Dire climate change, predicted by atmospheric models but not substantiated by reality, has become the coinage of statists.  Wealth transfer executors never had it so good.  No wonder free-market thinkers and scientists whose currency is reality are targeted by the climate police. 

But what if climate model output is not good enough to justify the transfer of trillions of middle-class tax dollars to politically-favorable machinates, let alone send someone to jail under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act?  What if promoters of doom are somewhat biased in their thinking and even have some incentive for hoping for the worst where the atmosphere is concerned?

As hard as this may be to accept, it is possible that climate model results may be in serious error and doomsayers may be biased and incentivized somehow.  After all, some of the most vociferous champions of climate chaos are not scientists but political types--Democratic presidential candidates, Democratic attorneys general, Democratic president, vice president, cabinet members, and former Democratic vice president.  And, among those most likely to gain in power and profit are political types--Democratic presidential candidates, Democratic attorneys general, Democratic president, vice president, cabinet members, and former Democratic vice president.

Endorsement by politicians, along with the establishment of “settled science,” doesn’t particularly help science, rather it’s more likely to harm it.  Examples of negative impact of politics and magisteriums on science abound--from Aristotle’s geocentrism to eugenics and Lysenko’s practice of science in the service of the Soviet state.

Science thrives on open-mindedness, independent thinking, and perspective.  Yet, the current world of climate science is limited by influence from federal government largesse and academic groupthink.

Overall direction for politically-correct climate conclusions come via the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which role, since its establishment in the late 1980s, has been to assess “the scientific basis of the risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation.”

Informed challengers to the IPCC include the recently established Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a group of “nongovernmental scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change.”  Conclusions from their independent investigation of the climate issue, explained in Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus  (Heartland Institute, 2015), include:

“Climate is an interdisciplinary subject requiring insights from many fields.”

“Fundamental uncertainties arise from insufficient observational evidence, disagreements over how to interpret data, and how to set the parameters of models.”

“Climate scientists, like all humans, can be biased.  Origins of bias include careerism, grant-seeking, political views, and confirmation bias.”

The IPCC, “created to find and disseminate research finding a human impact on global climate, is not a credible source.”  For instance, “[i]n contradiction of the scientific method, IPCC assumes its implicit hypothesis – that dangerous global warming is resulting, or will result, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions – is correct and that its only duty is to collect evidence and make plausible arguments in the hypothesis’s favor.  It simply ignores the alternative and null hypothesis, amply supported by empirical research, that currently observed changes in global climate indices and the physical environment are the result of natural variability.”

From ample references to peer-reviewed works and based on NIPCC reports “drawn from its extensive review of the scientific evidence,” Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming argues that “any human global climate impact is within the background variability of the natural climate system and is not dangerous.”  

Scientists have a long way to go to sufficiently understand the workings of the atmospheric environment.  So, a terrific disservice is done to the discipline of science, when power-seeking politicians and narrow-minded individuals of all stripes seek to foreclose reasonable investigation with their claims of settled science and demands for immediate action that will likely produce just another redistribution of wealth fiasco.

Anthony J. Sadar is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail http://globalwarmingtrust.com/  (Stairway Press, 2016).