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Global Warming, aka Climate Change

This is the first in a series of excerpts from chapters in a new book

“Global Warming, aka Climate Change,” by retired Kaiser physician, Steven Schaefer.

Part 1 

Target Fascination

In 1977, while covering the emergency room in a small Wisconsin town and mentoring a senior medical student from UW-Madison, I was called to see a frightened young woman experiencing a “severe asthma attack”. Before I arrived, the student had treated her with epinephrine injections and oxygen, yet she was not improving. Upon my examination, it was clear she was experiencing a panic attack; she responded quickly to reassurance and a rebreather bag.

Taught in medical school was the concept of “target fascination”, a form of confirmation bias which could lead to wrong diagnoses, jumping to a conclusion without a careful evaluation of alternative diagnoses.

In a similar fashion, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shortly following the 1970’s panic regarding a fast-approaching Ice Age (!), blamed carbon dioxide, a trace atmospheric gas comprising 0.04% of the atmosphere, as the cause of rising temperatures following the Little Ice Age (1450-1750). The IPCC blamed man’s burning of fossil fuels from the time of the Industrial Revolution, ignoring the expected natural warming following an Ice Age.

Definitely a “misdiagnosis”!

“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, til their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1841.

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Part 2

Climategate and The Hockey Stick

Carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily, three ppm per year since first measured in 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. However, it is difficult to link this steady rise to the unexplained heating of the 1930’s, cooling from 1940-1975, and the 18-year pause in warming, 1997-2014. In fact, The Pause forced alarmists to change the terminology from “global warming” to “climate change”, so any change in temperature could be attributed to carbon dioxide.

Major spikes in world temperature occurred in the El Nino cycles of 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16. These El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels.

Early efforts to push the false carbon dioxide hypothesis included a cabal of climate alarmists at the University of East Anglia. Their manipulations of data, “peer review” of their own studies, and suppression of skeptics’ research was documented in leaked e-mails (“Climategate”).

Similarly, Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” delusion was a favorite tool to prove unprecedented warming in the past 1000 years, erasing the well-documented Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. His study involved bristle cone pine tree rings in California. Critics showed using his computer codes would produce a similar hockey stick spike by randomly selecting telephone numbers from a phone book!

Climategate and the Hockey Stick delusion should have derailed the alarmist hoax, but Al Gore’s slick Hollywood propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, was waiting in the wings. Roy Spencer, a well regarded climatologist, described the film as “full of disinformation, a campaign based on a litany of scientific half-truths, exaggerations and inaccuracies.”

“Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to non-existent knowledge and envision a cosmos centered on human beings, will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.” Cosmos, Carl Sagan, 1980.

4/4/23

Schaefer I

133 Replies to “Global Warming, aka Climate Change”

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