Donald Trump’s presidency has seemingly unsettled the supposedly settled science of climate change, disrupting 40 years of “climate change is killing us” dogma in seven short months.
For nearly four decades, scientists with a reputational and financial stake in the game, and compliant, uninquisitive mainstream media have told the public one thing consistently concerning climate change: there is a consensus, there is no debate, human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change. The end, roll credits, The Science is settled.
The Consensus Climate Cabal (CCC), scientists, activists, and politicians, attempted to enforce the settled climate science orthodoxy because they profited from it in one way or another, in part by shutting down continued debate and discussion about the causes and consequences of climate change. For example, the Climategate emails showed scientists suppressing or lying about inconvenient data undermining climate concerns, having open minded journal editors removed from their positions or reined in by journal publishers (nefarious activity that continues to this day, unfortunately). In Climategate’s aftermath, climate skeptics were increasingly shut out of the peer review process, and papers openly skeptical of the anthropogenic climate disaster narrative were nearly impossible to get published in top journals.
The mainstream media then piled on. It began to shut dissenting voices out of climate change stories. The media concluded that since “the science was settled,” the debate was over and publishing the views of climate skeptics/climate realists was tantamount to allowing Holocaust deniers a voice in stories about Nazi death camps. Those not in the consensus group were labeled as climate deniers and disenfranchised in polite company.
Organizations like The Heartland Institute fought back by publishing various scientific documents, grounded in evidence and data. From multivolume, comprehensive reviews of the literature presenting the completely unalarming state of climate knowledge, to short, one to three page documents packed with data and graphs showing that, weather isn’t becoming more extreme and fewer people than ever before are dying as a result of weather, contrary to the impression of media headlines.
However, we are David facing the Goliath of the CCC, which is quite well-funded and supported by people who wield true power.
Fortunately, President Donald Trump is an unconventional politician who understands that climate change is a hoax. With the onset of Trump’s second term, armed with knowledge of the swamp’s workings against his agenda in the first term, Trump and his team hit the ground running. They quickly pulled the rug out from under the institutional edifice that had embraced the alarming climate consensus. Trump has pulled the U.S. out of international climate agreements, removed restrictions on fossil fuel development and use, sharply reduced tax credits and permits for wind and solar power, and ended most funding for climate efforts.
It has been a shock and awe assault on the CCC.
For the first time in more than a decade, climate alarmists are seriously engaging with climate realists on questions of climate science, specifically due to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) release of “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” Because the report’s authors are prominent and well-respected climate researchers, the report can’t be easily dismissed as produced by uninformed or bought-and-paid-for deniers.
The DOE report, among other things: debunks claims that climate change is causing worsening extreme weather events; explains how rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have an increasingly small influence over global temperatures; describes how the same increase in CO2 is causing a beneficial global greening; and examines the myriad, currently poorly understood, natural factors that obfuscate rising temperatures and changes in climate to human energy use.
The DOE report is a direct challenge to the CCC’s self-anointed position as the official voice of climate truth, a challenge that comes from the same federal government that has funded their climate research over the years.
Finally, the CCC is being forced to take seriously long-standing problems raised by realists with their arguments of pending climate catastrophe.
A recent article in Nature acknowledged that the DOE’s report has at least a modicum of validity.
“Predictions of global warming are uncertain,” writes Tim Plamer, D.Phil. in a recent article in Nature. “That’s why we need to keep finding out how the climate system works.”
Palmer admits, for example, that climate change is not catastrophic, and “its authors are correct in one respect: the most important uncertainty in our ability to predict how much global temperatures will increase as carbon emissions continue is related to how cloud coverage will change over time.”
The response of global temperatures to rising CO2 is the most critical question in the climate debate. If that question is unsettled, then we can’t really know how the climate will respond to rising temperatures and whether it endangers humans or the environment. Score one for the DOE report.
The science is not “settled,” after all. It never was!
Let the long-overdue discussion or debate on fundamental climate science questions begin. And let it be done based on data and evidence, without any further acrimony, censorship, ad hominem, appeals to authority, or appeals to consensus. That’s how it should have been all along.
Politics and the quest for power and money should not be factors, although I’m not naive enough to believe they won’t continue to be so.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., (hsburnett@heartland.org) is Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization.