By Scott Sturman, USAFA ’72
STARRS Board of Advisors
and
Doug Goodman, USAFA ’72
Executive Order 14057 justifies the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions as necessary to counteract the existential threat of climate change.
The program’s comprehensive and prohibitively expensive initiative proposes to transform the operational military by achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2045.
The rationale to implement this grandiose experiment is justified by computer climate modeling that is wildly inaccurate and fails to take into account multiple variables affecting the climate.
The dictum that elevations of atmospheric CO2 concentration alone cause temperatures to rise in a purported limitless fashion raises questions about the rationality of recalibrating the world’s economy to comply with an unproven theory based on computer modeling. The sheer simplicity of the atmospheric CO2 driven climate hypothesis mocks the complexity of the earth’s atmospheric system and minimizes a myriad of other inputs.
Over earth’s past 570 million years, paleoclimatic evidence demonstrates no cause and effect correlation between CO2 and temperature, and in fact, it shows that rising global temperatures precede CO2 increases. Multiple variables interact randomly, cyclically, and non linearly to drive climate dynamics, whose only constant is its variability.
The public has been inundated with climate change propaganda for decades, but the façade is beginning to crack.
Although most Americans believe that the climate is changing, less than half recognize it as an existential threat.
There is a vibe shift developing within our culture, where observers recognize a disconnect between what they witness and what they are told.
The source of the disinformation stems from affluent, elitist segments of society who, by distortion, promote luxury beliefs that they alone can tolerate and result in a generalized decline of standard of living and infringement on personal freedoms.
The Mer de Glas and its tributaries, located at the slopes of Mount Blanc, form the longest and largest glacier in France. A trail descends 900 vertical feet from the cogwheel railway terminus at Montenvers to an ice grotto carved into the heart of the glacier in the valley below. Along the way, signs document the level of the glacier at time intervals spanning several decades. At the top of the trail a sign marks the glacier’s height in 1820, and with each step downward along the steep path, the scope of Mer de Glas’s rapid retraction of the last 200 years is revealed.
In 2013 and 2016 my wife and I trekked the Haute Route and the Tour du Mont Blanc, and while visiting Chamonix, experienced our own vibe switch along the trail to the Mer de Glas. The climate scientist industry blames the glacier’s rapid retreat on CO2 emissions stemming from the Industrial Revolution that began in the mid 18th century.
However, Antarctic ice core samples rebut this argument and do not demonstrate an appreciable elevation of atmospheric CO2 throughout most of the 19th century—a period when the glacier experienced massive loss of mass.
Rising atmospheric temperatures occur for a multitude of reasons. By the 1800s the earth was emerging from the Little Ice Age that began with modest temperature depression in the 1300s, only to fall precipitously from 1650-1715 in conjunction with the solar Maunder Minimum. Temperatures recovered but advanced glaciation persisted as late as the 1920s in some areas of the Northern Hemisphere.
The case of the Mer de Glas illustrates two fundamental flaws of contemporary climate science—an over reliance on discredited computer models and simplifications that cannot accurately predict climate in the future nor recreate it in the past.
Media organizations protect these contrived myths by echoing the platitudes of politicians and corporations. With religious fervor they peddle fear and predict catastrophe to suppress scientific inquiry and defame proponents of alternative explanations.
In Javier Vinós’s recent book Solving the Climate Puzzle, a more thorough and complex hypothesis is presented that better explains climate science. Rather than rely exclusively on atmospheric CO2, albedo, and positive feedback loops, the author emphasizes heat transfer and multiple, systemic influences originating terrestrially and extra terrestrially that explain climate change from the distant past to the present. Vinós admits that his hypothesis is not perfect, but demonstrates it is far superior to the singular CO2 model.
In October 2022 Vinós published a seven part series of essays including a summary description in Climate Etc, a website published and edited by Dr. Judith Curry, that introduced the Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis (WGK-h). The intricate discussion examined climate science through the lens of thermodynamics, which links solar effects, ocean, atmospheric, and orographic dynamics, orbital mechanics, precision of earth’s axial inclination, plate tectonics, wave theory, and paleoclimatic data.
The analysis reveals a multitude of interacting climatic cycles that span from months to thousands of years and explains many of the observed phenomena unanswered by the CO2 only model. The breadth of inquiry reveals a treasure trove of interacting dynamic systems working in concert to determine climate change—considerations ignored by most climate scientists driven by grants, tenure and notoriety.
Solving the Climate Puzzle coalesces these insights in a 500 page book, using frequent repetition to facilitate understanding of interrelated topics. The author provides frequent examples that demonstrate the inability of government sponsored, CO2-driven computer models to explain climatic events of past, present, and future. It then offers an explanation as to why the WGK-h yields satisfying solutions.
