Michael Bloomberg, according to Forbes, is the 10th richest man in the world, with a net worth of $47.5 billion.

Bloomberg graduated from the Harvard Business School, and built a huge business. He is no dummy. So, why has he given millions of dollars to the extremist Sierra Club? Why did he co-write Climate of Hope, an ignorant, anti-science book, with Carl Pope, the former head of the Sierra Club? Bloomberg studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate, so he can’t plead that he is a science-dumb liberal arts major. Sadly, Bloomberg seems to believe what he wrote.

Global warming is a scare story that is on the decline. The failure of the Earth to warm for over 18 years, many unresolved questions and contradictions, and repeated scandals, have gravely damaged the catastrophic global warming story.

Different chapters in their book are written by either Bloomberg or Pope. Pope wrote a “science” chapter that is extremely amusing because Pope, a history major, obviously hasn’t the vaguest understanding of the basic science behind claims of global warming. Worse, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Pope says:

 “Different gases and particles in the atmosphere capture some of the solar energy both as it hits the atmosphere and as it bounces back as heat. These are the greenhouse gases…”

This is confused gibberish. Very little of the incoming radiation from the Sun is absorbed by greenhouse gases.

Pope says that without greenhouse gases the Earth would be like the Moon, 253 degrees Fahrenheit by day and 243 degrees below zero at night. That’s wrong. Even without greenhouse gases, the Earth, unlike the moon, has an atmosphere. The Earth rotates 13 times faster than the moon. The Earth would not experience the extreme temperatures of the moon even without greenhouse gases because days and nights are short compared to the moon and because the atmosphere provides far more thermal inertia than the Moon’s surface does.

Pope states that greenhouse gases cause the blanket of air surrounding the Earth to retain more solar energy, causing the temperature to rise. Pope seems to think that the greenhouse gases are a kind of bank vault for energy. According to Pope: “…carbon dioxide is the second-largest heat-storage gas in the atmosphere…” But very little energy is stored in greenhouse gases as heat, the more so because they constitute a very small part of the atmosphere. The amount of atmospheric heat that can be stored in the atmosphere’s CO2 is more than a thousand times less that the amount of heat stored in the major atmospheric gases, nitrogen and oxygen. Pope was very clear about his mistaken beliefs in his 2006 book about the Bush administration, Strategic Ignorance:

"the science is, in fact, settled. greenhouse gases-carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and certain other atmospheric chemicals -- absorb heat from the Sun during the day and do not re-radiate it at night”

This is gibberish. Pope seems to think that greenhouse gases store heat and make the earth warmer. Do they store more energy every day and not release it every night? Will they eventually explode from all the energy accumulated over the years?

Pope says in Climate of Hope:

“More retained solar energy has two effects. It causes temperatures to rise -- hence global warming. It also makes the atmosphere more energetic, just as heating a pot of spaghetti sauce not only heats it but eventually causes it to bubble over. Storing more -- and reflecting less -- of the incoming Sunlight puts weather on steroids.”

Just as Newton supposedly understood gravity after observing an apple falling off a tree, Pope has grasped global warming while cooking up a batch of spaghetti. Global warming is supposed to take place most strongly in the polar regions, reducing the pole-equator temperature difference. It is this temperature difference that drives weather, so global warming should make the weather more moderate -- more like spaghetti at a low simmer.

The many termite companies in Chicago would not be amused to know that Pope thinks there are no termites in Chicago due to the cold winters.

I am not surprised that Carl Pope, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, has a knowledge of science barely one step up from explaining things in terms of Moon gods and Sun gods. What does surprise me is that obviously no attempt was made to fact check the information in a book written by the 10th richest man in the world and the former head of a 2-million-member environmental organization.

Michael Bloomberg has a history of supporting global warming hysteria. See this article concerning his previous efforts to promote global warming with two other billionaires. In Bloomberg’s chapter, The Stakes, quoting his previous efforts, he says:

“In the decades ahead, coastal storm damage could grow to $35 billion annually, agriculture could face yield losses of more than 10 percent, and increasing power demand caused by rising temperatures could cost ratepayers an additional $12 billion annually.”

A lot of things “could” happen as a result of global warming. None of these things is happening. But then, neither is global warming happening. If adding CO2 to the atmosphere is going to hurt agricultural yields, one has to wonder why the owners of greenhouses routinely install CO2 generators. Plants breathe CO2. Increased CO2 makes plants grow better with less water.

Bloomberg says: “Never in recorded history have the seas risen as much, as quickly, as they did during the twentieth century.” To see how misleading that is, look at the graph here. “Recorded history” is not relevant in this context.

Bloomberg uses tricks to make the reader think global warming is progressing rapidly. But, the Earth’s temperature has been flat since 1998, contrary to the predictions of global warming disaster. The flat temperature has slight ripples that enable the promoters of global warming to say this year or that year is the hottest on record. The “record,” of course, doesn’t go back very far. It was probably hotter 6,000 years ago during a period known as the Holocene Optimum.

Bloomberg has a lot to say about increasing the energy efficiency of buildings. If you add enough insulation, enough triple pane windows and restrict fresh air intake, or use heat exchangers to condition fresh air intake, it is possible to make buildings that hardly consume any energy for heating or cooling. Instead of wasting energy, the greens prefer to waste money. Usually it is not their money. Then people move into the wonderful green building and ruin the best laid plans by opening the windows. The plunging price of natural gas due to fracking has made green buildings ever more wasteful of money. Because gas is so cheap, the sweet spot is less building and more energy.

Bloomberg and Pope hate coal, undoubtedly because burning coal generates more CO2 than other fuels. To promote their hatred of coal, they claim that pollution from coal is responsible for all sorts of medical problems. Claims that the low level of pollution from coal plants is responsible for medical problems and premature death is based on calculations and the assumption that small doses of pollutants cause problems in linear proportion to the problems caused by large doses. There is every reason to believe that this is not true. The claim that coal generation of electricity causes medical problems is thus unsupported by good science.

I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the mistakes, misrepresentations and lies in the Bloomberg-Pope book. What is really going on? What is this book, filled with crazy but fashionable ideas, really about? It is certainly not about science. It has to do with a new religion that instead of invoking God, invokes science. The role of the devil is assigned to fossil fuel companies and Republicans. The prophets are computer models that supposedly predict the future climate of the Earth. The science that is invoked is not real science, but a confused mix of wild claims larded with scientific terminology.

Norman Rogers has a website.