Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported for the entire 20th century by the United Nations (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows in fact that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Political Correctness Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Education Watch, Australian Politics, Recipes, Socialized Medicine, Food & Health Skeptic, Tongue Tied, Immigration Watch and Gun Watch. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing). The archive for this mirror site is here or here.
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30 June, 2008

Alarmist cloud assumptions debunked

Greenies get the feedback effect precisely wrong. Feedback effects are the Greenie way of magnifying the trivial 20th century warming (less than one degree) into something threatening -- so this should really be the death-knell of Warmism

Abstract

This article addresses new satellite and modeling evidence that previous satellite diagnoses of high climate sensitivity--which directly translate into predictions of dangerous levels of global warming--contain a large spurious bias. It is shown that those exaggerated estimates were the result of faulty assumptions regarding clouds when analyzing variations in average global temperature and average reflected sunlight off of the Earth.

Specifically, it has been assumed (explicitly or implicitly) that, for global averages on time scales of three months or more, temperature variations cause clouds to change, but that cloud variations do not cause temperature to change. But when properly filtered, the satellite data reveal evidence of cloud variations indeed causing temperature changes, and that this source of natural climate variability biases the estimate of climate sensitivity in the direction of a very sensitive climate system.

The new interpretation suggests a very low sensitivity. If the new sensitivity estimate is accurate, it would suggest only 0.5 deg. C of manmade warming by the year 2100. The new sensitivity estimate also suggests that warming over the last century can not be explained by human greenhouse gas emissions alone, but instead might require a mostly natural explanation

Source

Richard Courtney comments:

Re Spencer's finding that "when properly filtered, the satellite data reveal evidence of cloud variations indeed causing temperature changes, and that this source of natural climate variability biases the estimate of climate sensitivity in the direction of a very sensitive climate system.".

I find it interesting because I have been arguing the following since 1991 when Ramanathan & Collins published their first paper reporting maximum sea surface temperature (ref. Nature, v351, 27-32 (1991) ).

Increased temperature implies more evaporation with resulting increase to cloud cover. The evaporation removes heat from the surface with resultant surface cooling (just as evaporation of sweat cools hot skin). And clouds reflect solar radiation with resulting reduction to surface heating (as every sunbather has noticed) so increased cloud cover reduces surface warming. The effect of increased cloud cover with increased temperature is that the tropical warm pool has a maximum surface temperature of 305K (because additional heat increases cloud cover). Similar but lesser increase to cloud cover can be expected everywhere that sea surface temperature is increased for any reason.

(Richard Courtney, DipPhil, is a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant)




Australian astronomical Society warns of global COOLING as Sun's activity 'significantly diminishes'

A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary:

Based on our claim that changes in the Sun's equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun's orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun's meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.

Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me: It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World's mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C. Oh. Global cooling coming, then. Obvious, really.

Source




Silly Sharon Blames Midwest Floods on Global Warming



Newsweek's senior editor Sharon Begley has taken it upon herself to publicly declare the recent floods in the Midwest are being caused by global warming.Those familiar with her work shouldn't be even slightly surprised by this, as Begley was the person responsible for the August 13, 2007, Newsweek cover story "Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine" which evoked widespread criticism including from one of her fellow editors. Regardless, Begley is at it again with an article in the upcoming issue of Newsweek disgracefully entitled, "Global Warming Is a Cause of This Year's Extreme Weather"

The frequency of downpours and heat waves, as well as the power of hurricanes, has increased so dramatically that "100-year storms" are striking some areas once every 15 years, and other once rare events keep returning like a bad penny. As a result, some climatologists now say global warming is to blame. Rising temperatures boost the probability of extreme weather, says Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center and lead author of a new report from the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Program; that can "lead to the type of events we are seeing in the Midwest." There, three weeks of downpours have caused rivers to treat their banks as no more than mild suggestions. Think of it this way: if once we experienced one Noachian downpour every 20 years, and now we suffer five, four are likely man-made.

As is her typical modus operandi, Begley chose not to offer any balance concerning this recent report, or identify that top scientists around the world have been critical of both its findings and the lead author. As the University of Colorado at Boulder's Dr. Roger A. Pielke Sr. wrote on June 20:

This report perpetuates the use of assessments to promote a particular perspective on climate change, such as they write in the Executive Summary. "It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases. Such studies have only recently been used to determine the causes of some changes in extremes at the scale of a continent. Certain aspects of observed increases in temperature extremes have been linked to human influences. The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming."

This claim conflicts with the 2005 National Research Council reportNational Research Council, 2005: "Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties". Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp -- where a diversity of human climate forcings were found to alter global average radiative warming, including from atmospheric aersosols and due to the deposition of soot on snow and ice. The claim of an increase in atmospheric water vapor conflicts with a variety of observations as summarized on Climate Science (e.g. see).

To further illustrate the bias in the report, the assessment chose to ignore peer reviewed research that raises serious questions with respect to the temperature data that is used in their report. As just one example, they ignored research where we have shown major problems in the use of surface air temperature measurements to diagnose long term temperature trends including temperature extremes.

Pielke concluded: "Since this assessment is so clearly biased, it should be rejected as providing adequate climate information to policymakers. There also should be questions raised concerning having the same individuals preparing these reports in which they are using them to promote their own perspective on the climate, and deliberately excluding peer reviewed papers that disagree with their viewpoint and research papers. This is a serious conflict of interest.

Of course, Begley chose not to offer her readers an opposing view, and just continued with the hysteria:

The Midwest, for instance, suffered three weeks of intense rain in May and June, with more than five inches falling on some days. That brought a reprise of the area's 1993 flooding, which was thought to be a once-in-500-years event. The proximate cause was the western part of the jet stream dipping toward the Gulf of Mexico, then rising toward Iowa-funneling moisture from the gulf to the Midwest, says meteorologist Bill Gallus of (the very soggy) Iowa State University.

The puzzle, he says, is why the trough kept reforming in the west, creating a rain-carrying conveyor belt that, like a nightmarish version of a Charlie Chaplin movie, wouldn't turn off. One clue is that global warming has caused the jet stream to shift north. That has brought, and will continue to bring, more tropical storms to the nation's north, and may push around the jet stream in other ways as well.

Interesting that Begley cited Bill Gallus, but chose to ignore some of his other opinions concerning the floods, as well as those of one of his colleagues. For instance, as reported by Radio Iowa on June 10:

The recent spate of wet weather that's stormed over Iowa is very similar to what happened 15 years ago. Iowa State University meteorology professor Bill Gallus has reviewed the data."In many ways, the pattern we've had the last two or three weeks is very similar to what lasted for a much longer time in 1993," Gallus says.....

Iowa State University meteorologist Bill Gutowski says so-called "climate change" might be a part of this weather equation, but it's too soon to say. "There are physical reasons as well as results from models that indicate that we could expect more intense rainfall events occurring in a much warmer climate, but it'd be really hard to say based on what's going on this year that this is directly an outcome of global warming," Gutowski says. "We would need to see that the...frequency of those events is increasing."

According to Gutowski, one of the challenges researchers face is there are "natural fluctuations" in the climate system, so weather data from a single year is just not indicative of any trend.

