The New York Times this week posted a draft of a climate science report by the federal government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program. The Timesclaimed it was leaking a confidential document, but apparently the draft was available for public comment for months.

The report, which you can read here, was written by Obama-era staffers and predictably claims “evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.” It also states, “many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change.”

The report concludes with a claim that even if all human emissions of carbon dioxide were ceased immediately, global temperatures would still rise at least 0.30 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. It predicts a rise of as much as 2 degrees Celsius if the world does nothing. Thirteen federal agencies have a deadline of August 18 to approve the report.

The following statements from environment policy experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Deputy Director of Communications Keely Drukala at [email protected] and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 312/282-1390.

“The recent story by The New York Times claiming a government scientist leaked a draft of a climate science special report for fear of the report being suppressed by the Trump administration demonstrates how politicized the debate over human influences on global temperatures has become. The claim is particularly noteworthy because it is simply not true: two of the authors of the report have noted on Twitter that a draft of the report has been readily available online since January.”

Isaac Orr

Research Fellow, Energy and Environment Policy

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“The New York Times’ front-page story on the national climate assessment represents fake news in collaboration with the deep state. The first paragraph of the story gives the game away, claiming there has been a massive warming in the United States since 1980. In fact there has been little if any warming based on satellite readings, corroborated 100 percent by weather balloon readings. The satellite data readily available on Dr. Roy Spencer’s webpage show 0.28 degrees Celsius warming since 1979. That rate of warming would equal less than 0.75 degrees Celsius over 100 years.

“The New York Times/deep state global warming hysteria is 100 percent the result of predictions from flawed, flux-adjusted computer models. None of us would live our lives that way, yet the deep state would have us govern our lives that way – with them in charge of our daily lives based on their fake science and flawed computer models.”

Fred Palmer

Senior Fellow, Energy Policy

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“It makes no sense to claim that temperatures in the United States have risen by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 150 years when meteorologist Anthony Watts’ Surface Stations study showed only 7.9 percent of existing stations achieved accuracies better than +/-1.8°F. The U.S. Government Accountability Office confirmed Watts’s research and concluded the U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) surface temperature record is unreliable.”

Tom Harris

Executive Director, International Climate Science Coalition

Policy Advisor, Energy and Environment

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“It’s very likely the sun is the primary cause of global warming and has probably caused global warming to temperatures higher than today multiple times over the past 10,000 years.

“The Svensmark hypothesis, where the sun affects cloud cover by affecting the number of cosmic rays entering the Earth’s atmosphere, has considerable scientific support. Before 1850, atmospheric carbon dioxide was essentially constant at 280 ppm over the previous 4,000 years, then gradually declined to 260 ppm during the next 6,000 years, so could not have caused past global warming events.

“Current CO2 emissions will likely have a minimum effect on temperature rise over the next 100 years, probably less than 1 degree C, based on a climate sensitivity analysis by the former Apollo scientists and engineers who form The Right Climate Stuff group.

“Higher levels of atmospheric CO2 are beneficial and have resulted in the recent greening of the Earth. We have nothing to fear from CO2.”

Donn Dears

Policy Advisor

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“Here we go again. The New York Times hyping a rehash of frightening climate change claims by Obama administration holdover activist government scientists. The new report is once again pre-determined science. The Trump administration should reject this new climate report and consider a national commission on climate change with scientists not affiliated with environmental activist groups.”

Marc Morano

Publisher

Climate Depot

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“It appears the deep state in Washington is at it again. Unfounded scare tactics from a report not yet released? Early release is usually used to elicit comments and corrections from the scientific community and public. Never mind the underlying data have been compromised, cherry-picked to add to the distortions. Even just the start year for their ‘trend’ is questionable. I lived through the 1980s and they weren’t anything special; what’s wrong with the ‘30s? Oh yea, it would not show any warming.

“Worse, there will be louder cries to ‘do something’ likely meaning more mandates for consumers and more money for climate scientists. Yet nary a word about what’s actually reducing greenhouse gases better than heavy handed government: the free market. It’s outperforming government in all metrics. Maybe the alarmists and statists ought just leave well enough alone.”

Tom Tanton

Director of Science and Technology Assessment

E&E Legal

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“The great scientists I have been privileged to know over my long career including Namias, Willett, Landsberg, and Gray and the great men who championed the scientific method like Feynman, Popper, and Einstein would be appalled by this report and the overall decline in the sciences and the alarming peer-review failures that allow bad and dangerous science like we find in this report to propagate and be used to support harmful policies. I believe the only part of this work that is ‘extreme likely’ is that future scientists and historians will look on it as a low point in the history of climate.”

