Germany’s media is sick and intolerant at times, seemingly continuing a once infamous tradition.
Yesterday NDR German public television had an interview with Fritz Vahrenholt, co-author with Sebastian Lüning of the bestselling book Die kalte Sonne now sweeping through Germany. The NDR piece is dubbed: “Vahrenholt and the ‘CO2 lies'”. The clip first introduces the climate topic and reminds viewers that “that man is causing global warming and storms.”
Established climate science is indignant about the scrutiny
NDR first questions Hartmut Grassl and Jochem Marotzke, both of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. Grassl, obviously agitated by Vahrenholt’s skeptical book, crossly replies:
Ach, actually I have no desire to comment on such nonsense.”
If you listen closely, you’ll hear a burst of laughter from some hyena in the background. Jochem Marotzke also takes the same snobby attitude: No one should question AGW. Why the indignant reaction from Marotzke and Grassl? One can only speculate.
Suppressing open debate
Perhaps they feel that a chemistry professor (Vahrenholt) and a geologist (Lüning) have no business doubting their science. But my guess is that they are completely embarrassed, and thus terrified, about having been duped by what is turning out today to be a really dumb and simplistic hypothesis: climate trace gas CO2 rules the climate and other factors play no role. These two scientific men bought into the global warming end-of-the-world catastrophe hook, line and sinker. They have absolutely no desire to have all this exposed by an open debate.
And as Lüning writes at the “Die kalte Sonne site here:
One gets the sense they are now trying harder than ever to suppress debate.”
NDR could not resist delivering a low blow to Vahrenholt. The used old footage of him when he was Environment Senator for Hamburg over 20 years ago. The footage shows the young Vahrenholt climbing down through a manhole while the reporter says: “He has opted to descend into another world.” NDR’s message to the viewers is clear: “Skeptics belong in the sewers. Now you know how nasty things can get in Germany.
Critics should first read the book
The NDR interview with Vahrenholt on the other was well handled.
During the interview, Vahrenholt’s calls out the major error made by the IPCC, not properly taking the sun and ocean currents into account, and falsely assigning all the warming to CO2 from 1980 to 2000. ARD asked Vahrenholt to respond to Mojib Latif’s recent criticism, also indignant. Vahrenholt replied.
“He really ought to first read the book.”
They all should read the book. From their comments, it’s clear that they haven’t, and they seem stunningly ignorant of the latest science – or they simply just don’t want to talk about it.
Good news! The book is selling like hot cakes – no. 14 on bestseller list
Here’s a little anecdote. I live in a small town and four weeks ago I ordered two copies of “Die kalte Sonne” from our local bookshop here in town – one for myself and one for the bookshop display window, which the owner kindly allowed. I told the owner that the book was highly controversial and politically incorrect. “What do you mean?” he asked. I told him “the book doesn’t believe in the climate catastrophe!” He just laughed.
Today the bookshop owner sent me a message to let me know that “Die kalte Sonne” is now on the Spiegel bestseller list and that customers have been snapping them up, and that he’s been ordering more copies.Then he told me on the phone that once a book is on the Spiegel bestseller list, then sales pick up.
So expect tens of thousands of copies to be sold nationwide!
Pierre,
Of course I haven’t met your local bookstore owner, but I already like him! Also I can only hope that when Vahrenholt replied to the interviewer “He really ought to first read the book…” I hope he was smiling in a knowing and amused way. His opponents are making public fools of themselves.
Isn’t it strange that Warmista like Latief can casually ignore the fact that their models of global temperature are failing miserably while refusing to consider alternative explanations? It almost seems in a way, pathalogical…
About a week ago I wrote a comment on WUWT:
—–
As this whole tragedy is a religious one, consider a historic parallel.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a monk who didn’t like the way that the church was being run (in many ways). So he made up a list of complaints and nailed them to the doors of a cathedral. He then married a nun.
The monk still believed in God, etc. etc, but he stopped believing in the old church.
The converts to the reformed church gather while the old church denounces them as Satan’s spawn.
—-
Almost 500 years later and there’s little evidence of a sustained improvement in the fundamental behaviour people in dealing with matters of conflicting belief.
Times of enlightenment have been brief flashes in history. Driven by the energies of a few. Enlightenment that seldom burns brightly into the third generation. From the fading embers of enlightenment rise those who wish to control the hearts and minds; returning to ages of superstition and non-science. And the plunder continues until what can be plundered is not enough to defend against a new enlightenment.
Rinse. Repeat.
I’ve often wondered why so many chemists seem to be sceptics and many of those who are prominant in consensus climate science are physicists. I wonder if its because in physics you can often model observations from a closed system with elegant equations that can are predictive. In chemistry, the world is a bit more messy, with competing reactions, temperature sensitivities and side products, run-away reactions, etc. Perhaps to many physicist, the world around them easily reduces to equations while in chemistry there are a lot more goblins lurking that reveal themselves when you take an idea to the lab.