Sadly, people like Begley choose to ignore such natural fluctuations, and, instead, blame everything on man. On the other hand, Gallus did attach one cause of this year's flooding to humans, but not in a fashion that supported Begley's hysteria as reported by Iowa's Gazette on June 6:

The rains' effect on Eastern Iowa streams and rivers is exaggerated by the lack of crops in nearby fields, said Bill Gallus, Iowa State University professor of meteorology."Most of the crops were delayed getting in," said Gallus. "That tends to lead to more water running off into streams and rivers" because there's no vegetation to catch runoff.

Such facts pertaining to the Midwest floods eluded Begley, much as they did with her following declaration: "Hurricanes have become more powerful due to global warming." Really, Sharon? That's not what hurricane experts such as William Gray and Christopher Landsea believe. But why should their opinions matter when you're on a roll? Although the last time Begley was so reckless with her reporting, one of her colleagues, contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson, called the piece "fundamentally misleading" and "highly contrived." We can only hope her most recent addition to this debate is similarly derided

Source




The UN climate change numbers hoax

It's an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the world over: "2,500 scientists of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate crisis." But it's not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see the extent to which they have been misled. As lies go, it's a whopper. Here's the real situation.

Like the three IPCC "assessment reports" before it, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released during 2007 (upon which the UN climate conference in Bali was based) includes the reports of the IPCC's three working groups. Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future "projections". Its report is titled "The Physical Science Basis".

The reports from working groups II and II are titled "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" and "Mitigation of Climate Change" respectively, and since these are based on the results of WG I, it is crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny.

There is, of course serious debate among scientists about the actual technical content of the roughly 1,000-page WG I report, especially its politically motivated Summary for Policymakers which is often the only part read by politicians and non-scientists. The technical content can be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply assume that if large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right.

Consensus never proves the truth of a scientific claim, but is somehow widely believed to do so for the IPCC reports, so we need to ask how many scientists really did agree with the most important IPCC conclusion, namely that humans are causing significant climate change - in other words the key parts of WG I?

The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little more than 600 in total. The other 1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future trajectory. Still, 600 "scientific expert reviewers" sounds pretty impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors who assure us that "all substantive government and expert review comments received appropriate consideration". And since these experts reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have endorsed it, right?

Wrong.

For the first time ever, the UN has released on the Web the comments of reviewers who assessed the drafts of the WG I report and the IPCC editors' responses. This release was almost certainly a result of intense pressure applied by "hockey-stick" co-debunker Steve McIntyre of Toronto and his allies. Unlike the other IPCC working groups, WG I is based in the US and McIntyre had used the robust Freedom of Information legislation to request certain details when the full comments were released.

An examination of reviewers' comments on the last draft of the WG I report before final report assembly (i.e. the "Second Order Revision" or SOR) completely debunks the illusion of hundreds of experts diligently poring over all the chapters of the report and providing extensive feedback to the editing teams. Here's the reality.

A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented on more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it's a far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.

Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did, ignore reviewers' comments. Some editor responses were banal and others showed inconsistencies with other comments. Reviewers had to justify their requested changes but the responding editors appear to have been under no such obligation. Reviewers were sometimes flatly told they were wrong but no reasons or reliable references were provided.

In other cases reviewers tried to dilute the certainty being expressed and they often provided supporting evidence, but their comments were often flatly rejected. Some comments were rejected on the basis of a lack of space - an incredible assertion in such an important document.

The attitude of the editors seemed to be that simple corrections were accepted, requests for improved clarity tolerated but the assertions and interpretations that appear in the text were to be defended against any challenge. An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that "hundreds of IPCC scientists" are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely "Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years".

In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60 per cent of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.

Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this article - Dr Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the "Greenhouse gas forcing ." statement above, Professor McKitrick explained "A categorical summary statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from greenhouse gases have not been observed."

Dr Gray labeled the WG I statement as "Typical IPCC doubletalk" asserting "The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model".

Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers' comments is subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is nonsense.

"The IPCC owe it to the world to explain who among their expert reviewers actually agree with their conclusions and who don't," says Natural Resources Stewardship Project Chair climatologist Dr Timothy Ball. "Otherwise, their credibility, and the public's trust of science in general, will be even further eroded."

That the IPCC have let this deception continue for so long is a disgrace. Secretary General Ban Kai-Moon must instruct the UN climate body to either completely revise their operating procedures, welcoming dissenting input from scientist reviewers and indicating if reviewers have vested interests, or close the agency down completely.

Source




Right and wrong ways of driving down fuel prices

by Irwin M. Stelzer

Students of energy policy despair, and at times believe that Dante's inscription on the entrance to hell should be emblazoned on the entrances to the Capitol and the White House, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Our president has just gone to Saudi Arabia to grovel before the royal family in the hope of persuading the kingdom to open its taps just a bit to bring soaring oil prices down.

The caribou lobby in the Senate has voted down a bill that would have opened a small portion of Alaska's untapped oil fields to exploration and development. (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted to continue the restriction, and John McCain would have joined them had he not been out of town reveling in the applause for his speech promising to lead the fight on global warming.) And the farm and ethanol lobbies are prepared to crush the groups calling for an end to the food-for-fuel mandate that requires motorists to use nine billion gallons of ethanol (auto fuel made from corn) this year.

A good part of the energy policy muddle stems from a tendency to ask the wrong questions. Ask the wrong questions, and you get the wrong answers. The question now being asked by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and other politicians whose notion of the long run extends only for the six months until the November election is, "How can we lower gasoline prices?" Their answer: Reduce the approximately 18 cent-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline during the summer driving season.

The reasons that is exactly the wrong policy are too many to list. One is that oil producers, or oil companies, or service station operators would raise prices by an equivalent amount. Hillary Clinton, in her new populist incarnation, might dismiss this as the ranting of pointy-headed economists, but it is nevertheless true. But give the pandering pols the benefit of the doubt, and assume that prices would go down. The right question would have been, "Is it good policy to lower gasoline prices?" The right answer is "no."

Higher prices seem to be persuading Americans to use less gasoline, witness the increased use of mass transit reported in many cities around the country. Lower gasoline prices would encourage Americans to drive more, use more of the cheaper gasoline, emit more pollutants, and increase the demand for crude oil. So regimes hostile to the United States would sell us still more oil.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, whose government owns some 8,000 Citgo gasoline stations in America, must be astonished to learn that leading American politicians are eager to increase his revenues so that he can step up his propaganda campaign against America. And the Saudi financiers of jihadists and of the Wahabbi mullahs who fuel anti-Americanism would be pleased to have a few extra hundred million. So would Vladimir Putin.

Better that, figure our politicians, than to take the political risk of increasing taxes on gasoline, reducing demand, and getting to the consumers' wallets before OPEC and its allies do.

The wrong question--how do we lower prices?--also led Congress last week to pass legislation ordering the president to stop buying oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The reserve now contains 701.3 million barrels, a record. Bush wants to fill it to its capacity of 727 million barrels this year, and eventually double the capacity.

Stop buying oil, critics, including John McCain, tell President Bush, and demand pressures will ease. Better still, start selling off some of the strategic reserve, and increase supplies of crude oil. The notion that the government can outsmart the market by buying low and selling high is, to put it mildly, questionable. As is the assumption that it is smart enough to distinguish a shock, which might justify use of the reserve, from a trend, which should be allowed to play itself out so that the economy can readjust to the new prices.

Besides, oil companies are likely to increase their own inventories when the government stops stockpiling, stepping up purchases of imported crude oil in order to do so. Net effect of all of this on demand and supply: nil. Net effect on our ability to withstand a supply cut-off: substantial.

