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Mail Fraud

One of our favorite environmental activist organizations to skewer has been Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), a group of MDs whose membership consists of less than 1 percent of all American physicians but who presume to speak for the majority. One of their past ploys was to urge their members to attend a series of nationwide, administration-sponsored global warming town meetings wearing their lab coats and stethoscopes for maximum impact!

PSR’s latest ploy is a global warming mass-mailing postcard from members to U.S. Senators:

Dear Senator _________________________:

I am deeply concerned about what global warming will do to our children’s planet. The World’s leading scientists warn that global warming will mean spreading infectious diseases, heat waves, extreme weather, devestating (sic) sea level rise, loss of wildlife and habitat.

The US is the world’s biggest source of global warming pollution and we need to take action now to protect our children and their planet. Nearly two thirds of America’s global warming pollution comes from gas guzzling cars and trucks and from power plants. This pollution is altering our climate, poisoning our air and threatening our natural heritage.

I urge you to support strong domestic measures that will reduce our global warming pollution so that we can protect our children. As first steps we need to:

1. raise miles per gallon standards for all cars, trucks, and SUVs;

2. set specific limits on global warming pollution from power plants and increase our use of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Every country needs to do its fair share to curb global warming. The US must take the lead and protect our children and their planet from global warming.

If this issue weren’t so serious, we could laugh at PSR’s blatant exploitation of our "Children" in every paragraph, the demonstrable relationship between lighter vehicles and fatal traffic accidents that will kill more children (don’t they remember their own credo "First, do no harm"?), and the environmentally correct capitalization of the word "World."

But it’s not funny. In response, WCR is launching its first campaign. If you are concerned about physicians using global warming as an excuse to push a social agenda and acting like climatologists, simply click on "Send" to send the note below to Physicians for Social Responsibility. (This will only work if your web-browser is configured to send e-mail.)

Please, do it for the Children.

Please enter your name:

and your email address:

Dear Physicians for Social Responsibility: I am deeply concerned about how the policies your organization proposes will impact our Children's future. Just because you are MDs does not mean you know the first thing about climate science. If you did, you would realize that there is no association between global warming and the spread of "tropical diseases," most of which are not "tropical" at all, and are more directly related to poverty than to temperature. If you really cared about tropical diseases, you would use the significant resources of you organization and its membership to improve the living conditions in the Third World rather than trying to worsen them in the United States. You would also realize that the trade-off for fuel efficiency is automobile safety, which will result in more injuries and fatalities to adults and our Children. I urge you to support a free-market economy that will provide a World for our Children that is free of unnecessary taxation and of a federal government that interferes with the economic livelihood of them and their parents. With your support, we can all look forward to a Planet on which our Children will be free of energy taxes and on which peddlars of ecological armageddon will be relegated to their rightful place in history books, along with Marx, Rousseau and other less notables.

Synthetic Reality

As film buffs will agree, most movie trailers seem to begin the same way: "In a world ravaged by terror and mayhem, one man alone had the ability to infiltrate the enemy base and rescue humanity from this diabolical plan to control the planet..."

The Hollywood script being played out in the global warming debate pits two forces against each other: Climatologists who believe in data (actual observations of the atmosphere as measured by real instruments), and others who place their faith in models. (Most of the latter think global warming is the greatest threat to humanity, while most of the former think climate models are.)

Which brings us to a rather amazing paper by T.M.L. Wigley, P.J. Jaumann, B.D. Santer, and K.E. Taylor in Climate Dynamics. You may recall that three of these scientists were coauthors of the now infamous Nature paper that "proved" human activities caused global climate change.

Among the deluge of responses challenging their conclusion was one by David Legates and Robert Davis, who demonstrated the statistic that served as the basis of their argument, the "so-called centred pattern correlation coefficient," should be permanently tossed onto the scientific garbage heap of bad ideas. Among other things, this mathematical device can demonstrate that global cooling is caused by "global warming."

Undaunted, the Wigley team produced a paper dedicated entirely to the wonders of this statistic. And to prove how great it is at detecting human-induced climate change, they have invented an entirely new branch of "science"—synthetic climatology. You see, it’s impossible for climate models to replicate even past temperature change. So Wigley invented a "synthetic" temperature history. It’s not based on real observations, but the results "simulated what we currently believe to be the main anthropogenic contribution to past climate change." And (big shock) it looks a lot like the real temperature record!

But even using synthetic data—and a flawed statistic—Wigley and friends only find correlations that are so small, they border on meaningless.

As a movie, it would flop. "In a world free of climate data, general circulation modelers use ‘synthetic data’ to meet their modeling needs. When these synthetic data are combined with a strange new correlation statistic, they can prove humans are altering the global climate, even when the value of the statistic is extremely small." A close-up on our hero’s anguished face as he blurts, "Even nine more Kyotos won’t save our climate! Will we survive? Will we survive?"

References:

Wigley, T.M.L., et al., 1998, Relative detectability of greenhouse-gas and aerosol climate change signals. Climate Dynamics, 14, 781–790.

Santer, B.D., et al., 1996, A Search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere. Nature, 382, 39–45.

Legates, D., and R. Davis, 1997, The continuing search for an anthropogenic climate change signal: Limitations of correlation-based approaches. Geophysical Research Letters, 24, 2319–2322.