Physicists invariably think they’re the smartest in the room. They also have no experience with control circuits and feedbacks. They always start drawing formulas where I start drawing data flows. Always a hard time explaining signal processing to them – I imagine it visually, they start writing
f(t) = f(t-1) + bla …
and get completely lost in terms – no sense for the behaviour, the general picture.
Chemists need some feeling for feedbacks as well, a buffered solution is very similar to an RC circuit in its timing behaviour.
Oh. Really bad, even for the low standards of the NDR climate lunatics in Hamburg.
“He used to be an evironmentalist with his warning of chemical pollution; later he served as manager of renewable energy companies, but at a certain point in time, he seems to have descended to another world” – archive picture of Vahrenholt climbing into a sinkhole. Stopped watching the video at that moment. Even for the NDR, very cheap.
I am a physicist, and I know the answer to the incompetent climate consensus (and to “lukewarm” greenhouse believers, also) is NOT a better knowledge of feedbacks–it is the sure knowledge that THERE IS NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT, of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
No real physicist would say something so laughably absurd.
Did you identify any particular flaw in the argument at the linked page? Should be easy enough if it’s “laughably absurd”.
Your posting without coherent, relevant argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Just because you believe something, doesn’t make it so. What you believe, isn’t even a hypothesis.
The “greenhouse” is a simplification for first-year physics students as part of heat transfer by radiation. The closer one looks at the real world mechanisms within the atmosphere and the climate system, the less the magnitude of the “greenhouse”; the first-year fudge that aligns theory with reality.
A “greenhouse” could theoretically exist even without any “greenhouse gasses”.
We have the ability to determine approximately the levels of “greenhouse gases” and temperature in the past; and temperature has been independent of the concentration of those gases, even when they were 10 times more abundant than today. There is no reason to think that the laws of nature have changed over the past 4,500 million years. Is there?
Real science is firmly anchored in the reality of nature. Nature has the veto over any “consensus”.
Pointless lies.
Blind refutation.
Come off it Ed – some comments are just too ridiculous to be worth refuting. He might as well be claiming that the Earth is flat and that rain is caused by fairies weeing on us.
Icky,
None of what I wrote is a lie. You owe me an apology.
You are acting like an irresponsible, spoilt child. One that thinks it’ll get away with bad behaviour because its presence here is anonymous and thereby shielded from any repercussions. Foolish child.
You will stay stupid as long as you use the IPCC reports and realclimate as a source of “science”.
Try Halliday & Resnick “Physics” (ISBN 0-471-34528) with a companion mathematics text like Sokolnikoff & Redheffer “Mathematics of Physics and Modern Engineering”.
Are you a physicist?
No – Just someone who can spot a hoax when I see it. AGW denial is a hoax.
@Sean
Judging from the list of prominent skeptics (see climatedepot), I would say there is much MORE skeptic physicists than skeptic chemists.
They’re generally paid by oil companies. Funny, that…
Myth.
Funny how so many of the so-called ‘skeptics’ just happen to be petroleum geologists, isn’t it?
That is indeed not so difficult to explain, Icarus.
Geologists, especially those specializing in fossil fuel reserves, know how much the CO2 content of the atmosphere of the Earth fluctuated over time, and how tiny the current increase is in comparison.
This should be self-explanatory:
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/0/7/6/2/8/5/CO2forcingto4500ppm-61707388556.jpeg
If not, let me know.
Icarus, are you worried when the sun is shining?
Hmmm… why the evasion?
No evasion. When the sun is shining, 1000 W/m^2 shine down on you. A few W/m^2 more or less don’t make a difference. They’re easily compensated for by the negative feedbacks. That’s also why the global average temperature staid practically constant in the 20th century. (Yes there has been warming, but barely detectable – 0.7 deg C; far less than daily temperature swings – completely insignificant)
What leads to grave climatic shifts are not these tiny variations but changes in cloudiness.
One third of IPPC climate science paper authors are Greenpeace and WWF employees. Imagine That.
Greenpeace, Sierra, WWF and Stanford climate receive hundreds of millions from Exxon, BP and Shell every year. James Hansen gets a 10 grand per year bonus from Shell. He has taken 1.6 million in slush payments in the last five years.
Shell is the main driver behind EU carbon trading.
Where does that leave you? Everyone must be lying.
Climate science denial is not much different from evolution denial – you can see that in both cases, people are anti-science because the science tells them something that they don’t want to hear. In both cases, these irrational people have chosen to divorce themselves from real science, so they are irrelevant, a worthless distraction from what is important. It’s hardly surprising that the real scientists laugh at them.