Next wrong question, and one being asked not only in America, but in most other countries: "How can we replace crude oil with renewable sources of energy?" Answer: Subsidize construction of wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, and the production of corn. But neither wind turbines nor solar energy, on the cheeriest of assumptions, can make a significant dent in the demand for crude oil and its products. As for nuclear, few of these costly plants--and cost estimates seem to be doubling every few months--will be built unless overt or covert subsidies are offered to private-sector players, licensing proceedings and construction times are shortened, and politicians are willing to override Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to allow the opening of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository.

Which leaves corn. Congress has mandated that farmers be paid huge subsidies to grow corn to be converted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute, while quite inconsistently maintaining a tariff wall to deny motorists access to cheaper imported ethanol. The answer produced by the wrong question has serious negative consequences. For one thing, the negative environmental impact of these biofuels seems to outweigh their positive effect. Among other things, production requires the use of huge amounts of fertilizers, causing run-off that pollutes streams and rivers; farmers around the world cut down environmentally friendly forests to increase planting of oil-substitutes; and acreage previously devoted to growing food is converted to growing fuel. That has contributed to the massive increases in food prices that are afflicting not only Americans but, with greater ferocity, the world's poor. In essence, rich countries are trying to fill their gasoline tanks at the expense of empty stomachs in Africa, Central America, and parts of Asia.

So what are the right questions? First, have any of the programs now in place proved counterproductive? Yes, several have costs that exceed their benefits. Best example: the attempt to grow our way out of the energy problem. Admit that we have erred, and wind down the subsidies that are denuding forests and contributing to food shortages without significantly adding to fuel supplies. That's what a coalition of environmentalists, livestock producers, and consumer groups last week called on Congress to do. They are unlikely to overcome the powerful farmer-ethanol lobby.

Second, are there cost-effective ways of increasing the supply of conventional crude oil? Probably. Studies that showed that the environmental cost of drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and offshore Florida and California exceeded any benefit from new discoveries are now out of date. The benefits were estimated when oil prices were less than half current levels. So the benefits of stepped up exploration have multiplied with the price and value of oil. Meanwhile, the industry claims to have learned a great deal about reducing the environmental impact of such stepped-up drilling. If new studies bear out these impressions, and suggest that the environmental and other costs of drilling are now exceeded by their benefits, restrictions on domestic drilling should be relaxed. But that is not in the cards--all three of the presidential wannabes are pledged to keep Alaska closed to drilling, no matter what the balance of costs and benefits.

Final sensible question, Can anything be done to increase supplies of oil from the world's important suppliers? Answer: Yes, if there is the will to act. The Mexican government depends heavily on remittances sent to poor Mexican families from the millions of its citizens working, legally and illegally, in the United States; the Saudi regime depends on the U.S. military umbrella for its survival; and the Saudi-led OPEC cartel, which has held production constant for eight months in the face of a 54 percent increase in prices, exists only because successive administrations have prevented the antitrust authorities from attempting to break it up. Hillary Clinton is on to something when she calls for antitrust action against this cartel, which would not be the first time the Justice Department has moved against a price-fixing conspiracy by foreign firms. Antitrust lawyers tell me that the immunity of sovereign governments from antitrust prosecution does not extend to their commercial activities.

Bush knows this. He knows that nothing frightens the Saudi regime more than the threat of the furling of the U.S. umbrella, which as Karen Elliott House put it in the Wall Street Journal, "has provided the Saudis with a security blanket that puts this desert kingdom off limits to regional predators" and prevented Iran and Syria from turning Saudi Arabia into another Lebanon. He knows that the Saudis have about two million barrels per day of shut-in, excess capacity. And he knows how vulnerable the Saudi-led OPEC cartel is to antitrust action.

Perhaps he worries that if he deploys any of these weapons the Saudis will dump some part of their dollar pile on the market, driving down the value of our currency, and increasing inflationary pressures and interest rates in America. They might, but only if they are willing to drive down the value of the billions of dollars remaining in their vaults, and damage the value of their U.S. investments. Would the president of the United States or the king of Saudi Arabia be the first to blink in a stare down? We will never know, since the administration prefers the role of supplicant to that of tough bargainer.

Nor is there any indication that we are prepared to harden our line with Mexico. No one has suggested that Mexico's continued refusal to allow American capital to flow into its oil industry might be considered when NAFTA is reviewed. Is it unreasonable to suggest that free trade in goods and services, and the virtually unhindered movement of labor across the border, must be accompanied by the free flow of capital across borders? Yes, we benefit from NAFTA, and its abrogation would impose costs on us. But so does Mexico's ban on U.S. participation in its oil industry.

A serious American administration would explain to the Saudis and their OPEC allies, and to the Mexicans, that continuation of their present policies would not be without cost to them. Continued defense of the Saudi regime, a staying of the hand of the antitrust authorities, and continued absence of restrictions on remittances to Mexico will, they should be told, depend at least in part on their willingness to allow Western firms to develop new reserves and to wring more oil from existing fields, and to relax cartel restrictions on current output.

Unfortunately, the right questions are precisely the sorts of questions that politicians abhor. Asking them produces politically difficult answers--higher not lower taxes on gasoline to encourage new technologies and discourage consumption, the opening of now-closed areas to exploration and development, the end of massive subsidies to farmers to grow corn-for-fuel.

Wrong questions and the inevitably wrong policy answers might be one reason Goldman Sachs is talking about a "super spike" that would take oil prices to $200 per barrel. Remember: These are the guys who were laughed at when they predicted that the price of oil would hit $100. Dante might have been referring to what happens to good ideas on energy policy when they are sent to the halls of Congress or the White House, when he wrote, "Through me you pass into the city of woe .??.... into eternal pain."

Source




Global warming could increase terrorism, official says

Global warming could destabilize "struggling and poor" countries around the world, prompting mass migrations and creating breeding grounds for terrorists, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council told Congress on Wednesday.

Climate change "will aggravate existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions," Thomas Fingar said. "All of this threatens the domestic stability of a number of African, Asian, Central American and Central Asian countries."

People are likely to flee destabilized countries, and some may turn to terrorism, he said. "The conditions exacerbated by the effects of climate change could increase the pool of potential recruits into terrorist activity," he said.

"Economic refugees will perceive additional reasons to flee their homes because of harsher climates," Fingar predicted. That will put pressure on countries receiving refugees, many of which "will have neither the resources nor interest to host these climate migrants," he said in testimony to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

More here

Comment on the above session from NR::

Today marked a new low for the way congressional Democrats deal with national security. This morning, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a joint hearing on a "National Intelligence Assessment" on global climate change. This analysis was ordered by the Democratic Congress last year and was issued a few weeks ago. Some highlights (or low-lights) from the hearing:

1) In response to a question by Global Warming Committee member Greg Walden (R-OR), the Intelligence Community admitted they had "low to medium confidence" in the accuracy of this estimate because intelligence officers lack the expertise to write such an estimate (it was mostly contracted out to other organizations) and climate change science is so uncertain. As Walden started to ask about why an analysis of such low reliability was issued, Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA), the Global Warming Committee Chairman, cut him off and told him he was out of time even though Markey let all the previous Democrats speak substantially past their time limits.

2) Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Peter Hoekstra asked what intelligence was used for this estimate and whether intelligence collection requirements were prepared. National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar said no clandestine intelligence was used and that intelligence officers extrapolated what would happen if the "mid-level estimates" by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were correct. When Hoekstra asked why the U.S. Intelligence Community would write an major analysis of low to medium confidence that contained no intelligence, Fingar answered, "because you [Congress] told us to."

3) Hoekstra noted that intelligence assessments of high confidence have proven to be wrong and he wondered why an intelligence assessment of low to medium confidence would even be published. In an attempt to dispel the debate over confidence, Intelligence Committee member Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) responded by noting that the 2002 Iraq WMD NIE had high confidence in its findings. Some Republicans thought Rep. Eshoo's statement actually made their case about the futility of issuing an intelligence assessment that intelligence officers cannot fully back.

Source

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29 June, 2008

Greenie scientist disowns "vanishing arctic" panic

Mark C. Serreze was the author quoted in most of the stories. He says now:

I hope that I will not be pilloried by the community for being a part of this story. From what I can gather, it started with a piece in "National Geographic Online", moved to a piece in "The Independent", another piece on CNN, and then quickly grew out of all reasonable proportion. A positive feedback process.

I'll be the first to agree that losing the ice at the north pole this summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful.

Source (Comment 6)




Comment on "Real Climate"

Comment below by Jim Peden. I first had a close look at realclimate.org on Dec. 13, 2004 and arrived at similar conclusions, without at that time being aware of their corrupt origins -- JR

Quoting RealClimate.org as a reliable source of information on climate science is like quoting Disneyland.com for reliable information on mouse behavior.

"Real Climate" is a staged and contracted production, which wasn't created by "scientists", it was actually created by Environmental Media Services, a company which specializes in spreading environmental junk science on behalf of numerous clients who stand to financially benefit from scare tactics through environmental fear mongering. There you will find the word "model" used a million times, for the entire basis of the Global Warming Hoax is based on computer modeling ( not climate science ) which has thus far failed to predict anything accurately since day one.

For example, one of their past clients, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, hired them to create the illusion that Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) was somehow dangerous, despite the fact that it had been fully tested and approved by the FDA. After a lengthy national fearmongering campaign by Environmental Media Services, Ben & Jerry's proudly announced that their ice cream was "BGH-free"... as if it made any difference.

Real Climate has become the Alamo for folks like the highly discredited Michael Mann, whose original analytical blunder led to the famous "hockey stick" curve, which helped kick off the Great Global Warming Hoax after it was picked up by science illiterate Al Gore and proudly paraded around the globe. The hockey stick was proven to be an absurd blunder, but by then you couldn't put the genie back into the bottle, and today we are wasting billions of dollars on a cure for a nonexistent disease.

Perhaps the best summary of "Real Climate" was given by a Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Richard Lindzen, who said,

"This website appears to constitute a support center for global warming believers, wherein any criticism of global warming is given an answer that, however implausible, is then repeated by the reassured believers."

Source




A different climate meeting

The Warmists are always having conferences and meetings. But others can have them too. A report:

Yesterday (25 June) I attended a lunchtime seminar in Westminster, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, on climate change and the case against CO2 as the driver of global temperatures. Chaired by Nigel Lawson, there were several other peers in attendance, and more Ph.Ds and professors than you could shake a stick at. The speaker was Dr Fred Singer, the 84-year-old American climate scientist and author of 'Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years' and one of the founders of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), set up to examine all the evidence on the subject, including that ignored by the politicised IPCC.

The London seminar was the last in a series that Dr Singer had held around Europe, where he had also had a meeting with the EU Environment Commissioner. Apparently, after listening to Dr Singer's views, the commissioner replied that they were very interesting but he would have to seek the views of scientists!

Dr Singer gave a presentation on the NIPCC paper 'Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate' (http://www.heartland.org/pdf/22835.pdf), of which he was the editor. He showed that the most damning evidence against man-made climate change was the 'fingerprint' method of comparing what the climate models predict should be happening to atmospheric temperatures and what measurements show actually is happening - and they are totally different.

There was a question and answer session after the presentation. In response to a question from the Bishop of Chester about what was driving the whole climate change scare, Dr Singer described the financial beneficiaries (activists, scientists, industrial organisations) and ideological factors. CO2 control was also the perfect vehicle for promoting world government.

One of the issues stressed by Dr Singer was that climate policies are negatively impacting energy policies, making energy much more expensive. In his view we need to be seeking economic growth throughout the world, which can only be achieved with access to relatively cheap energy. Since the end of the current interglacial cannot be too far away, we need to be wealthy enough to have the resources to adapt to the potentially catastrophic effects of the severe cooling that is inevitable within the next few thousand years.

Dr Singer believes that continued cooling over the next ten years, plus the economic consequences of the sharp increase in energy prices that is now occurring, will be needed to cause a break in the ranks of politicians towards trying to control CO2. More recognised academics need to speak out on the issue to keep the pressure up. All in all, a very interesting meeting.

There is another issue that came up in the Q&A session that we need to take seriously. There was a question from Nick Riley, who described himself as a geologist and zoologist, about the 'acidification' of the oceans from extra CO2. Dr Singer replied that the oceans were not acidifying but they were becoming less alkaline. Riley mentioned that there had been an acidification event some 55 million years ago (he didn't say what caused it) that took some 100,000 years for the oceans to recover from.

I have done a quick Google search this morning and found this paper by Riley: www.all-energy.co.uk/UserFiles/File/25Riley.pdf which shows that he is promoting carbon sequestration and is either a true believer or is making money from CO2 alarmism.

I think I may have mentioned before that I can see the Greens and their fellow travellers changing tack once it becomes irrefutable that CO2 is not driving temperatures, and ocean acidification is likely to be their next scare. It strikes me that, with current atmospheric CO2 levels at a very low level in terms of geological time, the likelihood of the oceans becoming acidic must be remote if they did not do so when atmospheric levels were much higher. If the event Riley referred to is true, it clearly didn't kill all life in the oceans, and corals date back some 250 million years and they obviously survived. I think we need to have the answers ready on this, though, for when the Greens say we must reduce CO2 emissions, even if they don't affect climate after all.

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Lawrence Solomon: What I told the Petroleum Club

On a tour earlier this week for his new book on global warming, "The Deniers", Lawrence Solomon made a presentation at the Petroleum Club in Calgary. His remarks, adapted, appear below

I'm surprised to see so many of you here today. I thought you might be at trial, for your global warming crimes. James Hansen - he's one of the leaders in the climate change movement in the U.S. - wants you in court. "CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing," he stated yesterday. "...they should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." Come to think of it, David Suzuki also sees those who abet CO2 emissions as criminals.

And you know what, I bet some of you see yourselves as criminals - or something close to it - because there's something in human nature that makes us feel guilty, even for crimes we didn't commit, let alone for non-crimes. And I bet some of your friends and associates might look at you sideways. And your children may be teased and made to feel guilty about what their dad does for a living. Even more, you've been cowed into silence. Instead of making your case to the public, instead of defending yourselves and your industry, you've thrown in the towel, or tried to be greener than green, hoping to avoid recrimination.

As many of you know, I and Energy Probe, my organization, have long been critics of the energy industry. We have opposed Arctic pipelines and tar sands that we considered to be ill-advised. We have opposed nuclear plants and big dams. We favour conservation and renewable energy. We like clean and economic energy, something we have had too little of in Canada. For this, some of you in this room bear some responsibility.

