Comments on the City of Portland/Multnomah County
Climate Action Plan

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)

"Real Science is based on the logic and evidence only."

Let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Gordon J. Fulks. I'm a PhD astrophysicist from the University of Chicago with much the same background as the Great Global Warming Guru James Hansen. Hansen and I have talked and agree on many things, not to include carbon dioxide.

Thank you for the opportunity to once again comment on your Climate Action Plan that is designed to combat Global Warming and to stabilize our local climate, so that presumably we never get too warm or too cold, never experience another destructive Columbus Day storm, and get uniformly good mountain snow every winter to keep the ski resorts happy and water available throughout the year. In short, your goal seems to be to create a sort of Shangri-La where people live happily ever after in a perfect climate, and in perfect harmony, since all social injustices have been corrected at the same time.

Such Utopian visions usually die quickly when confronted with reality. But I notice that your report has no real measures of success and accountability. You seem content with “reducing carbon” as a substitute for actual measures of taming our climate. That would suggest that you are not at all serious about this endeavor and just use carbon as an excuse to do what you want to do without any accountability. On the one hand, you make outrageous assertions as to your ability to stop Climate Change, and on the other, you make sure that there are no criteria in place to see if you really have! It certainly seems like you are selling snake oil! Why should anyone believe that your snake oil can do what no man has been able to do before?

Accountability requires that you actually involve real scientists and engineers in your work, not just planners and high priests of the prevailing paradigm who have no idea whether or not what they are proposing will address your goals in any meaningful fashion or are completely counterproductive. Riding the bus over driving a car may or may not reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide produced, especially if the bus has few passengers. Using bio-fuels for the bus or car may seem to reduce use of fossil fuels, until you consider how much fossil fuel went into the bio-fuel production. Bio-fuels may seem more environmentally friendly until you look at the destruction of natural areas to grow these crops. So-called 'Clean Energy' is similarly very 'Unclean' when you consider that Portland General Electric is forced to build very inefficient natural gas power plants to back up wind farms, instead of super efficient gas turbine power plants. That's a scandal in itself, made much worse by moves to power regional transportation (cars) on electricity. And so on.

Accountability requires that you permit challenges to your assumption that carbon dioxide is the earth's thermostat. The official Obama Administration's National Climate Assessment 2014 listed “Three Lines of Evidence” that they claim make the case against carbon dioxide. Several prominent scientists joined me to prove all of these are fatal flaws:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/224538945/NCA-Rebuttal#scribd

Similarly the latest UN IPCC report on our climate has a lengthy counter report that you need to read:

http://www.nipccreport.org/reports/reports.html

It is based almost entirely on peer-reviewed literature, unlike the UN report which relied on too much non-authoritative material written by activists. Even the long serving former Chairman of the UN IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, as a Railroad Engineer can hardly be considered a scientist of our scientific stature.

Accountability requires that you permit challenges to your presumption that the climate of the Pacific Northwest is behaving abnormally in any fashion whatsoever, let alone in a fashion traceable to man, let alone in a deteriorating fashion. Yes, we had a mild winter, similar to the one in 1934, which was a little warmer by some measures and a little colder by others. But our mild winter was a stark contrast to the fierce one in the Eastern half of the USA. Alarmists at Oregon State University have been proclaiming this winter “as what we expect in a warming world.” Yet they did not proclaim the Spring of 2011 as not what they expect, because it was the coldest since records began in 1895. In other words, they are dishonest about warm seasons being an indication of climate while unusually cold seasons are just weather. As the acclaimed professor of meteorology at UW, Cliff Mass, recently pointed out, this is just “Ridging 101,” not Global Warming.

As Professor Mass also explained, the recent paper by Johnstone and Mantua that found no evidence of man-made CO2 influencing our climate was squarely on target, and the rival claim by Professor Phil Mote at OSU wrong. Even though all of these people think that rising CO2 will eventually produce measurable warming, they are realistic about the fact that it has not so far, except for fanatical Mote. This is something that you MUST understand. Our local climate has not deteriorated the way Mote and other alarmist professors predicted a decade ago. They predicted a relentless rise in local temperatures of +1.0 F/decade. The PNW temperature actually went down by that amount through 2013 and corrected to zero trendwith the very warm 2014.

Accountability requires that you actually pay attention to criticism from those of us who have the standing to critique your efforts. Yet all of my efforts to date to discuss these matters with you have been met with complete hostility and stonewalling. When I politely attempted to ask a few mild questions at one of your brown bag lunch events, I was abruptly cutoff and the meeting was adjourned early. When I protested that such behavior did not meet local government standards for openness and suggested that the people involved needed to be disciplined, there was no investigation, and no one was disciplined. When I talked with your people about allowing a presentation of competing views, I was ignored. And when someone else in your department made inquiries about reserving the same room for a counter-presentation to your staff, he was told that it was not possible. And so on.

Why do you need to be accountable? Because you are proposing great societal changes that need to be grounded in sound science and engineering, not “feel-good planning.” Remember that you are directing the spending of vast sums of taxpayer money, based on what many many scientists know to be bad science and fraud. Your attempts to completely ignore competent scientific criticism mean that you are knowingly defrauding Multnomah County taxpayers. I have trouble believing that you are so ignorant of science as to believe that it can be treated as subservient to green politics and religion. “Science” based on a presumed consensus (real or imaginary) is just politics. “Science” based on belief is just religion. Real Science is based on the logic and evidence only. I have repeatedly said you need to consider what experts really say, not what you get from the UN IPCC or Oregon State University, both heavily compromised institutions that are paid to promote the climate nonsense.

I have the knowledge and standing to challenge the basis of your Climate Action Plan, and I am formally doing so here. You will not be able to ignore competent criticism forever. Continuing to do so undermines all your efforts and leaves you open to charges of Official Corruption. Former Governor Kitzhaber may go to prison for influence peddling tied directly to the Climate Scam and the great amounts of money to be made aiding and abetting this crime against science and against the taxpayer.

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA