As much as they try to stifle debate, global warming alarmists must contend with many inconvenient facts.
When Professor Lennart Bengtsson resigned from the Global Warming Policy Foundation on May 7, he caused a stir by accusing alarmists of using “McCarthy” tactics against him. Now, Bengtsson has publicly slammed alarmist climatologists for promoting “pseudo-science.” Unsurprisingly, the media have fostered every bit of this “pseudo-science.”
Bengtsson expressed concern over the “increased tendency of pseudo-science in climate research” and a wide-spread “bias in publication records.” Specifically, he criticized the “alarming… tendency” of scientists to predict extreme weather events and asserted “there is no 97% consensus about this.”
Bengtsson is a widely regarded meteorologist with a doctorate from the University of Stockholm. Over his fifty-year career, he has published more than 200 papers and won 20 prestigious awards. Bengtsson is the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, which Der Spiegel called “one of the world’s leading climate research centers.”
Writing for the Swedish blog, Uppsalainitiativet, Bengtsson calmly explained the many problems with modern climate science and popular theories about global warming. He was most worried by “the increased tendency of pseudo-science in climate research,” and pointed to “the bias in publication records towards only reporting results that support one climate hypothesis.”
Despite repeated broadcast network claims of a consensus, Bengtsson contended there are scientists and publications disputing climate alarmism. He said “there is no 97% consensus” as to the effects of greenhouse gases, and there is “even less [consensus] concerning how weather and climate will turn out.”
The media have frequently encouraged the illusion that there are no publishing scientists skeptical of climate change. In fact, ABC and CBS completely excluded skeptical scientists for years, and all three broadcast networks regularly hype alarmist scientists and climate change reports.
Major media outlets have also repeated the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe in global warming. In April, NBC ran a documentary hyping this statistic, and fewer than three months earlier The New York Times published an article by Michael Mann claiming that 97 percent of scientists believe in man-made climate change.
Bengtsson called into question the very practice of predicting future climate trends, writing “it is practically impossible to make climate forecasts” and “climate calculations are uncertain even if all model equations would be perfect.”
Bengtsson elaborated on the widespread movement contending that changes in climate are causing more extreme weather events, saying “apart from a possible increase in precipitation and a possible intensification of tropical hurricanes that has not yet been detected, there are no indications of extreme weather in the model simulations, and even less so in current observations.”
He wrote that “even extremely cold weather, as this year’s winter in north Eastern USA and Canada, is regarded as a consequence of the greenhouse effect.”
The media regularly promoted the narrative that climate change is causing extreme weather events. For example, Showtime ran a nine-part special called “Years of Living Dangerously,” beginning in April, that purported to explore the ways that global warming and extreme weather are effecting people. Incidentally, this documentary was disturblingly weak on the science.