But on the global warming issues, based on the evidence to date, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Albertans have nothing to feel guilty about either. No crime has been committed. No known harm has occurred. You've been had.

The fears of cataclysm over global warming are unfounded. There is no consensus on climate change, despite what Al Gore and the UN's Panel on Climate Change would have you believe.

Let me tell you why most people think that global warming is a serious problem. It comes down to one number: 2500. That's the number of scientists associated with the UN's Panel on Climate Change that the press reports has endorsed the UN Panel's conclusions. These are the conclusions that get released in the UN's mammoth reports every six years or so, and that then dominate the media airwaves for weeks. "2500 scientists can't be wrong," the press always says, explicitly or implicitly. Without that number, it would have no basis for the claim that they repeat over and over again - that there's a consensus on climate change.

2500 is an impressive number of scientists. To find out who, exactly, they were, I contacted the Secretariat of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asked for their names. The Secretariat replied that the names were not public, so I couldn't have them. And I learned that the 2500 scientists were reviewers, not endorsers. Those scientists hadn't endorsed anything. They had merely reviewed one or more of the literally hundreds of background studies, some important and some not, that were part of this immense United Nations bureaucratic process. They did not review the final report or endorse it.

Their reviews weren't even all favorable. I know that from many sources, including from among some of the scientists that I profiled - several of the deniers in my book are among those 2500. And those deniers, and others, generally consider the UN's work a travesty. There is no endorsement by 2500 top UN scientists. The press has been taken. And so the public has been taken.

The extent to which the public has been taken may surprise you. Not only is there no consensus, the scientists who are skeptics - the deniers - have extraordinary credentials, people at the very top echelons of the scientific establishment. They are the Who's Who of Science. Not only do they disagree with the UN conclusions, they often value CO2 for the benefits it provides the planet - satellite data shows the planet is now the greenest it has been in decades. Until recently, after all, CO2 was universally viewed as Nature's fertilizer.

If these top scientists are right, you are being attacked without justification. You are being painted as criminals and your children are being made to feel ashamed of what you do. You are being victimized, in a modern form of shunning.

Your present strategy of lying low and hoping all this will pass has gotten you nowhere. You need to make your case, factually and frankly. The public will be skeptical of your arguments, as it should be. But if your critics can't counter your factual arguments, it is your critics who will fail. You need to decide. Do you want to go on being attacked for something that may be laudable, for producing CO2 may well be laudable? Do you want to go on feeling guilty out of public ignorance of where scientists truly stand on the global warming issue?

On global warming, the science is not settled. You have the facts on your side. But facts will count for naught as long as you see the battle as lost.

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Yellow Science

In the late 19th century, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer developed what would come to be known as yellow journalism. By disregarding what had been standard journalistic methods, particularly in regards to the verifying of sources, these two publishers were able both to push their country toward war with Spain and dramatically increase the circulation of their respective newspapers.

Man has always had a healthy desire for knowledge, and it is the feeding of this hunger that ennobles journalism. Hearst and Pulitzer were acutely aware that man has a less healthy but no less voracious desire to believe that he has knowledge, particularly knowledge of something sensational. It is the feeding of this hunger that irreparably disgraced journalism, and a century later now threatens to do the same to science.

Scientists, like journalists, are called upon to plumb the depths of the unknown and to fairly and objectively report their findings to their own professional community as well as the general public. Scientists, like the journalists of yesteryear, have specific methods for ensuring that the public trust placed in them is not abused. The most fundamental of these methods is the well-known, if not so creatively named, scientific method. The essence of the scientific method is the formulation of hypotheses (ideas) and the using of these hypotheses to make predictions that can be experimentally tested. In the words of Sir Thomas Eddington in "The Philosophy of Physical Science," "Every item of physical knowledge must therefore be an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure."

Nevertheless, over the past several decades an increasing number of scientists have shed the restraints imposed by the scientific method and begun to proclaim the truth of man-made global warming. This is a hypothesis that remains untested, makes no predictions that can be tested in the near future, and cannot offer a numerical explanation for the limited evidence to which it clings. No equations have been shown to explain the relationship between fossil-fuel emission and global temperature. The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.

The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of "an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure." Global warming may or may not be "the greatest scam in history," as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an "item of physical knowledge."

Nevertheless, the acceptance of man-made global warming as scientific fact has become so prevalent that the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, recently declared: "The debate is over. It's time to discuss solutions." Leaving aside the question of the secretary-general's qualifications, that is certainly one of the most antiscientific statements ever made. The first question that this raises is why have so many scientists chosen to ignore this glaring failure of the global warming hypothesis to meet the standards of their own profession? The second question is what, if anything, can be done about it?

The first, and most obvious, temptation for this sort of willful blindness is financial. Hearst made only a fraction of his estimated $140 million in net worth from yellow journalism. Global warming, on the other hand, has provided an estimated $50 billion in research grants to those willing to practice yellow science. Influence in the public sphere is another strong temptation. It might not be as impressive as starting the Spanish-American War, but global-warming alarmists have amassed a large group of journalists and politicians ready to silence any critics and endorse whatever boondoggle scheme is prescribed as the cure to our impending climate catastrophe.

Finally, one should not underestimate the temptation of convenience. Just as it is far easier to publish stories without verifying the sources; so is it much more convenient to practice yellow science than the real thing. It takes far more courage, perseverance, and perspiration to develop formulas, make predictions, and risk being proved wrong than to look at historical data and muse about observed similarities. Yellow scientists have fled the risks of science that Albert Einstein described when he said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong."

The layman might object that this is not his problem. Surely Joe Six-Pack should not be expected to monitor the findings of research physicists; if anything is to be done about this collapse of scientific standards, it must be done by the scientific community itself. Unfortunately, history has shown the inability of professional communities to police their own ranks. When it first reared its head, yellow journalism was roundly condemned by the journalistic community. In fact, it was these critics who coined the term yellow journalism. The condemnation of their peers was an insufficient deterrent for Pulitzer and Hearst, because it was the approval of the public that drove their circulation. Eventually the entire journalistic community acceded to the sensationalism that the public seemed to insist on.

In recent decades, the scorn of prominent scientists such as John Coleman has been similarly unable to stop the ascendancy of the global-warming hypothesis as the public has been increasingly drawn by its sensationalism. The scientific community as a whole is on the brink of acceding to Ban Ki-Moon's insistence that "the debate is over" and turning now to their grant applications.

Ultimately, it is only the public that holds the power to enforce professional standards, and therefore each of us must accept this responsibility. Most of us will not be able to comprehend the latest climatologic studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but fortunately that is not necessary. However complex the information may be, the standards are quite clear. One need not be a Beltway newshound to know that whatever follows the phrase "unnamed sources in the capital" or "rumors in Hollywood are" is not real journalism. Similarly, one does not need an advanced degree in natural science to understand that whatever follows the phrase "most experts agree" or "no one can measure the exact effect but" is not real science. In fact, if there is no possible way that a statement can realistically be tested, it probably fails to meet the standards for any professional community and is of no real use to the public.

The long-term results of yellow journalism have probably been more devastating than the war it started. Journalists have lost the respectability of their profession, and the public has lost real journalism. We are in very real danger, as scientists and as a nation, of losing the respectability of a professional community that has done so much to make this country great in the past hundred years. If yellow science overcomes real science it will not only be on account of the greed, ambition, and cowardice of our scientists but also the sloth and cowardice of a public that is unwilling to stand up and demand professionalism. This is why, as the editors of the New York Press said in 1897, I "called them yellow because they are yellow."

