Australians continue to be subjected to an onslaught of programming surrounding the ‘scientific consensus’ of anthropogenic climate change.

This narrative, underpinned by the notion that human activity is warming the planet to an “irreversible stage”, has been used to manipulate data, suppress dissent and re-write critical policies.

But is the evidence really ‘settled’ on the topic? Or does a second side of the coin exist? In the following piece, Justin Dwyer explores top reasons all Australians should question ‘climate change’ information.

HEATWAVES IN AUSTRALIA

Media outlets are one of the underlying factors behind the standard of information Australians receive in the public domain regarding climate change, with an array of reports sensationalising the effects of heat cycles cited to be the ‘hottest ever recorded’.

Despite the claims, many examples exist of similar summer conditions and climate cycles in recent Australian history, including two heatwaves that are commonly ignored by the establishment.

In the summer of 1896 – 1897, a savage blast described “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. 

Archived newspaper reports show that heat had approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days (also here and here), with regular temperatures remaining 102°F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.

By January 14th, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109F at midnight. The temperature did not fall below 103°F.

On January 18th in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”. 

Many businesses had to shut down — almost everything except bars and hotels — as panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in refugee trains.

Temperatures would remain high throughout the first quarter of the 20th century in Australia, as documented by news outlets recording rising numbers of wildlife deaths in the 1930s.

Following this, in the summer of 1938 – 1939, it is estimated that 438 people died as a result of a heatwave that hit. This didn’t only affect the ACT, but also NSW and southern Queensland.

At the time, regular temperatures across the country reached over 90°F, while overnight temperatures were 70°F. Newspaper reports at the time regularly documented temperatures of 110-115°F:

According to the 1939 article by the Townsville Bulletin, the death toll was rising steadily:

“Heatwave victims throughout New South Wales now are estimated at 100 dead. In the Sydney suburbs to-day’s record heat caused the collapse of 100 others.

At 9 a.m, the temperature was 104.4 degrees. By 10.80 a.m, it had risen to 110.6 degrees. The highest temperature in the city to-day was 113.6 degrees at 1 p.m.”

A variety of articles from the era can be found in this great compilation piece by Joanne Nova.

Reports of much hotter cycles pre-dating the modern era also correlate with evidence presented by historians across the world, who claim current conditions are far from the hottest we have seen.

Australia’s best-known historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, has challenged the idea that the current levels of change are either unique or largely the result of human behaviour.

Blainey, an influential author of almost 40 books on Australian and world history, made plain he did not accept the overwhelming view of climate scientists that the changing climate required a unique, modern explanation limited to human behaviour.

THE OPPOSING EXPERTS

According to public perception, nearly all climate scientists — roughly 97–98% of the industry — support the notion of anthropogenic climate change. The ‘scientific consensus’ is that average surface temperatures have risen over the past century as a result of human output on the planet.

The ‘97% consensus’ notion is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed, proven on multitudes of occasions to obscure the complexities of the climate issue.

However, numerous professionals — many who are highly respected in their scientific fields — have publicly opposed the official narrative presented by institutions and government agencies.

Lennart Bengtsson, former Director of Max Planck Institute for Meteorology — one of the world’s leading climate research centers — joined the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) to counteract exaggerated concerns about global warming.

He would later defend his decision to join an organization that is skeptical of climate change.

Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, claims that climate change orthodoxy has become a ‘new religion’ for scientists, and that the “pseudoscience” isn’t nearly as compelling as it should be to get this kind of conformity.

He resigned from his position at the American Physical Society (APS) in disgust over its officially stated policy that “global warming is occurring”.

Will Happer, a highly-respected physicist out of Princeton, compares the anti-CO2 crowd to prohibitionists and states the influence of CO2 is vastly overstated.

In a testimony to Congress, he spoke on the minimum effects of C02 on the Earth’s temperature:

“…Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. Carbon dioxide is a bit player, with at least 90% of greenhouse warming due to water vapor and clouds.

Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the radiation that it can.”

Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh, author of Lies and Traps in the Global Warming Affair, claims that the causes of warming are far more complex than the anti-carbon crowd would have you believe.

Physicist Frederick Seitz, former President of the US National Academy of Sciences, was a familiar name in publications, expressing his deep skepticism about the existence of global warming.

Seitz is a recipient of the National Medal of Science, the Compton Award, the Franklin Medal, and numerous other awards, including honorary doctorates from 32 universities around the world.

