Posted on 06/18/2014 7:20:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
“I have had students who are very strongly pro-the global warming movement in my classes, of course, because most young people have heard this already,” he said. “And when I have them actually do the study, and take apart an IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] claim, sometimes they break into tears, and they say ‘I can’t believe this is the only class I’ve ever been in in which anyone has ever told me there is even an issue.’”
American University statistician tells The Fix: Belief in climate catastrophe ‘simply not logical’
If one would have asked statistician Caleb Rossiter a decade ago about global warming, he says he would have given the same answer that President Barack Obama offered at a recent commencement address.
“He castigated people who don’t believe in climate catastrophe as some sort of major fools,” Rossiter says of the president’s speech, adding he would have agreed with the president – back then.
But Rossiter would give a different answer today.
“I am simply someone who became convinced that the claims of certainty about the cause of the warming and the effect of the warming were tremendously and irresponsibly overblown,” he said in an exclusive interview Tuesday with The College Fix. “I am not someone who says there wasn’t warming and it doesn’t have an effect, I just cannot figure out why so many people believe that it is a catastrophic threat to our society and to Africa.”
For this belief – based in a decade’s worth of statistical research and analysis on climate change data – Rossiter was recently terminated as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington D.C. think tank.
Rossiter wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change,” in which he called notions of climate catastrophe “unproved science,” and shortly thereafter received word from the institute that his position was terminated.
“Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of US policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours,” their note to Rossiter stated.
Rossiter will continue to offer courses on math, history, politics and statistical analysis at American University, he just landed a deal to write a book on his experiences teaching inside high poverty high schools in D.C., and he recently returned from the Sudan, where he spent time as a Fulbright fellow.
And he will continue to teach college students that the data behind “catastrophic climate change” does not stand up to scrutiny – after all, it’s how he came to hold such opinions himself.
About a decade ago, Rossiter assigned his international statistics students a paper that asked them to analyze some topic of international affairs using statistics. When one female student turned in a paper on humans’ role in global warming, he gave her an F.
“She came to see me and said, ‘But Doc, it’s not fair, I am just repeating exactly what they said,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘That’s impossible, because the evidence you cited here is just wishful thinking, there is no real data.’”
“So I sat down with her and we looked over the article, which is one of the classic ones in climate change in which they developed a computer model that tries to say how much of the half a degree rise in temperature can you attribute to natural variation or the Arctic oscillation, or whatever the hell is going on up in the north there when the seas gets warmer and colder over long periods, things sort of like El Niño- or is it human [caused]?”
“I had to raise her grade because she certainly had cited the evidence they had given, but I just couldn’t give her much of a grade because she should have been able to see – as most people should be able to see – that the computer models were just guessing and sort of notional, and just kind of playing around to get a good fit, but didn’t have much scientific basis.”
“So I became quite interested in this phenomenon,” he added. “So many of my colleagues and so much of educated America and liberal newspapers and all just believe that mathematicians have set up models that should make us very certain that the recent half-degree uptick from 1980 to 2000 was human caused – when in fact they were just playing with the models. I use models a lot, and these were pretty weak.”
From then on, Rossiter specifically assigned students papers to look at global warming and climate change issues, and over the years graded hundreds of papers on the topic. The results from this further solidified his belief that the global warming crisis is one that’s man-made.
“So there is really two big statistical questions: what caused the little warming, and what effect did the warming have on these other climate variables?” he said. “I am a pretty decent statistician, I have taught for many, many years. The data that support the headlines are very, very weak, very, very notional, and simply not logical.”
“You couldn’t have this many terrible effects from a half a degree rise in global temperature. It’s probable that there are some, but it gets a little boring because it’s always weak data, because that is the nature of a tremendously complex system.”
Over the years, he’s broken a few students’ hearts when they learn of this truth.
“I have had students who are very strongly pro-the global warming movement in my classes, of course, because most young people have heard this already,” he said. “And when I have them actually do the study, and take apart an IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] claim, sometimes they break into tears, and they say ‘I can’t believe this is the only class I’ve ever been in in which anyone has ever told me there is even an issue.’”