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Bellamy: Flying not to blame for global warming

Controversial environmental campaigner and botanist David Bellamy has claimed the world is getting colder and aviation should not be blamed for climate change. An outspoken critic of claims that global warming is man-made, he was talking during Haven Holidays' Big Green Weekend event last week, designed to promote eco-friendly domestic tourism. "In the next 24 hours the amount of deforestation will pour the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as eight million people flying from Britain to America. So stop the logging and we can stop the problem," he said. "There is more proof that global warming is natural climate change and we have to adapt to it. In the past 17 years the temperature has actually gone down."

Bellamy, who has faced widespread criticism for his unorthodox views, also said there is now more sea ice at the poles than ever before and that, despite concerns about climate change driving polar bears to extinction, their numbers had trebled.

However, Rachel Noble, campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, said: "Human beings are contributors to climate change and aviation is a part of that. "Every individual is responsible for their actions, including where and how they travel."

Michelle di Leo, director of pro-aviation group FlyingMatters, said: "We don't disagree with those who say climate change is a serious issue because as far as we're concerned the science is there. "Where we do agree [with Professor Bellamy] is if policy makers focus on what is, globally, just 2% of emissions we could miss the chance of cutting more damaging sources without damaging the social and economic welfare that flying brings us."

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28 June, 2008

Climate models fail again! Scientist 'startled' to discover 50% of ozone destroyed in lower atmosphere

"Destruction Of Greenhouse Gases Over Tropical Atlantic May Ease Global Warming"

Large amounts of ozone -- around 50% more than predicted by the world's state-of-the-art climate models -- are being destroyed in the lower atmosphere over the tropical Atlantic Ocean. This startling discovery was made by a team of scientists from the UK's National Centre for Atmospheric Science and Universities of York and Leeds. It has particular significance because ozone in the lower atmosphere acts as a greenhouse gas and its destruction also leads to the removal of the third most abundant greenhouse gas; methane.

The findings come after analysing the first year of measurements from the new Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, recently set up by British, German and Cape Verdean scientists on the island of Sao Vicente in the tropical Atlantic. Alerted by these Observatory data, the scientists flew a research aircraft up into the atmosphere to make ozone measurements at different heights and more widely across the tropical Atlantic. The results mirrored those made at the Observatory, indicating major ozone loss in this remote area.

So, what's causing this loss? Instruments developed at the University of Leeds, and stationed at the Observatory, detected the presence of the chemicals bromine and iodine oxide over the ocean for this region. These chemicals, produced by sea spray and emissions from phytoplankton (microscopic plants in the ocean), attack the ozone, breaking it down. As the ozone is destroyed, a chemical is produced that attacks and destroys the greenhouse gas methane. Up until now it has been impossible to monitor the atmosphere of this remote region over time because of its physical inaccessibility. Including this new chemistry in climate models will provide far more accurate estimates of ozone and methane in the atmosphere and improve future climate predictions.

Professor Alastair Lewis, Director of Atmospheric Composition at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and a lead scientist in this study, said: "At the moment this is a good news story -- more ozone and methane being destroyed than we previously thought - but the tropical Atlantic cannot be taken for granted as a permanent 'sink' for ozone. The composition of the atmosphere is in fine balance here- it will only take a small increase in nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel combustion, carried here from Europe, West Africa or North America on the trade winds, to tip the balance from a sink to a source of ozone"

Professor John Plane, University of Leeds said: "This study provides a sharp reminder that to understand how the atmosphere really works, measurement and experiment are irreplaceable. The production of iodine and bromine mid-ocean implies that destruction of ozone over the oceans could be global".

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Don't be Fooled by America's "Armchair Environmentalists"

Despite a vast U.S. marketing and media coverage trend toward green affinity and awareness in recent years, most Americans admit putting personal comfort ahead of the environment, and a significant percentage voice ambivalence - even negativity - about increased media attention regarding the environment. So reports Eco Pulse, the newest national study on U.S. consumers and green affinity, produced by Shelton Group (www.sheltoncom.com/), a Tennessee advertising agency focused on energy, energy efficiency and sustainability.

"What we've quantified in Eco Pulse is that by and large, consumers behave as 'armchair environmentalists' at best," said Suzanne Shelton, CEO of Shelton Group. "Folks who talk up their green purchases and lifestyles at a cocktail party really aren't doing as much as they say they're doing."

Eco Pulse reveals how few Americans actually put their own environmental views into practice at the check-out counter. When asked, "How much, if any, does a company's environmental record and/or practices impact your decision whether or not to buy their products?" 49 percent said "somewhat" to "very much."

However, when asked a specific follow-up to this question, "Have you ever chosen one product over another based on the environmental record/practices of its manufacturer?" only 21 percent said "yes," and of those, only 28 percent - six percent of the total population - could name the actual product.

When asked, "Given a choice between your comfort, your convenience or the environment, which do you most often choose?" 46 percent chose comfort, while 31 percent chose the environment, and 23 percent chose convenience. When asked if they feel like they are often asked to choose between their comfort and the environment, most consumers (48 percent) were undecided, but 26 percent agreed.

In addition, a significant percentage (40 percent) admitted to a less-than-enthusiastic response to increased media attention covering human impact on the environment. While 60 percent answered in a positive fashion (such as feeling better educated or glad as a result of environmental media attention), the rest chose negative or ambivalent responses such as irritated, skeptical, guilty or unaffected.

"The market for green messages is not nearly as mature as the media often leads the public - including businesses and marketers in the sustainability sector - to believe," Shelton said.

"We work with clients all the time who initially think consumers collectively hold widespread, uniform views about the environment and have a wealth of knowledge," Shelton said. "This corporate lack of understanding about the consumer mindset can lead to a lot of poorly crafted messaging - such as promoting things about a company's sustainability that mean little or nothing to consumers, often because a proper education process was never implemented first. For example, some companies just assume consumers know what a carbon credit is and that consumers will buy into a company's green credentials based on that sort of claim alone. Not true."

"The green marketing movement is very cart-before-the-horse right now, and it seems that few players in this space really understand that investing in educational groundwork will ultimately be needed to achieve meaningful connections between green messages and consumers."

Eco Pulse respondents also confirmed the skepticism that Shelton Group has been monitoring in recent nationwide focus groups regarding green corporate positioning.

When asked why most companies that adopt environmentally friendly practices do so, most (47 percent) responded "to make their company look better to the public." Only 13 percent believed it was "because their owners/shareholders care about the environment."

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BRITISH LABOUR PARTY WIPED OUT IN HENLEY BY-ELECTION

Gordon Brown suffered the humiliation on Friday of Labour crashing to fifth place in the Henley by-election on his first anniversary as prime minister. The unprecedented result, which placed the government behind the Green party and the far-right British National Party, is likely to raise further questions about Mr Brown's leadership and increase calls for change from Labour MPs.

The Conservatives comfortably held one of their safer seats, vacated by Boris Johnson when he left parliament to serve as London Mayor. John Howell, the Tory candidate, secured a majority of 10,116, increasing the Tory share of the vote from 53.5 per cent in 2005 to 57.5 per cent. In his acceptance speech he said "the British public has sent a message to Gordon Brown to 'get off our backs, stop the endless tax rises and help us cope with the rising cost of living'".