Ian Plimer, an Australian Geologist and Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, is the author of Heaven + Earth — a book that attempts in great detail to debunk all of the major global warming myths.

His work has sparked debate in the Austraian scientific community in recent years.

Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for taking on the scientific climate community — insisting global warming is not an urgent problem:

“I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. 

They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish-based scientist who is famous for his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, has delivered presentations on the need to prioritize problems on Earth before ‘climate research’.

Patrick Michaels, a CATO scholar and a GMU professor, believes we’re in a long-term trend and that C02 has got little to do with it, as each additional greenhouse molecule has less effect.

A Duke University-led study concluded that natural variability in surface temperatures over the last decade could account for the small increases reported in the last 10 years.

“Based on our analysis, a middle-of-the-road warming scenario is more likely, at least for now,” said Patrick Brown, a doctoral student in climatology at Duke University.

Professor Judith Curry, head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, recently revealed it was clear that computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.

Arthur Robinson and Willie Soon from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, published a study refuting the effects on environmental warming, citing over 130 references.

Furthermore, 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden admonishing the agency for their role in advocating certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change.

These are a few prominent examples from a list of opponents and evidence to the ‘consensus’.

Outside of well-known personalities, 31,487 American scientists – including 9,029 with PhDs – have signed a petition calling for a review of current climate change dogmas across the world.

CLIMATEGATE EMAIL SCANDAL

The ‘Climategate’ scandal erupted when a collection of email messages and data files were leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK, revealing scientific fraud and data manipulation concerning the theory of climate change.

In November 2009, over 1,000 private emails between climate change scientists were stolen and published online, and the uproar briefly shook the public’s faith in global warming science.

Three themes emerged from the released emails: 

(1) Prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; 

(2) These scientists view global warming as a political “cause”, rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and;

(3) Many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of data.

The contents suggested that scientists have been manipulating or hiding data, have been working together to frustrate people requesting access to the data and to prevent journal papers they disagreed with from appearing. 

All emails involved CRU staff, principally CRU head Phil Jones, but in correspondence with many of the world’s leading climate scientists — including the main researcher behind the “hockey stick” graph, Michael Mann. 

CRU’s speciality was reconstructing records of the Earth’s past temperatures from thermometer data and “proxy” such as tree-ring measurements.

The Climategate emails and climate data became the subject of intense debate, calling to question assumptions on anthropogenic global warming, the legitimacy of climate science and the charges leveled by the CRU and the IPCC — which claim humans cause climate change.

Recently, a new batch of 5,000 emails were anonymously released to the public.

BOM SKEWING RECORDS

As increased media sensationalism suggesting climate change will bring disastrous impacts for Australia continues to spread, the accuracy and integrity of temperature information is crucial.

Despite this, the Bureau of Meteorology has recently rewritten Australia’s temperature records for the second time in six years, greatly increasing the rate of warming since 1910:

For example, rather than the nation’s temperature having increased by 1C over the past century, the ­bureau’s updated data set — ACORN-SAT — now shows mean temperatures have risen by 1.23C.

Bureau data shows the rate of warming since 1960 has risen to 0.2C a decade, now pushing statistics closer to the IPCC target of ‘critical’ warming levels.

The bureau had fiercely defended the accuracy of ACORN-SAT data, yet these changes have increased the rate of warming by 23 per cent, compared with the earlier version-one data.

Agency officials admitted that the problem with instruments recording low temperatures likely happened in several locations throughout Australia, but they refuse to admit to manipulating temperature readings.

As a result, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s own department discussed setting up an investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology, amid media claims it was exaggerating estimates of global warming.

Documents obtained by the ABC under Freedom of Information show just weeks after the articles were published, Mr Abbott’s own department canvassed using a taskforce to carry out “due diligence” on the BoM’s climate records.

The Bureau denied skewing the data, citing lost or ‘outdated’ methods used to record the original temperatures. Despite have a budget of millions, BOM seemingly can’t afford an extra memory stick to save historic scientific data.

THE ‘INCONVENIENT TRUTH’

The debate over global warming has been going on long enough that we’ve had time to see whether some of the predictions people made about it have panned out in the real world.

An Inconvenient Truth was a staple piece of information produced to bring international attention to the issue just over a decade ago, about former US Vice President Al Gore’s campaign against global warming.