One concludes that the current state of climate science relies on gross oversimplifications to not only appeal to the public’s thirst for reductionism but to label detractors as deniers of the obvious.
Massive worldwide crop failures, desertification of arable land, mortality due to hot weather, and deaths from increased climate induced natural disasters constitute elements of a bonafide climate emergency. Yet none of these are present.
Since 2000 the rate of the world’s vegetative greening has exceeded browning by seven times, and the planet’s cereal production reached a new all time high in 2023, continuing a multi-decadal trend of increased food supply. This is particularly good news for the undeveloped world. Extreme weather events have not increased over the past 100 years and deaths related to them have fallen by 99%. Deaths due to cold temperatures outnumber those from hot temperatures by a factor of 10:1.
CO2 is not a poison, but an essential element of life that has been the target of relentless dissemination of misinformation.
Over the last 570 million years atmospheric CO2 levels varied from nearly 6000 parts per million (ppm) to less than 300 ppm in the pre industrial era and failed to correlate positively and consistently with temperature.
Gregory Wrightstone’s, A Very Convenient Warming, dispels many of the myths associated with rising CO2 levels and states that prolonged growing seasons due to modest temperature elevation and vigorous plant growth promoted by higher CO2 values provide an enormous benefit to civilization. Satellite measurements show a 30% increase in planet-wide biodiversity as a result of CO2 induced greening.
Decisions involving billions of dollars are based on inaccurate measurement of surface temperatures.
A third of the U.S. Climate Historical Network weather stations have been decommissioned, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) continues to use extrapolated phantom data. Temperature sensors are located in urban heat islands and climate modelers homogenize data rather than use discrete measurements obtained directly from set grid points.
96% of sensors used at U.S. surface temperature stations are corrupted and rated unacceptable by NOAA standards.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations agency chartered to affirm anthropomorphic climate change, claims the urban heat island effect overestimates actual temperatures by less than 10%. Recent studies demonstrate that this fundamental corruption of basic data is four times higher, and when corrected in the global temperature models, the manufactured global warming catastrophe disappears.
In his candid opening remarks at Davos in 2023, John Kerry acknowledged his belief that he is a member of an elite class of global intellectuals gifted with “extraterrestrial insights,” who are charged with saving the planet from the ignorant masses:
“When you stop and think about it, it is pretty extraordinary that we, a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. I mean it is so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet’.”
Clearly a busy man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, this year he arrived late to speak to a WEF sponsored forum, where he complimented China for being a leader in net-zero and reaffirmed that CO2 driven anthropomorphic climate change is settled science. His willingness to deprive 1.2 billion Africans of inexpensive, readily available energy relegates the continent to poverty and smacks of colonialism’s worst excesses.
Critics of climate alarmism like Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, are committed to the scientific method.
Moore’s rational and circumspect assessment of climate change and willingness to expose the politicalization of Greenpeace has made him the object of vicious personal attacks. But as alternative media sites push back the curtain of censorship, other courageous climate scientists, who are unmotivated by personal fame or wealth, educate an indoctrinated public subjected to decades of climate propaganda.
Norman Rockwell’s illustration of freedom of speech painted in the Four Freedoms series depicts a common citizen dressed in workman’s clothes standing among an audience of men attired in jackets and ties, who listen with polite interest. Rockwell painted the picture in 1943 during an era that lacked the identity-based sensibilities of our times, so he chose to represent societal disparity by the mannerisms and appearances of distinct social classes.
The picture’s orator symbolizes that all Americans are guaranteed the constitutional right to free speech and the prerogative to choose to either accept or reject a speaker’s words.
Climate alarmism and absolutism thrive in the morass of censorship and intimidation but wither when the veil of secrecy is lifted.
Yes, Mr. Kerry, the public may not posses “extraterrestrial insights,” but it has the uncanny ability to distinguish the fool from the sage.
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Scott Sturman, MD, a former Air Force helicopter pilot, is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy Class of 1972, where he majored in aeronautical engineering.
Doug Goodman graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1972 and majored in physics and atmospheric physics. His professional life began as a weather officer in the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and later evolved into a career in the aerospace industry developing remote sensing and high performance supercomputing systems.
First published on Armed Forces Press
Top photo: “The 2022 Global Air and Space Chiefs’ Conference attendees pose for a photo in London, England, July 14, 2022. The attendees signed a declaration of intent on climate change collaboration signaling the air and space leaders’ commitment to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.” (DVIDS)
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