A lot of folks have asked me to debunk the recent anti-truthful Wall Street Journal article with the counterfactual headline, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”  I’ll combine my debunking with the rapidly growing list of debunkings from scientists and others.  And I’ll update this as new debunkings come in.

That the WSJ would publish an amateurish collection of falsehoods and half truths is no surprise.   The entire global Murdoch enterprise is designed to advance the pollutocrat do-nothing agenda (see Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change”).  As National Academy of Sciences member Peter Gleick explains in his evisceration of the piece, “Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal“:

But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

Science magazine – perhaps the nation’s most important journal on scientific issues – published the letter from the NAS members after the Journal turned it down.

A tad more surprising is that 16 admittedly non-leading scientists would choose to soil their reputations by stringing together a collection of long-debunked falsehoods.  What is surprising is that these falsehoods are more easily debunked than the typical disinformer clap-trap because they are so out-of-date!

Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.  This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”….

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

Well, as the chart above shows, the last 10 years were easily the hottest on record.  As the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking notes, “2011 was the 35^th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.”  Doh!

And apparently these guys missed the news that last year’s Koch-Funded and Skeptic-Led Study Finds Recent Warming “On the High End” and Speeding Up.  The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) concluded:

… we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s….  our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

Double Doh!

Then again, what do you expect from a list of 16 scientists that include:

• Richard Lindzen, one of the most debunked  climate scientists in the world (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”:  Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”).  See also Kerry Emanuel slams media, asserts Lindzen charge in Boston Globe is “pure fabrication.”
• William Happer, physicist, Chairman of the Board of a leading disinformer think-tank George Marshall Institute, heavily funded by Exxon Mobil and other anti-science funders.
• Roger Cohen, Former manager for Strategic Planning and Programs ExxonMobil Corporation, now a George Marshall Institute ‘expert’.
• Harrison H. Schmitt, geologist and astronaut, who believes enviros and climate scientists like Holdren are communists.

This gang that couldn’t shoot straight assert “it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.” In fact, as Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency explained last year, the world is on pace for 11°F warming, and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.”

Yes, even school children know more than these guys!

They utterly misrepresent the work of serious climatologists like Kevin Trenberth.  Anybody who is actually paying attention to real science knows Trenberth explained 2 years ago that the way the disinformers were quoting him was nonsense, and they know recent analysis has done a good job of identifying where the “missing” warming went — the deep oceans (see my 9/11 post “Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Deep Oceans — Accelerated Warming May Be On Its Way“).  Let’s go through this one more time.

As Trenberth explained back in 2009, we have a vast amount of evidence that “global warming is continuing”:

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“There is an old joke, widely told among economists, about an economist strolling down the street with a companion when they come upon a $100 bill lying on the ground. As the companion reaches down to pick it up, the economist says ‘Don’t bother — if it were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up’.”

by Ryan Matley, reposted from the Rocky Mountain Institute

President Obama’s call in his State of the Union address to capitalize on “the strongest two-year period of manufacturing growth since the 1990s” by encouraging businesses to bring work back to the United States can be accelerated with energy efficiency innovation.

While Obama urged Congress to take a series of tax steps to encourage businesses to bring jobs back to the United States, RMI has strong evidence that industry can take cost-saving efficiency steps without waiting for policy-makers. Doing so can quantifiably improve U.S. manufacturing’s competitive advantage right now.

Stories about the death of U.S. manufacturing are a recurring theme since the “Japanese invasion” of electronics and autos in the early 1980s, and the sector hemorrhaged 5.5 million jobs over the past decade. But U.S. manufacturing is far from dead, in fact providing a rare bright spot in today’s economy.

Manufacturing employment has grown each of the last two years, driven by a rebounding auto sector, and now employs 11.7 million people.

A number of trends are coinciding to make U.S. manufacturing increasingly competitive globally. Wages and benefits are growing rapidly in China—as Obama noted in his speech—at the same time that U.S. manufacturing wages are falling. The risks of operating a supply chain that stretches halfway around the world are growing: rising transportation costs, the threat of import duties, less product flexibility, slower time to market, intellectual property theft, and product safety/reputation risks are growing concerns when moving manufacturing offshore. All of these factors are translating into making U.S. manufacturing more appealing.

Efficiency and whole-system design can help industry accelerate these growing advantages. Analysis from Reinventing Fire, RMI’s blueprint to running a 158 percent bigger 2050 U.S. economy powered by efficiency and renewables reveals that the industrial sector can achieve 84 percent greater production using 9 to 13 percent less energy, and save $0.5 trillion net.

JR:  That’s a big bill on the ground waiting to be picked up (see also “Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution. Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far”).

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