Bob Carter, Willie Soon & William Briggs

Scientists have been studying solar influences on the climate for more than 5000 years.Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records, and noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather. In 1801, celebrated astronomer William Herschel, the first to observe Uranus, noted that when there were fewer spots the price of wheat soared. He surmised that less “light and heat” from the sun resulted in reduced harvests.

It is therefore perhaps surprising that Professor Richard Muller (University of California, Berkeley) recently claimed that “no component that matches solar activity” could be identified in his newly reconstructed BEST global land temperature record. Instead, Professor Muller said, carbon dioxide controls our changing temperature.

Can it really be true that solar radiation, which supplies Earth with the energy that drives our weather and climate – and which, when it varied in the past, is known to have caused major climate shifts – is no longer the principal influence on climate change?

Consider the charts that accompany this article. In locations as widely separated as US, the Arctic and China, they show a strong and direct relationship between temperature and incoming solar radiation -- the data for the US coming directly from Professor Muller’s own BEST data! That such a tight relationship between temperature and solar radiation holds for many disparate geographical areas indicates that the US result cannot be dismissed as just a local aberration.

A strong sun-climate relationship requires mechanisms to exist whereby our sun can both cool and warm the Earth. One such mechanism is fluctuations in the total amount of incoming solar energy, but measurements suggest that this is not a dominant effect. Another cause, and probably a more substantial one, is modulation of the amount of solar radiation that reaches earth’s surface by changes in total cloud cover.

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Bob Carter

This is text of the speech (edited for online publication) delivered by professor Bob Carter at the “Convoy of No Confidence” protest in Canberra on August 22, 2011.

Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen.

First, my warm congratulations to every person here for coming to this gathering today. Most of you have paid your own expenses, and simply by being here you are therefore displaying great public generosity on behalf of all your fellow citizens. For, though some remain unaware of it, every single Australian man, woman and child will be hurt should a carbon dioxide tax come into being – and that hurt will be greater for the less well off, and will be imposed for no environmental benefit whatever.

Second, the organizers of this event have made it crystal clear it is a gathering at which ANY Australian, of any shape, size, colour or political inclination, can express his or her opposition to a carbon dioxide tax.

However, a meeting on the lawn of parliament house has inescapable political implications. My perspective is that of an experienced scientist - one who has spent a professional lifetime studying ancient environmental and climatic change. I therefore have nothing to say, and neither should I have anything to say, about the politics of the carbon dioxide tax. Rather, my role today is to share with you a summary of the science that should be, but actually isn’t, illuminating policy making on climate change.

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Bob Carter
Quadrant Online

"It therefore behoves Australian politicians to stop nanny-stating people over speculative dangerous warming – alleged to be wrought by carbon dioxide emissions, following the IPCC-inspired legend that is marketed relentlessly by the Greens - and to focus instead on better protecting the populace against known natural climate vagaries by being prepared to adapt to them."

New Minister for Climate Change, Greg Combet, has started his term by calling for the application of commonsense to the debate over global warming policy.

Well, yes, but even more important is the application of some independent scientific analysis to the alarmist advice rendered by the UN’s now discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Last year, in preparation for defeating the government’s anti-carbon dioxide (emissions trading) bill in the Senate, Senator Fielding invited four independent scientists to audit the IPCC advice that was being provided to Climate Minister Penny Wong through her department.

These scientists concluded:

(i) that whilst recent increases in greenhouse gases play a minor radiative role in global climate, no strong evidence exists that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing, or are likely to cause, dangerous global warming;

(ii) that it is unwise for government environmental policy to be set based upon monopoly advice, and especially so when that monopoly is represented by an international political (not scientific) agency.

The Fielding Four therefore called for a commission of enquiry into the evidence for and against a dangerous human influence on climate.

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Bob Carter

The phenomena of disinvitation and the brotherhood of silence

Scientists who venture to make independent statements in public about environmental myths soon come to learn about two post-modern-science tactics used to suppress their views – namely, disinvitation and the application of a brotherhood of silence. How these tactics work is explained in this article.

The modus operandi

A member of the organising committee for one or another conference comes to one of my talks, or chances to meet a friend who has attended. Enthusiasm thereby arises for me to speak at the conference that is being planned. Prompted by the member, the conference committee approves an invitation, which I accept. Later, the Council or governing body of the society in question gets to “rubber stamp” the conference program and someone says: “Bob Carter as a plenary speaker! You must be joking”. The disinvitation follows, sometimes well after the talk has been written and travel booked.

In a variation on this, earlier this year I was invited by our ABC to contribute an opinion piece about climate change to their online blog site, The Drum. The piece was duly written and tendered, only to be declined.