Who keeps trying to shut down debate and keeps claiming the science is settled when in fact it is only in its infancy? Denying climate science is not only done on just one side. The warmists deny the role of natural factors.
Don’t be absurd – Climate scientists are the ones who *discover* those natural factors, and the effect they have on climate.
Now we are making progress!
Icky–Evolution???? Come on.
A far back as I can remember the green movement has not believed in evolution or the ability of species to evolve or adapt or become extinct. The green hypothesis is that the species and sub-species are static and can only survive as wards of the state under protection. It is held as the duty of the state to preserve every species.
So, evolution is science but you don’t really believe it but AGW is science and you do believe it. Or is it all dogma?
Icky is a devout atheist.
Without the framework of a religion, one could easily believe anything.
Oh the irony…
Icarus,
You have obviously studied nothing of the science. No one in this discussion is “anti-science.” the difference is science for grant money and science for learning something. The former is very often science-fiction, because it produces the paid-for answer, whether it is correct or not. The phenomenon is called confirmation bias. The latter, because it is disinterested in what answer, more often comes closer to the truth. All the “climate scientists” you admire are in the first camp. They have found the answers they get paid for, and will defend them to the death. They have no other choice. An admission that they might be in error would be career suicide. But you are not so constrained. I would recommend a couple of years of open-minded study.
I don’t know whether you really believe that or are simply pushing the fossil fuel industry’s AGW denial hoax, but either way it’s nonsense. The deniers only have arguments which involve dishonesty, because there is no science to support their views. That’s why they always end up contradicting themselves (e.g. it’s not warming / it’s warming but it’s not caused by us / it’s warming and it’s caused by us but we can’t stop it anyway).
What you see as contradiction is actually the result of open and honest discussion, not blindly following a “party line.”
“It’s not warming.” in the last ten years it has not warmed. See two articles on that on this site alone in the last week.
“It’s warming, but it’s not caused by us.” The warming in the 1980’s and ’90’s was due to natural ocean cycles of 60 to 70 years, just as the warming in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
“it’s warming and it’s caused by us but we can’t stop it anyway.” I don’t know of anyone that holds all three of those beliefs at the same time. Please name one for our edification.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20120130b/
Global warming continues as evidenced by rising ocean heat content, rising sea level, continuing Arctic sea ice decline, continuing ice mass loss on Greenland and Antarctica, continuing decline of glacier ice mass, and continuing surface and lower troposphere warming as determined by both terrestrial and satellite series.
Rising Sea Level. That’s a good one.
http://www.real-science.com/sea-level-disaster-alarmists
Icarus,
Your words and my response:
Global warming continues as evidenced by rising ocean heat content,
Not nearly as fast as the models predict, and the ocean cycles are only now reversing their regular 60 to 70 year and 200 year cycles.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/26/october-to-december-2011-nodc-ocean-heat-content-anomalies-0-700meters-update-and-comments/
rising sea level,
Not recently. You need to keep up with these things.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel1/sl_ns_global.pdf
continuing Arctic sea ice decline,
Funny how the warmists ignore the flip side of the earth. The Antarctic is gaining. The Arctic and Antarctic regularly switch action. Something to do with thermohaline oscillation in the Atlantic.
continuing ice mass loss on Greenland and Antarctica,
No. This explains the pause in sea level rise. Both are gaining mass in the interior as fast or faster than loss at the edges.
continuing decline of glacier ice mass,
Some are, some aren’t.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10847.html
The net is about 1mm sea level contribution over ten years.
and continuing surface and lower troposphere warming as determined by both terrestrial and satellite series.
Nope.
https://notrickszone.com/2012/02/14/giss-charts-show-northern-hemisphere-not-warming-during-winters-slight-cooling/
Icarus,
Except that recent solar activity has not been unusually low… Yet.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm
Scroll down to the history of the TSI since the Mounder Minimum.
There is something odd about that graph. According to PMOD, the solar minimum was around 1365.2, so if you subtract 4.8741 to bring it in line with the graph (as indicated by the caption), it comes to 1360.3, or around the value from 1900AD. Why doesn’t the graph show that for the most recent solar minimum?
“The deniers only have arguments which involve dishonesty, because there is no science to support their views. ”
Do you try to pack as many insults as possible into one sentence? You are becoming desperate, Icarus.
Relative humidity is dropping:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/08/support-for-the-saturated-greenhouse-effect-leaves-the-likelihood-of-agw-tipping-points-in-the-cold/#more-56158
as predicted by Ferenc Miskolczi.
Falsify that.
There are a FEW more variables going into the climate mix “than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, Icarus:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/potential-climatic-variables/
(Keep in mind a) that many of them are sourced to Wikipedia, which has a bias in these matters you should be happy with, b) Wikipedia articles are sourced, so use the sources as reference points when quoting.)