “Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit writes, “The function of climate change … really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change … to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.”
Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said, “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. … One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. … This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Finally, the climate models themselves have common physical boundary conditions, so it’s not like we’re getting a “consensus” of really different models. They simulate two to three times as much warming as observed — not an encouraging feature for a trillion-dollar project to curtail fossil fuels and raise energy prices!
The EPA itself admits that its latest policies will reduce global temperatures by only a few tenths of a degree.
I personally doubt that Trump and Ebell will be able to halt this massive global momentum. Too many people depend on it. But it’s nice to see a little balancing of the playing field.
Charles Clough is a meteorologist, retired chief of the U.S. Army Atmospheric Effects Team at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a pastor and a contributing writer for The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