Labour expectations were extremely low ahead of the vote. But even the most pessimistic Labour MPs will be shocked that the governing party won little more than 1,000 votes, lost its 500 pounds deposit and trailed two parties with no representation in parliament.

Martin Salter, the Labour MP leading their campaign in Henley, described it as a "grim result" in which the government "reaped the whirlwind" of voter dismay over the credit crunch and faltering economy. "It is very difficult to divine a clear message for Gordon Brown in a seat in which we had no chance at all," he said.

Labour's share of the vote slumped from 14.8 per cent in 2005 to about 3 per cent - well short of the 5 per cent share required to keep their deposit. Lord Renard, the Liberal Democrat chief executive, said it was "abject humiliation" for Mr Brown.

More here

And below is the high-tax "Green" mentality that lost the election:

GORDON Brown was set to signal today he is prepared to take on public opinion over green taxes. The Prime Minister was to insist "real leadership" is necessary to reduce Britain's carbon footprint.

Announcing a 100 billion pound programme to slash greenhouse gas emissions, Mr Brown was due to say UK lifestyles must change over the next decade. The Government has been under pressure over green incentives such as tax hikes for owners of the most polluting, gas-guzzling vehicles.

But, at a lower carbon economy summit in London today, Mr Brown was to say a low carbon society will not emerge from a "business as usual" approach. "It will require real leadership from government - being prepared to make hard decisions on planning or on tax, for example, rather than tacking and changing according to the polls. It will require an investment programme of around 100 billion over the next 12 years. "It will involve new forms of economic activity and social organisation. "It will mean new kinds of consumer behaviour and lifestyles. "And it will demand creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism throughout our economy and our society."

Thousands of new wind turbines could be built across the UK over the coming decade as part of the radical blueprint being unveiled today. Business Secretary John Hutton acknowledged the "green" power plants would cost more and take up more land than conventional electricity generation, but said Britain had "no choice" about moving to lower-carbon energy.

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GERMAN GOVERNMENT CONCERNED IT MAY FALL OVER HIGH ENERGY COSTS

Germany might reintroduce a _5bn-a-year (œ4bn, $7.8bn) tax break for commuters to shield consumers from rising petrol prices.

Senior officials from the Christian Democratic Union led by Angela Merkel, the chancellor, told the Financial Times the pressure to bring back a tax subsidy that was abolished last year, was so high that "we will not have the political strength to resist it". The admission comes as legislators frantically seek to alleviate the effects on voters of rising food and energy prices, which they fear could weaken consumption and dent support for the ruling parties in the run-up to next year's general election.

Using taxes to offset rising petrol prices would mark a U-turn for Germany, which recently rejected French suggestions that European governments should cut levies on petrol to protect consumers' purchasing power. Coalition parliamentarians yesterday said such a move would garner a broad majority in the house.

More here




G8 SUMMIT RELEGATES CLIMATE AGENDA AS FOCUS SHIFTS TO OIL AND FOOD PRICES

As Japan prepares to host the Group of Eight Summit in ten days' time, it appears that the agenda will undergo a change to reflect current world concerns over the prices of food and oil. According to Japanese officials directly involved in the summit preparations, the summit's focus is likely to shift from climate change to rising prices, as leaders of the world's richest countries search for solutions to escalating costs that are affecting rich and poor nations alike.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, following a summit early this month in Rome, is working on ways to implement action plans adopted at the summit to improve food security.

The results of a policy dialogue among major oil producing and consuming nations in Saudi Arabia last weekend were disappointing; the host country promised to increase production by 200,000 barrels a day, but this was not expected to have much impact on the global oil market. "The world economic outlook is quite different from that prior to the previous Heiligendamm summit," said Masaharu Kono, deputy foreign minister in charge of economic affairs, referring to last year's G8 summit in Germany. Kono was speaking to the foreign press in Tokyo last week.

Originally, the summit was expected to focus on climate change - hardly a promising agenda for leaders interested in a "successful" outcome for the meeting. This issue is "one of the most difficult problems mankind has ever faced," said Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura Tuesday at a meeting of foreign journalists in Japan. The complexity of the task was apparent at the latest Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change, which took place last weekend in Seoul, South Korea. More than 12 hours of debate failed to produce a common language of consent on long-term - let alone mid-term - carbon emissions targets.

At the G8 meeting Japan is determined to sell its Cool Earth Partnership program, outlining its proposed policy incentives and demonstrating its energy-saving technologies and low-carbon products at the summit venue. "Our main goal is to forge a post-Kyoto framework in which all the major emissions nations can participate," stressed Komura.

On the third and final day of the summit, an extended meeting between G8 leaders and what is known as the Outreach Five nations - Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa - will be held. These 13 nations produce almost 80 percent of global carbon emissions.

Another major item on the agenda will be Africa. Japan has invited eight African leaders to dialogue with G8 leaders on July 7, the first working day of the conference.

The summit's political issues will cover nuclear non-proliferation, focusing mainly on Iran and North Korea, as well as peace building in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan.

For the host Japan, the issue of North Korea has suddenly come to the fore, as the U.S. administration is expected to remove North Korea from its list of terrorism-supporting nations and grant it other benefits, after Pyongyang submitted details of its nuclear programs to China on Thursday as part of an earlier agreement. The delisting, Japan fears, may undermine its efforts to push Pyongyang to release more than a dozen Japanese citizens abducted nearly three decades ago.

On Wednesday U.S. President George W. Bush held a 20-minute telephone conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, affirming that he would "never forget about the abduction cases" and promising close cooperation on the matter, according to a Foreign Ministry press release.

Among the nine leaders expected at the G8 summit - eight plus the European Union Commissioner - there will be four new faces: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The merit of the annual summit is the fact that "these leaders can talk freely and interactively without any interference," said Kono, who will serve as aide to Fukuda, the summit chairman.

This year's G8 summit carries echoes of the very first summit - then the G6 - held in Rambouillet, France in 1975, in the wake of a global recession sparked by the 1973 oil crisis. More recent summits have drifted away from economic issues to focus on post-9/11 terrorism, infectious diseases, African development and climate change. In addition to the state actors, non-state actors including non-governmental organizations - invited and uninvited - as well as business and interest groups are expected to converge around the otherwise pristine volcanic Lake Toya, site of the summit. "This summit will be very colorful and with much diversity," Kono predicts.

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How "Smart Growth" Exacerbated the International Financial Crisis

The U.S. mortgage meltdown has dominated business news for months. The crisis seems to deepen daily, and its impacts are felt throughout an increasingly interdependent financial world. Only recently, the Organization for Economic and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have suggested that losses of an additional $250 billion to $1 trillion may yet be in the offing. In the ongoing debate over the causes and cures of the mortgage meltdown, one of the most important factors has been virtually absent: the role of excessive land use regulations in exacerbating the extent of losses.

What Is Excessive Land Use Regulation?

As we know from introductory courses in economics, scarcity raises prices. In a number of metropolitan markets across the country, excessive land use policies have been adopted, such as urban growth boundaries, huge areas recently declared off-limits to development, building moratoria, confiscatory and unprecedented impact fees, and excessively large minimum lot sizes.

These policies, often referred to as "smart growth," create a scarcity of land, artificially raise the price of housing, and, again, have increased the exposure of the market to risky mortgage debt. When more liberal loan policies were implemented, metropolitan areas that had adopted these more restrictive policies lacked the resilient land markets that would have allowed the greater demand to be accommodated without inordinate increases in house prices.

