Does Climate Change Threaten National Security?

These GEITP pages have often included topics of fraud and corruption in science, as it relates to gene-environment interactions. As these pages have recently mentioned, there are strong political forces opposed to overturning the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Model used in carcinogen-testing and other environmental toxicant-testing [i.e. there is growing evidence that the LNT Model does not apply to most (if not all) environmental toxicants — including even nuclear bomb irradiation].

Similarly, during the past several weeks, there has been a strong organized political force opposed to the formation of a Presidential Committee on Climate Security (PCCS) — which is designed specifically to dissect out scientific facts from subjective hysteria about “global warming.” Opposition to scientific fact is not what “science” is all about.

One of the major goals of the PCCS is to examine whether “climate change” (which has occurred ever since our planet was first formed) has any impact on U.S. national security. Several national defense and national security agencies have strongly endorsed the view that “there is a large impact on national security”, but this view is not based on any credible scientific data. It might be that their view is grounded on a desire for more federal money for research grants and salaries?

The article below by physicist Ralph B Alexander describes nicely the dilemma between the scientific view and the political view. J

Does Climate Change Threaten National Security?

On Thursday, March 7, 2019
“UNCOVERING THE TRUTH”

by Ralph B. Alexander, PhD, Physics

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(Mar. 7, 2019) — The White House’s proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security (PCCS) is under attack — by the mainstream media, Democrats in Congress, and military retirees, among others. The committee’s intended purpose is to conduct a genuine scientific assessment of climate change.

But the assailants’ claim — that the PCCS is a politically motivated attempt to overthrow science — has it backwards. Au contraire, the Presidential Committee will undertake a scientifically motivated review of climate change science, in the hope of eliminating the subversive politics that have taken over the scientific debate.

It is those opposed to the committee who are playing politics and abusing science. The whole political narrative about greenhouse gases and dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) warming — including the misguided Paris Agreement that the U.S. has withdrawn from — depends on faulty computer climate models that have failed to predict the recent slowdown in global warming, among other shortcomings. The actual empirical evidence for a substantial human contribution to global warming is flimsy.

And the supposed “97% consensus” among climate scientists that global warming is largely man-made is a gross exaggeration, mindlessly repeated by politicians and the media.

The 97% number comes primarily from a study of approximately 12,000 abstracts of research papers on climate science over a 20-year period. What is rarely revealed is that nearly 8,000 of the abstracts expressed no opinion at all on human-caused warming. When that and a subsidiary survey are taken into account, the climate scientist consensus percentage falls to somewhere between 33% and 63% only. So much for “an overwhelming majority!”

Blatant exaggeration like this for political purposes is all too common in climate science. An example that permeates current news articles and official reports on climate change is the hysteria over extreme weather. Almost every hurricane, major flood, drought, wildfire or heatwave is ascribed to global warming.

But careful examination of the actual scientific data shows that if there’s a trend in any of these events, it’s downward rather than upward. Even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 report found little to no evidence that global warming increased the occurrence of many types of extreme weather.

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Another over-hyped assertion about climate change is that the polar bear population at the North Pole is shrinking because of diminishing sea ice in the Arctic, and that the bears are facing extinction. Yet, despite numerous articles in the media and photos of apparently starving bears, current evidence shows that the polar bear population has actually been steady for the whole period that the ice has been decreasing — and may even be growing — according to the native Inuit.

All these exaggerations falsely bolster the case for taking immediate action to combat climate change, supposedly by pulling back on fossil fuel use. But the mandate of the PCCS is to cut through the hype and assess just what the science actually says.

A specific PCCS goal is to examine whether climate change has any impact on U.S. national security, a connection that the defense and national security agencies have strongly endorsed.

A recent letter of protest to the President from a group of former military and civilian national security professionals expresses their deep concern about “second-guessing the scientific sources used to assess the threat … posed by climate change.” The PCCS will re-evaluate the criteria employed by these national agencies to link national security to climate change.

The protest letter also claims that less than 0.2% of peer-reviewed climate science papers dispute that climate change is driven by humans. This is nonsense. In solar science alone during the first half of 2017, the number of peer-reviewed papers affirming a strong link between the sun and our climate, independent of human activity, represented approximately 4% of all climate science papers during that time — and there are many other fields of study apart from the sun.

Let’s hope that formation of the new committee will not be thwarted and that it will uncover other truths about climate science.

Ralph B. Alexander, Ph.D., Physics, and Author of Science Under Attack

Does Climate Change Threaten National Security?

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