February 8, 2021
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I am a longtime subscriber and supporter of SEPP. You can sign up free of charge and decide whether or not you’d like to keep reading. Click on the URL and you get this week’s issue which is available first thing Monday morning. Here is the link: http://www.sepp.org/the-week-that-was.cfm
I routinely print off the first 7 pages and read and study as time permits. But it is always my first thing on Monday mornings.
“Follow the science,” so many bellow, and then claim that the ‘science’ is settled. The definition of science is knowledge! What those folks are actually telling us is that “…we already know as much as there is to know…” But such is antithesis of science. True science must involve skepticism and must NEVER ignore data or findings that don’t conform to current “group-think.”
I usually read only the first 7 pages or so because I have already read or scanned many of the excellent articles which are references for additional knowledge and study and promote understanding. Those articles are written by genuine scientists – not group-thinkers.
None of the authors is a “Denier!” All acknowledge that climate by definition and in actual practice throughout earth’s history has changed and may be changing now. But, many factors having enormous influence on weather – and weather over time (which is the definition of climate), are at work and many of them are so complex that they cannot be “modeled” accurately. Real climate scientists understand that a near trace gas in our enormous atmosphere cannot produce cataclysmic “climate emergencies.” As many of the studies linked to in this weekly publication demonstrate, that trace gas – amounting to but four one-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere – has beneficial effects and make life on this planet livable. To proclaim that carbon dioxide – the very stuff we exhale with every breath – is a POLLUTANT is a classic example of anti-science. Real science doesn’t cherry-pick or ignore data. Above all, public policy should never be based on “models” no matter how complex – and especially when the predictions of the models DON’T MATCH UP WITH OBSERVED DATA.
The informed citizen will learn that the atmosphere surrounding earth – where carbon dioxide (a GAS) exists – has NOT warmed. But surface temperatures have. Carbon dioxide is not found on the earth’s surface, but only in the atmosphere. And there are years of recorded data gathered by very sophisticated and accurate automated instruments that prove this beyond any doubt. Such truth is not to be tossed aside as “skepticism.”
A most important reason why temperature readings are higher today than in the past is the “heat island” effect. Thermometers today are mounted in places that artificially distort their readings. In the past, the readings at airports were recorded from instruments that were properly sited in shaded igloos located above bare earth or grass near airports. Those same sites today have been paved over with black asphalt or concrete – both of which absorb sunlight and hold heat. So in comparing readings from earlier years at the same locations, the results are OF COURSE higher.
Here’s an easy self-test. On any sunny July afternoon, walk across your front lawn barefoot, and then step on to your sun-baked black asphalt driveway. OUCH!! Big time. That, my friends and colleagues, is the “heat island” effect. It is real, used to distort and misinform and may even end up costing us dearly in many ways.
The new President has been badly misinformed and thus has appointed a tragically flawed “true believer” to be his climate czar to oversee some massive expenditures that will destroy our livelihoods and impoverish our living standards. Windmills and solar are NOT solutions to anything. When true science finds suitable, and affordable, substitutes for fossil fuels – and they will if genuine science is unleashed – they will be welcomed. But today “renewables” are hogwash.
Check the link and try it. Real science is not afraid of truth.
Old Frank