Do not expect Mr. Hellewell to alter his willingness to attribute authority to individuals whose pronouncements have been repeatedly, for years, thoroughly debunked.
To understand why, consider the rest of the story about William Miller, the misguided minister who repeatedly and incorrectly predicted the end of the world. It was not only Miller who “persisted in believing the end was near.”
His followers also continued to believe it despite the obvious proof that his predictions were untrue. Those followers now constitute the 7th Day Adventists, with over 25 million adherents worldwide. To them, obviously, demonstrable fact is what is inconvenient.
The title of Mr. Hellewell’s opinion piece does not mean what he thinks it means. The reason it’s difficult to get studies published in reputable scientific journals that contradict the 99.9% scientific consensus about the fundamentals of climate change is because they are unscientific and invalid.
The first non-Clintel match that a Google search of “Clintel World Climate Declaration” produces is an article at Euronews. This is a television network headquartered in Brussels, rated by Media-Bias/Fact Check as “high for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record.”
In Sept. 16, 2022, Euronews reported, regarding Clintel’s World Climate Declaration, that less than 1% of the signatories claimed to be climatologists or climate scientists, and the first Nobel Prize winner who signed it worked on superconductors and never published anything on climate science.
The signatories include a commercial fisherman, a retired chemist, a cardiologist, an air-conditioning engineer, and several retired geologists, per the Climate Intelligence Foundation (April 6, 2020).
Clauser, whom Mr. Hellewell names, worked on quantum mechanics, not climate science. However, the impact of the Great Disappointment was only that – disappointment. The impact of denying the reality of climate change, the science of which is well-understood and following the trajectory predicted by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, will not just be disappointment.
It is more extreme weather events like what happened in Libya and Pakistan (deadly flooding), sea level rise that is already measurable, and insufferable and deadly heat, as is also already happening.
Mr. Hellewell did not persuasively challenge or dispute any facts or sources Dr. Osborne or I provided in our on-point rebuttals to his opinions. Instead, he pivoted to a new one. I predict that nothing will likely change Mr. Hellewell’s opinions on this issue because he is in the realm of belief, not fact.
Gary Stewart, Laguna Beach
