CHRIS MORRISON – Reposted from the Daily Sceptic
Professor Dr. Knut Loschke studied crystallography, chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer science. In the course of a long career he founded an IT company, and is an honorary professor at the University of Technology, Economics and Culture in Leipzig. As part of his work at the University, he deals with the energy industry and climate change. He served the German Bundestag as an expert in ‘Artificial Intelligence’. But Professor Loschke is annoyed, very annoyed, as he demonstrated in this recent Facebook post.
I’m sick.
Or, to put it even more clearly: I’m fed up with permanent and increasingly religious climate ramblings, fantasies about the energy transition, worship of electric cars, horror stories and doomsday scenarios from Corona to conflagrations and weather disasters. I can’t stand the people who shout into microphones and cameras, or print it in newspapers every day. I suffer from having to see how science is turned into a whore of politics.
It seems that scientists like Professor Loschke are fighting back, tired of being abused and often ignored for scientific work that fails to conform to a fashionable political narrative. Last week, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the ongoing World Climate Declaration (WCD), now signed by over 1,100 scientists and professionals. Headed by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, the WCD says there is no climate emergency. Climate science is said to have degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound science. Our story about the WCD attracted enormous interest on social media and is one of the most widely read articles we have ever published. Enormous efforts were made to trash the Declaration, and many of the people who signed have been personally abused.
The WCD is signed by no less than 235 professors drawn from a wide variety of scientific and other academic disciplines. Thirteen of the 28 WCD lead supporters are professors, seven out of the 10 Greek signatories likewise, and 11 out of the 24 from Norway. The climate scientist and writer Willie Soon recently listed a number of the academic disciplines that are helpful in studying the changing climate. They include: astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochemistry, paleoclimatology, glaciology, oceanography, ecology and history. It was not a complete lists, he added. The breadth of experience from scientists and non-scientists found in the WCD list encompasses most, if not all of these areas of study. People with thousands of years of cumulative practical experience are calling for the study of climate science to be less political and for governments’ climate policies to be more scientific.
Another German scientist, the distinguished experimental physics specialist Professor Hermann Harde, recently dismissed the idea that humans control the climate via carbon dioxide emissions as an “absolute delusion”. He warned politicians that it would be an irresponsible energy policy to continue to ignore more serious peer-reviewed scientific publications that show a much smaller human impact on climate than previously thought.
We recently reported Harde’s comments and referred to the fact that for years German politicians have been able to make virtuous green noises by banning nuclear and fossil fuel production, while relying on an unstable Russia to make up the energy short fall. The sheer stupidity of that policy is likely to become apparent in Germany this winter. Already problems are mounting, with the German newspaper Handlesblatt reporting that the megawatt price of electricity jumped last week to a new high in daily trading. A megawatt hour cost €563, compared to just €23 a year ago. Of course, the ruinous policies behind Net Zero are responsible for this. In the U.K., the spike in international gas prices, and an increasing reliance on unreliable renewables, means the consumer energy price cap could be raised to £6,000, an amount that is almost certainly beyond the means of a significant portion of the population. Under these conditions, a cold winter could kill thousands of people.
Before he died, the acclaimed physicist Professor Freeman Dyson – a signatory of the CWD – noted that the “people who are supposed to be the experts and claim to understand the science, are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence”. Professor Richard Lindzen, a WCD lead signatory, evidently agrees, having said that the current climate narrative is “absurd”, even though trillions of dollars currently says it is not. It remains to be seen what will run out first – the money, or the tolerance of citizens to become poor under command-and-control, hard-left Net Zero regimes.
For years, green activists and journalists have been able to hide behind the obvious canards that the science surrounding the human involvement in climate change is ‘settled’, and that 99% of scientists agree with that statement. The arrogance behind this political stance is on display with a tweet from the Guardian writer George – “Don’t mention the coral!” – Monbiot, who made an oblique reference to the recent WCD article.
As we have reported before, 48 Italian science professors recently wrote to their Government, stating that human responsibility for climate change is “unjustifiably exaggerated and catastrophic predictions are not realistic”. Activists such as Monbiot regularly traduce ‘deniers’ for their supposed links to funding from oil companies (although he recently dismissed the suggestion that the Guardian’s lavish funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation influences its coverage in the slightest). Particular ire is often reserved for geologists, since they are much in employment demand from companies that seek to extract mineral riches from the Earth. Geology also provides an important insight into the paleoclimatic record. Geologists are often sceptical about claims that humans are causing sudden changes in the climate. One might say that they have seen it all before. The only scientist who went to the moon on Apollo was a geologist called Harrison Schmitt, and his position is that there is “no evidence” that humans cause climate change.
The increasing numbers of scientists prepared to break ranks with the ‘settled’ politicised science of climate change would suggest various causes for their scepticism other than bungs from oil companies.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.