Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand
Showing posts with label Juliet Eilperin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juliet Eilperin. Show all posts

24 February 2019

The Washington Post Questions the Climate Change Expertise of Prof. William Happer

That great organ of the Democrat Socialists, the Washington Post, was in a huff in a front page top of the fold story about a new national security panel being formed to consider the possible threats of climate change.  The Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan on Thursday, 21 February 2019, did its utmost to belittle the purpose of the panel and, in particular, to belittle the head of the panel, William Happer, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University.  The article over and over claimed that the question of catastrophic climate change was settled by the UN and by a number of government reports issued under Obama or by the political establishment (The Deep State) even since Trump became President.

Climate Change can certainly have national security implications.  The African people who lived around the Great Lake Chad which is now the Sahara Desert are testimony to that.  The droughts that so greatly affected both the Anasazi and the Mayan peoples were a national security issue of great magnitude for them.  The change to a much colder climate was a security problem for the Vikings who settled in Greenland when substantial parts of Greenland were green.  None of these problems were caused by man's use of fossil fuels for energy, however.  Today, the Democrat Socialists and the Washington Post want us all to believe that there is an equivalency between climate change and global warming caused by man's carbon dioxide emissions.  They complain that Trump is encouraging increased production of hydrocarbon fuels.

I have pointed out over and over the many errors in the physics upon which the catastrophic man-made global warming advocates have based their claims of drastic warming due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Will Happer has also been a critic of their bad physics and among other issues, he has pointed out one of the ways they exaggerate the effect of carbon dioxide is by ignoring changes in its absorption spectrum as the atmospheric pressure decreases at higher altitudes.  Even though he thinks they exaggerate the temperature increase due to carbon dioxide, he thinks that increase is greater than I do.  However, he also recognizes that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has several good effects, such as increased plant health and a sight warming effect.

The National Security Council has issued a discussion paper on a federal advisory committee
"to advise the President on scientific understanding of today's climate, how the climate might change in the future under natural and human influences, and how a changing climate could affect the security of the United States."
The document notes that reports issued since Trump became President have stated that climate change is a serious threat.
"However these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial scientific peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security."
These statements by the NSC document are absolutely correct, but they frighten the Democrat Socialists and the Deep State.

Hilariously, the Washington Post expects us to take seriously the claim by Francesco Femia, CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security when he claims
"This is the equivalent of setting up a committee on nuclear-weapons proliferation and having someone lead it who doesn't think nuclear weapons exist."
Nonsense!  Will Happer knows that climate change exists.  But unlike the alarmist advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming, he does not see an equivalency between man's carbon dioxide emissions and catastrophic global warming or climate change.  Over and over, the alarmists try to imply an unproven and an actually clearly wrong equivalency.

Keeping with the hilarity:  The Washington Post article says that Will Happer is unqualified because he
"is not formally trained as a climate scientist.  He developed a national reputation for his work on laser technology used in missile defense and on the interactions between light and atoms."
Now on the one hand the Washington Post believes that there is an equivalency between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change, but on the other hand it does not recognize that the physical mechanism by which this is claimed to happen is due to the interaction of light (the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum) and atoms (those of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane primarily).  The laser technology of his expertise includes those that emit infrared radiation and addresses the propagation of that radiation through the atmosphere with its losses due to absorption by molecules in the air.  Prof. Will Happer is exactly the kind of expert most qualified to address the basic physics behind the claims of the physics-ignorant formally trained climate scientists.

The Washington Post is very certain that Will Happer and all other critics of catastrophic man-made carbon dioxide emissions climate change are either idiots or they are bought by the hydrocarbon industries.  They point out that Will Happer once was paid between $10,000 and $15,000 by Peabody Coal to testify before a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission hearing.  I have been accused of taking money from the hydrocarbon industries for the same reason, despite the fact that I have been paid several times as much by so-called green or renewable energy companies as by the hydrocarbon industries.  Of course, the many people in environmental groups and who work for so-called green energy companies are never doubted about their testimony when they act in favor for their much greater dependence on the catastrophic man-made global warming crisis for their livelihoods.

Consider the certainty expressed by the Washington Post in this article and many others over the years that man's carbon dioxide emissions are causing and will cause catastrophic problems for mankind and the animal kingdom.  If they really do not know that the interaction of light, specifically infrared light, and atmospheric molecules is at the heart of the physics of catastrophic man-made climate change, how can they justify any certainty about those claims?  Are they just buffoons?  Or is this more a matter of fraud than buffoonery?  Did they phrase the last quote above with great care because they believe their readers are too ignorant themselves to understand how nonsensical their claim is that Will Happer is unqualified to head up the new advisory panel because he is only a physicist and not a formally trained climate scientist?  Are they buffoons or are they scam artists?  Or are they both buffoons and scam artists?