The film features a comprehensive slide show that he has presented over a thousand times across the world, crisscrossed countries, waving his arms and passionately declaring, ‘the future of human civilization is at stake’.

Some of Gore’s most memorable claims includes Rising Sea Levels (despite being discovered purchasing a beachfront mansion),  Increased Tornadoes, A “New Ice Age” in Europe, South Sahara Drying Up, Melting Arctic, Polar Bear Extinction and Temperature Increases Due to CO2.

On Jan. 26, 2006, Gore told The Washington Post that he “believes humanity may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan”.

Al Gore predicted all the Arctic ice would be gone by 2013. In 2005, established press ran articles saying that the Artic had entered a death spiral following on from Gore’s predictions.

All would prove to undoubtedly wrong, revealing the true intentions of a man who spoke of the effects of human lifestyle decisions he himself was unwilling to relinquish in his personal life.

A 2007 report from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research (TCPR) revealed that Al Gore’s Tennessee home uses over 20 times more energy than the average U.S. home.

He left his office with assets of $2 million, hauls in $175,000 speaking fees and generated $50 million in revenue from his movie across the world.

In total, Gore now has wealth estimated at over $200 million, and is on his way to becoming what the establishment is coining as “our first carbon billionaire”.

Despite being discredited in the climate field, Gore returned to Australia earlier this year to continue to promote his agenda to a new generation of climate activists.

THE PLANET IS COOLING

The aftermath of Al Gore’s film would send hysteria across the planet that led citizens to believe the Earth was rapidly warming to the extent it will be unlivable in a number of decades.

According to research, however, it has been revealed that atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1995 and has been cooling consecutively since 1997.

The Met Office — the United Kingdom’s national weather service — triggered debate among scientists by revealing that from 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate world temperatures.

The data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued without any media fanfare and revealed warming cycles lasted for about the same time as the previous periods — 1980 to 1996.

Furthermore, Met conceded that there would be no further warming until at least through 2017, which would make 20 years with no global warming. That’s right — the temperature of the planet has been flat for two decades.

Recently, a leaked draft of a UN climate change report showed the planet isn’t warming as quickly as previously believed, retracting previous 2007 estimates claiming a rise to 2-4.5C.

Mainstream experts now agree there is a two-in-three chance of keeping world temperatures within 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels — the ultimate goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Even NASA is reporting that the sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age — and the Earth’s atmosphere is responding by cooling accordingly.

MORE ARTIC ICE THAN EVER

The loss of Arctic ice is a key talking point for proponents who believe global warming is occurring.

Yet, Arctic ice has actually increased in recent years, including 50% between 2012-2013 alone. 

The following year, NASA reported Antarctic Sea ice levels had reached a new record maximum, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began records to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s.

The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), which monitors sea ice using satellite data, said that the year’s maximum was 1.54 million sq km above the 1981-2010 average:

Professor John Turner, a climate expert at the British Antarctic Survey, told The Guardian reports baffled experts for the third year running:

“The world’s best 50 models were run and 95% of them have Antarctic sea ice decreasing over the past 30 years.”

“This is an area covered by sea ice which we’ve never seen from space before,” Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre told ABC News.

Levels increased to the extent that, in December 2013, the world followed agog the plight of yet another “scientific expedition”, as 52 climate activists and reporters from BBC and The Guardian, sailed into the Antarctic to measure the effects of global warming on its sea-ice. 

By Christmas, their ship was so dangerously trapped by thick, multi-year ice, that they had to be helicoptered to a ship 10 miles away, which itself then got so trapped in ice they had to be airlifted again to two other ships.

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At the end of the day, the complexities of the climate change issue extend far beyond what the establishment would have you believe is ‘clear cut’.

Let’s be blank: the work of science has nothing to do with consensus — which is the business of politics.

Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, meaning that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant.

What is relevant is reproducible results; if counter-evidence to the established narrative exists, as is demonstrated above, it is unscientific to not explore where the claims lead.

Indeed, the greatest scientists and thinkers in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

This is a fundamental fact we all must remember.

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RELATED CONTENT

THE WEATHER IN NEW SOUTH WALES | Western Mail (17-01-1896)

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THE WEATHER IN THE EASTERN COLONIES | South Australian Register (23-01-1896)

Alarming Sickness in Many Towns | Barrier Miner (23-01-1896)

HEAT IN THE SOUTH | Townsville Morning Bulletin (16-01-1939)

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