Similarly, strong control has long been exercised by public broadcasters ABC and SBS against the appearance of independent scientists on their TV and radio news and current affairs programs. I first encountered this in 2007, when I participated in a broadcast discussion about Martin Durkin’s epoch-making documentary film, The Great Global Warming Swindle [Alternative link here.]. Before the broadcast I had the astonishing experience of being successively invited, disinvited, prevaricated with and then finally invited to participate again, as competing interests inside the ABC battled, as they obviously saw it, to control the outcome of the panel discussion.

I have generally viewed these and similar experiences over the years as amusing irritations that go with the territory of scientific independence. But the matter starts to become offensive, and indeed sinister, when it transpires that scientists from CSIRO, and other IPCC-linked research groups in Australia, have been behind particular disinvitations; or, even more commonly, have refused to participate in public debate on climate change.

The same self-appointed guardians of the sanctity of IPCC climate propaganda also strive ceaselessly to prevent invitations from being issued in the first place. For example, when it was suggested to a Sydney metropolitan university that I might give a talk on the campus, their Distinguished (sic) Professor of Sustainability responded that:

he would not be interested in allowing anyone to present a point of view which did not support the fact that human-generated carbon dioxide has caused global warming.

What?

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Bob Carter

The Chicago Heartland-4 International Conference on Climate Change

"The four Heartland conferences have had a number of features in common, of which perhaps the most surprising has been the general failure of the mainstream press to attend and report on the matters discussed, and this despite the pedigree academic credentials of many of the persons presenting papers."

The 4th Heartland International Conference on Climate Change was held between May 16-18 last week in the Heartland Institute’s home city of Chicago. Previous meetings have been held in New York and Washington, and all have been highly successful. But as conference participant and Euro-MP Roger Helmer pointed out, the Heartland-4 conference marks a turning point, because of the emergence at the meeting of a rapidly maturing counter-consensus on the still topical (if increasingly tiresome to voters) issue of alarmist global warming.

More than 700 scientists, social scientists, policy advisers and others attended the conference. Following the path blazed by independent Australian senator Steve Fielding in 2009, which resulted in his exercising a decisive vote against the ETS in the Senate, this year two serving politicians attended from the antipodes; they were Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi from South Australia and ACT climate change spokesman from New Zealand, John Boscawen, who were joined by a number of US politicians and ex-politicians. Also in attendance was former New Zealand Minister for Science, Barry Brill, the author of a devastating recent exposé of the unreliability of the claimed NZ historical temperature record.

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Bob Carter

[This is the essay Australia's ABC tried to ban. See story here...]

Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm. He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that

"the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".

Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that

"Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

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Richard K. Moore

In questions of science, the authority
of a thousand is not worth the humble
reasoning of a single individual.
– Galileo Galilei

Whenever you find that you are on the
side of the majority, it is time to pause
and reflect.
– Mark Twain

You've all heard of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is to be preferred. I have my own Occam's Razor: whatever the regime is selling is based on lies. I was quite concerned about co2 emissions for years, right up until the time Gore took up the cause. Then I said, Whoa! Time to reconsider.

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Bob Carter

The bell tolls for the IPCC

It is a fine day, and God is obviously in his heaven.

I am standing on the helicopter deck of the famous science-drilling ship JOIDES Resolution. The snow-capped mountains of South Island, New Zealand, glisten gently along the far western horizon. A majestic rolling, royal blue swell strokes the sides of the ship. Its origins lie deep in the Southern Ocean, and its crests are ruffled into a maze of small waves, ripples and white patches of gently breaking foam by today’s northeasterly breeze.

I feel like Admiral Jellicoe reviewing the Home Fleet on the Solent in 1907, for behind the ship bobs a flotilla of a thousand or more albatrosses, mollymawks and cape pigeons, most preening, courting, sleeping with heads tucked in or just lollygagging around in the sunshine, some few doing aerial acrobatics apparently for no other reason than the sheer zest of living; when and how this great mass of birds feeds remains mysterious to me, but generally their life out here seems to be, what else, a breeze. And that the stern flotilla is of seabirds rather than warships is particularly appropriate, for JR, as she is affectionately known to those aboard, is a research flagship for the environmental and earth sciences rather than for any navy.

It is a privilege and a pleasure to be here. The group of 50 scientists and technicians on board are drawn from the best in the world, and from the many country members of the International Drilling Program (IODP). They are supremely good at their highly skilled jobs, as are the ship’s and drilling crews. For a research proposal to be allocated a drilling leg on JR - which lasts 2 months and costs about US $15 million to conduct - the science involved has to survive the most rigorous international peer-review, at which stage many drilling proposals fail.

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Bob Carter

Science is about simplicity

A well-accepted aphorism about science, in the context of difference of opinion between two points of view, is “Madam, you are entitled to your own interpretation, but not to your own facts”.

The world stoker of the fires of global warming alarmism, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cleverly suborns this dictum in two ways.

First, the IPCC accepts advice from influential groups of scientists who treat the data that underpins their published climate interpretations (collected, of course, using public research funds) as their own private property, and refuse to release it to other scientists.