“I always enjoy that but, I would enjoy it the other way, too,” he said. “I always really push them to evaluate, dig down and learn the arguments of the other side- that is part of education.”
Yet it is Rossiter’s former colleagues at IPS and similar think tanks who refuse to debate him.
“I found at the Institute for Policy Studies no willingness to sit down and talk through the areas in which our analyses diverged,” he said. “For years, I would ask their climate staff, who were not particularly scientific or statistical, they are social activists, to come to my classes and debate me, to talk it out with me in front of the IPS board.”
There is a reason they won’t, he adds.
“I think they believe … that you give legitimacy to the ‘denialists’ if you debate them,” Rossiter adds. “I think that’s a terrible idea. … At IPS, like many other places, people don’t want to debate it because they have this funny statement that, and Mr. Obama repeats it every time he opens his mouth, ‘the debate is over.’ I have never heard a more remarkable statement in my life about anything.”
“Climate Justice” is a socialist dog whistle. Anything “justice,” economic, social, political, whatever...it’s all a dog whistle. It means “steal by government force from those who produce and give to a protected political class that does not.”
Which is a fancy term for “Armed Robbery.”
Don’t reject the precipitate with effluent.
Science is a God’s plan for His creation (yet through a “smokey mirror”). We just get to observe...critically.
Translation: Give me your money.
It runs deeper than a simple political dog-whistle...Climate Justice has undertones of racism and reparations.
Americans of European decent cannot (EVER) be the beneficiaries of “climate justice”.
Even the quasi-Appalachain trailer park family of 6 in the fall-out zone of the steel foundries in Gary, Indiana.
No how, no way.
“Disproved”, not “Unproved”.
When you hook up the AGW arguments to the discipline of Scientific Method they fall completely apart.
An entire generation has been brainwashed that AGW theory is proven fact, not theory.
If America wasn’t doomed without this, is certainly is with this. But we were doomed when the 60’s liberals began running things. Obama has accelerated this process many times over, and Obamacare is the final nail in the coffin sealing the deal.
The sad thing is that these school kids are not to blame because they are being brainwashed. That won’t make it any easier on them when they are subjected to the totalitarian oppression that is coming.
Every day now I give Thanks to God that I was born in the 50s and not now. I will be dead and gone before the totalitarian oppression is installed. Well, I hope I will be dead and gone.
As soon as I saw “Institute of Policy Studies” I knew the guy was doomed. “Climate justice” is just another hideous malapropism that uses the emotive term “justice” to justify forcible redistribution of wealth.
Climate Justice is another term for Marxism.
Pray America wakes up
Yes, the Scientific Method will disprove AGW arguments each time. The last 15 years or so totally disproves the hockey stick curve.
The “True Believers” can’t risk being exposed as wrong; their entire life/values are underpinned by these fantasies.
I must disagree with the last word of that sentence/paragraph.
A zealot is willing to die for his set beliefs.
A fanatic, on the other hand, is willing to destroy and kill for his set beliefs; huge difference.
These non scientists are actually fanatics.
The weather did not.
The incompetent misuse of statistical analysis did the fraudsters in.
Others proved mathematically, that the procedure the fraudster used, even using random data for input, would Always yield a hockey stick shape.
A proper scientific theory will not merely make predictions, but rather will present a *means of predicting* what will happen based upon what has happened. For example, given the temperature and pressure of a gas in a sealed container, Charles's Law will allow one to predict how the pressure will change if the temperature rises but the container does not expand. I don't think most AGW arguments even rise to the point of being well-formed scientific theories, much less ones that are backed by evidence.
That’s an interesting distinction and I’d agree with you except this definition describes zealots as fanatics, among other things:
“Zealot: a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.
“synonyms: fanatic, enthusiast, extremist, radical, young Turk, diehard, true believer, activist, militant;
bigot, dogmatist, sectarian, partisan”
Because they are not pure. They have been corrupted. President Eisenhower warned us about this very thing over 60 years ago.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation
January 17, 1961
Ike was a very smart man. He saw this coming.
You got that right! Good tagline.
Totally agree with your last sentence. The mere fact that their argument depends so great on about .04% of the atmosphere.
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