Joe D’Aleo

Executive Director, Icecap.us

Policy Advisor, Environment Policy

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“It is timely the ‘U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report (CSSR)’ is coming out at the same time as Al Gore’s new documentary “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” Both can be used to scare your children into behaving if they are disrupting the household.

“The CSSR is a document produced by individuals from the Obama administration ordered to produce a report backing that administration’s policies to abolish use of our abundant, inexpensive, and geographically distributed coal, oil, and natural gas. These energy resources are to be replaced by alleged renewable energy sources of solar, wind, ethanol from corn, other biofuels, etc. that have extreme environmental problems, unreliable, expensive, and require vast land areas. The outcome of these policies is to make the world’s premier economic power, United States, into a third-world nation.

“The CSSR reports eminent global warming that can’t be stopped without extreme measures in reducing fossil fuel use. Of course no mention is made the coldest July temperature ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere occurred in Greenland July 4, 2017. The temperature was – 27.4 degrees F. beating the old record of -23 degrees F.”

James Rust

Professor of nuclear engineering (Ret.), Georgia Tech

Policy Advisor,

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“In all its detailed reports linking weather events to climate change and the linking of ‘record high temperatures’ with climate change, this report lacks the one key element that is essential to satisfy the scientific basis of the basic claim: linking increases in CO2 with significant climate change. In fact, this report provides absolutely no new science to support this key point. Therefore, on a scientific basis it is entirely without merit.”

John Coleman

Meteorologist

Founder, The Weather Channel

Policy Advisor, Environment

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“Repeated failures of alarmist predictions on climate change plus multiple exposures of scientific malpractice in climate research and an ongoing hiatus in warming for the past two decades have been met by an ever-increasing ratcheting up of dire claims by proponents of the threat. The leaked copy of the climate science report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program presents a veritable compendium of much of the worst of these lies and exaggerations being touted as science. By all means, it deserves to be released in full. Signed, sealed and delivered, then subjected to a thorough, independent, and genuinely expert examination, it would be a gift to all who have been fighting so long against this blatant corruption of science. Properly addressed, it presents a unique opportunity to make clear the exaggerations, false claims and overwhelming quantity of irrefutable conflicting evidence in what has become the greatest fraud in history, now at the trillion-dollar level and ongoing.”

Walter Starck

Policy Advisor, Environment

The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“Abounding change is a definitive property of the atmosphere and oceans. Claiming evidence for anything remarkable, let alone something like climate change, by citing abounding change that we do not fully comprehend is tiresomely unchanging.”

Christopher Essex

Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics

University of Western Ontario

[email protected]

519/661-3649

“For two decades, they’ve been using fancy computer models to chase the wrong target. CO2 is innocent. The satellite data show how little the temperatures are changing. It’s time to set CO2 aside and instead look carefully at all the factors that contribute to the ever-changing climate.”

Tom Sheahen

Professional Physicist and Energy Expert

Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“The entire scientific credibility of the draft report is in ‘Appendix C’ where detection and attribution are discussed. They define detection as a change unlikely to occur ‘naturally,’ and attribution means assigning the cause of the change.

“This definition of change requires a physical theory of climate sufficiently complete to define natural variability, because a ‘change’ is defined as an ‘unnatural’ variation.

“Likewise, attribution requires a physical theory of climate able to accurately predict the effects on the climate of any relevant energetic perturbation (a perturbation such as the forcing due to increased CO2).

“So, the entire credibility of the claims in the report depends strictly and rigorously on the existence and use of a relatively complete and accurate physical theory of climate.

“There is no such theory.

“For example, C2, ‘Fingerprint-based Methodologies’ depends on ‘a model-generated response pattern.’ If the model-generated response pattern is subject to huge uncertainties (it is), then the response pattern has no particular physical meaning. Any fingerprint method based on that pattern also has no particular physical meaning.

“C3. Non-Fingerprint-based Methods, ‘compares observed and simulated time-series.’ Simulated time series are climate model outputs. The method again critically and fatally depends on unreliable models.

“Every method in Appendix C depends on model simulations for their basic validity. Model simulations have no known validity.”

Patrick Frank

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

at Stanford University

[email protected]

312/377-4000

“There are a number of serious flaws with the assessment and, as such, it should be viewed with great skepticism.

“Anthropogenic CO2 is cited as the primary driver of recent warming, with solar and volcanic impacts rated as minuscule. However, there is evidence that increasing mid-ocean seismic activity, an indicator of increasing geothermal heating of the ocean bottom, is more strongly correlated with recent global temperature rise than CO2 concentrations. The physical reasoning for this correlation is clearly demonstrated in the recent oceanographic literature, yet this important body of thought has been ignored in this report.”

Arthur Viterito

Professor of Geography

College of Southern Maryland

[email protected]

312/377-4000