Thus, confronted in 1996 with a request that he provide a U.S. peer-review referee with a copy of the data that underpinned a research paper that he had submitted, U.K. Hadley Climate Research Centre scientist Tom Wigley responded:

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08/14/09 Richard S. Lindzen Resisting climate hysteria: A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action.
08/20/09 Des Moore The Great Climate Scam
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11/17/09 Peter Smith Exploiting Guilt: The Copenhagen Treaty and Versailles
11/24/09 Judy Curry On the credibility of climate research
11/25/09 Bob Carter The science of deceit
11/26/09 John McLean Climategate: Shutting out dissent
11/26/09 Gerald Traufetter Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out
11/27/09 Marco Villa What You Should Know Before the Copenhagen Summit
11/28/09 Patrick J. Michaels The Dog Ate Global Warming
11/29/09 Judith Curry An open letter from Dr. Judith Curry on climate science
11/30/09 Doug L. Hoffman Global Warming Fatigue Spreads
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12/01/09 FOS Friends of Science Society Position Statement
12/03/09 Susan Swift Climate Gate: Where Politics and Religion Unite
12/04/09 Aletho News There's more to climate fraud than just tax hikes
12/05/09 Richard S. Lindzen Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?
12/07/09 Wendy McElroy "Settled"? It's not even "Science"
12/07/09 Mervyn F. Bendle The Eco-Apocalypse Craze
12/09/09 Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. The Left Fell into the Climate Morass
12/09/09 Marco Villa Copenhagen Beware
12/10/09 Friends Of Science Myths / Facts: Common Misconceptions About Global Warming
12/11/09 Steve McIntyre IPCC and the “Trick”
12/12/09 Notsilvia Night Why are the oligarchic elites trying so hard to push their climate change policies through right now?
12/13/09 Bob Carter Scam of the century
12/13/09 Lord Christopher Monckton Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues
12/15/09 Merv Bendle Brave New Green World
12/17/09 The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley Lord Monckton reports on Pachauri’s eye opening Copenhagen presentation
12/20/09 Merv Bendle Politics of green unreality
12/20/09 Paul Driessen Cleaning out the climate science cesspool
12/21/09 Mick Greenhough Elite Politique
12/22/09 Terence Corcoran Climategate: A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism --Part 1 & 2
12/23/09 S. Fred Singer Al Gore and Global Warming Alarmism
12/24/09 Richard Moore There is no global warming problem
12/27/09 Peter Smith Seeking untainted science
12/27/09 Bill Steigerwald G. P. Bear goes to Washington: The true story of a freedom-loving carnivore
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01/06/10 Neil Frank Climategate: You should be steamed
01/08/10 John Izzard The Pachauri affair
01/11/10 Lord Monkton Climate change: proposed personal briefing
01/15/10 Roy Spencer, PhD. A Demonstration that Global Warming Predictions are Based More On Faith than On Science
01/16/10 Patricia Adams The next big scam: carbon dioxide
01/25/10 Luboš Motl / Anthony Watts Global UAH: warmest January day on record
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02/01/10 Ninad D. Sheth The Hottest Hoax in the World
02/05/10 From the University of Haifa via Eurekalert Israeli study shows variable sea level in past 2500 years
02/06/10 Des Moore The IPCC's flawed data
02/07/10 Julie Chao LBNL on Himalayas: “greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt”
02/08/10 Margaret Wente The great global warming collapse
02/10/10 Henrik Svensmark, Torsten Bondo and Jacob Svensmark Cosmic Ray Decreases Affect Atmospheric Aerosols and Clouds
02/10/10 EUReferendum White Death or How wrong can they get?
02/12/10 Henrik Svensmark Svensmark: “global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning” – “enjoy global warming while it lasts”
02/14/10 S. Fred Singer MUST READ: The end of the IPCC
02/17/10 Marc Sheppard Evidence of Climate Fraud Grows, Media Coverage Doesn't
02/22/10 Anthony Watts The most slimy essay ever from the Guardian and Columbia University
02/27/10 Walter E. Williams Global Warming Update
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03/03/10 Steven Mosher The Final Straw
03/04/10 Iain Murray & Roger Abbott Climategate: This Time It's NASA
03/08/10 Joanne Nova The money trail
03/10/10 Tom Minchin Monckton on the IPCC
03/13/10 Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD Solar and Celestial Causes of Global Warming
03/20/10 Matt Ridley The case against the hockey stick
03/22/10 Bob Carter Lysenkoism and James Hansen
03/29/10 John O’Sullivan The bubble of climate change group-think burst in a cooling world
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04/01/10 E. Calvin Beisner The Illusion of "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming
04/02/10 Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter A Superstorm for Global Warming Research
04/04/10 Des Moore Climate inquiry, now
04/09/10 S. Fred Singer End of the IPCC: one mistake too many
04/19/10 På Høyden Om forholdet mellom CO2 og global temperatur
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