(Courtesy Wikipedia)

By Spencer D Gear PhD

I was shocked, surprised and encouraged to read this article in one of the main-stream media outlets in Australia, The Australian newspaper (3 July 2013) – one of our leading daily publications. It provides evidence about the smokescreen of climate change. Why don’t you take a read of Michael Newman’s evidence, ‘Climate change science has become an expensive smokescreen‘?

What is a smoke screen, smoke-screen or smokescreen? The Free Dictionary states that it is:

1. A mass of dense artificial smoke used to conceal military areas or operations from an enemy.

2. An action or statement used to conceal actual plans or intentions (‘smoke screen’, The Free Dictionary).

It is this second definition that deals with the topic of climate change and a smokescreen that Newman has raised. Has some of the climate change evidence been concealed for the Aussie populace? This article by Michael Newman provides evidence that this is so. Part of the article reads:

The voices of alarm and authority have been unable to hide the reality that, statistically, there has been no increase in global temperatures since 1997, despite an 8.3 percent rise in atmospheric CO2. For those who want to cite warming in some records, all datasets agree there has been none since 2000. In fact since 2002 a slight cooling has been observed. Who knew? Well, not the warmist scientists.

Indeed, the ABC reported: “A study forecasts that global warming will set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the following five years expected to be hotter than 1998, which was the warmest year on record.” Wrong. Even recent claims of an “angry” Australian summer were not validated by satellite data.

Roy Spencer, from the University of Alabama, compared 73 warming predictions to actual data across 34 years. Ending in 2012, he found an extraordinary discrepancy between what the models predicted and the actual observations of satellites and balloons. The predictions were all strongly biased to the upside. As he commented, “I frankly don’t see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models ‘are not inconsistent with the observations’. Any sane person can see otherwise.”

Scientists have long searched for a “hot spot” in the atmosphere. When it could not be found, some said it must be in the oceans. Yet, since the deployment in 2003 of 3000 Argo floats (the acme of ocean temperature measurement), researchers still haven’t found it.

Newman’s observation is that

Scientists have long searched for a “hot spot” in the atmosphere. When it could not be found, some said it must be in the oceans. Yet, since the deployment in 2003 of 3000 Argo floats (the acme of ocean temperature measurement), researchers still haven’t found it.

While CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, it seems that natural forces dominate climate change, not mankind’s emissions. Henrik Svensmark’s theory of cosmoclimatology (the role of cosmic rays) may be right.

(Courtesy Wikipedia)

Maurice Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Securities Exchange and the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission), is not the only person raising issues of the climate change smokescreen. On June 10, 2013, also in The Australian, David Uren wrote an article, ‘Sceptics put heat on climate change’. Here, he reveals some Aussie attitudes towards climate change:

CLIMATE change sceptics outnumber believers, according to an OECD study that shows how the debate has sharply divided Australians

The study into household attitudes towards the environment shows Australians are more sceptical than any of the other 10 nations examined, with the exception of The Netherlands.

It shows 45 per cent of Australians think environmental dangers are exaggerated and are reluctant to pay for government environmental policies.

In contrast, 42 per cent of Australians believe the environmental challenges are real and think the government should take action, which they are prepared to pay for even if the amount is not matched by other nations.

The OECD study identifies a third group of people who believe that environmental dangers are real, but thinks technological progress will resolve them. This group is about 10 per cent of the Australian population.

In Canada, Sweden and France, more than half the population is motivated by environmental concerns, while less than 40 per cent are sceptical (emphasis in original).

But there are those who challenge the climate change denial and examine the social science behind denial. One example is Haydn Washington and John Cook 2011. Climate change denial. London/New York: Earthscan (Routledge).

(Courtesy Routledge)

The publisher’s description of the book is:

Humans have always used denial. When we are afraid, guilty, confused, or when something interferes with our self-image, we tend to deny it. Yet denial is a delusion. When it impacts on the health of oneself, or society, or the world it becomes a pathology. Climate change denial is such a case. Paradoxically, as the climate science has become more certain, denial about the issue has increased. The paradox lies in the denial. There is a denial industry funded by the fossil fuel companies that literally denies the science, and seeks to confuse the public. There is denial within governments, where spin-doctors use ‘weasel words’ to pretend they are taking action. However there is also denial within most of us, the citizenry. We let denial prosper and we resist the science.

Climate Change Denial explains the social science behind denial. It contains a detailed examination of the principal climate change denial arguments, from attacks on the integrity of scientists, to impossible expectations of proof and certainty to the cherry picking of data. Climate change can be solved – but only when we cease to deny that it exists. This book shows how we can break through denial, accept reality, and thus solve the climate crisis. It will engage scientists, university students, climate change activists as well as the general public seeking to roll back denial and act.

See also ‘Global Warming & Climate Change Myths’ from Skeptical Science.

Are there others who question the climate change views being promoted so widely? See Wikipedia’s ‘List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming’. This article includes a list of ‘Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes’. Some of these scientists include:

• Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences;
• Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics;
• Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa;
• Chris de Freitas, associate professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland
• David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester;
• William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology;
• Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada.
• Ian Plimer, professor emeritus of Mining Geology, the University of Adelaide;
• Tom Segalstad, head of the Geology Museum at the University of Oslo;
• Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and
• Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center;

So, Maurice Newman’s timely article in The Australian raises some issues of concern for all of us regarding the evidence against artificially created climate change that may have been presented to the public as a smoke screen.

Copyright © 2013 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 08 October 2021.