31 January 2009

Chicken Little at the Washington Post

On Sunday, 25 January 2009, the Washington Post ran an article called Warming Trends Alter Conservation. It filled most of page A3 with a large picture of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore and two maps of the refuge showing the marsh boundaries now and as projected in 2100 using a conservative estimate for sea-level rise, or so the large font text above the maps claims. Of course, little of the marsh land remains under their projection. The alarm bells ring violently for most readers, I am sure.

I had observed this article because my wife was reading it. I asked, "How much sea-level rise are they projecting in their 'conservative estimate'?" Anna: "I don't know. It has not been mentioned yet, but I am still reading the article." Charles: "I'll bet it is not actually conservative." Anna, with some annoyance: "Oh, you don't believe anything in the Post." It is dangerous to disagree with the Post or all sources of the conventional wisdom. People, even those you love and who love you, will resent your being a know-it-all. But, what can I do but judge the media on their track record? I am doomed to being resented!

Sure, enough, in paragraph 18 of this long 21 paragraph article by Juliet Eilperin the Wildlife Federation turns up as the source of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge maps. These were based on the "conservative" sea-level rise of 27 inches by the year 2100. They said that the Chesapeake Bay region would lose 90% of its tidal fresh marsh, tidal swamp, and brackish marsh.

This is interesting. The IPCC's Third Assessment Report of 2001 estimated sea-level rise by 2100 to be at most 27 inches, equalling the 'conservative' estimate of the Wildlife Federation. One would have thought that in 2002, the Wildlife Federation would have used the mid-range or bottom limit projection of sea-level rise as a conservative estimate, not the maximum limit rise of the 2001 IPCC report! Moreover, the long-since available IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 revised this estimate, along with temperature estimates, drastically downward. This report estimates sea-level rise to be between 8.5 and 18.5 inches. The middle of this range is 13.5 inches. This mid-range sea-level rise is half of that which the Wildlife Federation claimed to be 'conservative.' Apparently, the Wildlife Federation is neither competent in keeping up with the IPCC reports nor able to comprehend the meaning of the word 'conservative.'

After the cut-off date for the IPCC report of 2007, G. B. Woppelmann and colleagues published a paper in Global and Planetary Change using GPS satellite data to measure sea-level rise and continental landmass rise, which may have caused the 2007 IPCC report to project even lower sea-level rise estimates. The land masses covered with ice in the last ice age are still rising due to the loss of weight of crushing ice which melted long ago. The relaxation of the continental masses in response to the loss of weight on them is a very slow process, but one with important consequences for the usual sea-level measurements which reference sea-level to the land. Correcting for the rise of land, the sea-level rise over a one hundred year span is less than 5.5 inches!

So, a conservative estimate of the rise of sea-level by 2100 should be 5.5 inches, not 27 inches, which was the upper end range of the estimate by the 2001 IPCC report, which upper limit was reduced by the 2007 report to 18.5 inches. That 2007 report had a lower range limit of 8.5 inches sea-level rise, which might have been taken as a 'conservative' estimate prior to the important work of Woppelmann and colleagues in 2007. The map of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge would surely look less dismal for a projected conservative sea-level rise of 5.5 inches!

Who is Juliet Eilperin? Obviously, she is not a very competent staff writer. She does not check her facts. This would be true if she were just a general topic reporter given an out-of-the-blue assignment to write up an article on nature conservancy and global warming. According to the Huffington Post she is:
A born-and-bred Washington [sic], Juliet Eilperin graduated in 1992 magna cum laude from Princeton University, where she received a bachelor’s in Politics with a certificate in Latin American Studies. In the fall of 1992 she went to Seoul, South Korea on a Luce Scholarship, which allowed her to cover politics and economics for an English-language magazine. Returning to Washington, Ms. Eilperin wrote for Louisiana and Florida papers at States News Service and then joined Roll Call newspaper after the Republicans seized Congress in 1994. In March 1998 she joined The Washington Post as its House of Representatives reporter, where she covered the impeachment of Bill Clinton, lobbying, legislation, and four national congressional campaigns.

Since April of 2004 she has covered the environment for the national desk, reporting on science, policy and politics in areas including climate change, oceans, and air quality. In pursuit of these stories she has gone scuba diving with sharks in the Bahamas, trekking on the Arctic tundra, and searching on her hands and knees for rare insects in the caves of Tennessee.

During her first year at the Post Ms. Eilperin was the most prolific writer on the news staff, writing more than 200 stories. In the spring of 2005 she served as the McGraw Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, teaching political reporting to a group of undergraduate and graduate students. This spring Rowman & Littlefield has published her first book, “Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives.”
It does make it easier and faster to be "the most prolific writer on the news staff" if you do not bother to learn anything about your subject or to check your facts! Can you imagine all the harm and falsehoods this writer has spread through her many articles in the Washington Post? Apparently, Princeton thought she had all the necessary tools to be an effective socialist propaganda generator and made her a magna cum laude graduate in recognition of those skills. Critical thinkers need not apply! After her track record was well-established, they further encouraged her by making her McGraw Professor of Journalism at Princeton and allowed her to warp the minds of younger Princeton students. Sorry, but I am very unimpressed by both Ms. Eilperin and Princeton University.