A few voices in the wilderness on both sides of the political spectrum have pointed to the role of excessive land use policies in driving up housing costs. For example: Liberal economist Paul Krugman of The New York Times put most of his conservative colleagues to shame in noting that the house price bubble has been limited to metropolitan areas with strong land use regulation. Conservative Thomas Sowell, no stranger to being a voice in the wilderness, has made similar points. More recently, Theo Eicher of the University of Washington produced a working paper placing much of the blame for house price escalation on land use regulation in cities around the nation.

Consequences of Excessive Land Use Regulation

How does all of this relate to the mortgage meltdown and the subprime crisis? It is very simple. There is no question that more liberal loan policies were the proximate cause. But the strict land use regulations forced prices up much more than would have been the case if the previous more traditional yet environmentally sound regulation had been retained.

Places like California, the Northeast, the Northwest, and Florida have implemented excessive land use controls. As a result, their land use planning systems have not been able to accommodate the stronger demand created in the more profligate lending environment. At the same time, as a result of its more relaxed land regulation, much of the rest of the nation was far better able to accommodate the higher demand. This includes the high-income world's three fastest-growing metropolitan areas with a population of more than 5,000,000: Atlanta, Georgia, and Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas.

This is illustrated by developments in the nation's 50 largest metropolitan markets. Between 2000 and 2007, house prices increased an average of more than $275,000 compared to incomes (house price to household income ratio) in the 10 markets with the greatest price escalation or the greatest affordability loss. Among the second 10 markets with the greatest affordability loss, prices rose $135,000 relative to incomes. By contrast, in the markets with the least affordability loss, house prices increased only $5,000. (See table.)

What the 20 markets that have lost the most affordability have in common is excessive land use regulation. Virtually everyone knows the distress that such cost increases mean for America's households.

But there are broader economic consequences that have expanded to the international market. From 2000 to 2007, the gross value of the U.S. housing stock rose $5.3 trillion relative to household incomes. It is estimated that $4.4 trillion of this increase occurred in the 20 most escalating markets, all of which are characterized by excessive land use planning. In each of four markets (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington, and Miami), the aggregate escalation above incomes was a third of a trillion dollars or more.

While there have been modest house price reductions in the most expensive markets, far larger drops would be required to restore previous levels of housing affordability in the most expensive markets. Moreover, Bureau of the Census estimates indicate that many of the markets that have lost so much affordability are also losing large numbers of households to more affordable areas of the country, which could suggest that house prices may well drop even further.[1]

Over the same period, the nation's gross residential mortgage exposure rose $4.8 trillion relative to household incomes. If the distribution of mortgage exposure increase tracked with the increase in excess value noted above, then 83 percent is attributable to the 20 most escalating markets-again, all with restrictive land use planning or smart growth. Stated another way, if price-escalating smart growth policies had not been adopted in state capitals, county courthouses, and local planning commissions, the financial risk in the current crisis would be at least $4 trillion less. This is a very high concentration of excess mortgage exposure, since these markets account for only 26 percent of the nation's owner-occupied housing stock.

The tragedy is that when most of these decisions were made, there was not the slightest consideration of economics-the upward pressure on house prices-or the number of households that would be denied home ownership in the years to come. Yet these local decisions played a major role in what The Economist magazine called a near global collapse.

Exacerbating the International Finance Crisis

Simply put, without smart growth, the international financial crisis that has raised so much appropriate concern would have been much less severe. Thus far, the policies of the Federal Reserve Board have failed to take notice of this important connection. Any serious effort to prevent a repeat of such destructive price volatility will require removing these destructive land use regulations that have done so much to destroy housing affordability in many markets while adding inordinately to the financial distress that is being felt around the world. Economics-challenged state and local politicians must not be permitted to steer the international economy into an iceberg.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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27 June, 2008

The melted pole: More breathtaking stupidity from the mainstream media

Post below recycled from Tom Nelson. See the original for links

From The Independent:

Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year. The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic - and worrying - examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

"From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water," said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

From a June 20 National Geographic article:

Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history]," David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.

But there's a big problem with this "alarming" story: it's not even rare for the North Pole to be ice free. See the details here, and note that the New York Times ran (and then retracted) a similar story back in August 2000. From a November 2000 Patrick Michaels article:

By August 29, the level of outrage the Times had incurred provoked a half-hearted retraction of sorts, on page D-3, where the paper admitted it misstated the true condition of polar ice, noting that about 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is open in the summer and that those open areas do in fact sometimes extend to the Pole. McCarthy, the Times reported, "would not argue with critics who said that open water at the pole was not unprecedented." How about the truth? Open water is common.

That's apparent from even a cursory look at the U.N.'s own temperature data or from a study of climate history. Climatologists are pretty sure that polar regions were around 2øC warmer than they are today during the period from 4,000 to 7,000 years ago. That's three millennia in which summer sea-ice was likely more scattered than it is today. The only ecological catastrophe ecologists might be able say resulted from this deplorable condition was the rise of human civilization.

SEOUL CLIMATE TALKS DEADLOCKED ON MANDATORY EMISSIONS TARGETS

I have long ago lost track of all the international conferences about climate. They must be a lot of fun to have so many of them. A nice holiday at taxpayer expense, I guess. Anyway, the one below seems to be the latest

Major carbon dioxide emitters failed to agree on a numerical target for reducing the world's greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050 even though the final session of a two-day meeting here was extended into Monday morning, conference sources said.

According to the sources, however, participants in the fourth Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change (MEM) did manage to hammer out a broad agreement on a draft MEM leaders' declaration to be issued on July 9 after talks to be held on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit meeting in Toyakocho, Hokkaido, which starts July 7.

The MEM comprises 16 nations, including China, India and South Korea, and the European Union plus the eight countries that form the G-8. Its first meeting was held at the initiative of the United States in September. The participating nations account for about 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

The G-8 groups Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States.

The content of the draft declaration has not been made public. According to sources, the draft indicates that developing nations also will be invited to take part in discussions on a post-Kyoto Protocol framework, based on the premise of receiving financial assistance from industrialized countries and technology cooperation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In regard to the long-term target of reducing the world's greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050, as proposed by Japan, the draft incorporates a certain understanding and awareness of this goal on the part of emerging economies, such as China and India, in addition to industrialized nations, according to the sources.

But this does not mean all 16 participating countries agreed to set a definite numerical goal, non-Japanese conference sources said, indicating that participants failed to clarify specific numerical targets and reach agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by half.

As for a midterm goal targeted for around 2020 through 2030, opinion was divided with industrialized nations calling on the emerging economies to share the responsibility for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. For their part, the emerging economies urged the industrialized nations to reduce their emissions in advance, the sources said.

For this reason, the draft failed to incorporate a definite agreement or goal, a Japanese government source said.

Speaking at a press conference Monday, Mitoji Yabunaka, administrative vice foreign minister, said: "It's good that a [draft declaration] document was compiled with the aim of submitting it to the G-8 summit. But it's not yet complete."

Source




POOR BRITAIN: HIGHER GAS AND ELECTRICITY BILLS TO PAY FOR SHIFT FROM FOSSIL FUELS

Householders will be warned today to expect five years of higher home energy bills to pay for a green power revolution. John Hutton, the Business Secretary, will outline plans for a massive shift away from fossil fuels to wind, solar and tidal power, but will add that the change comes at a price. "We think there will be a cost," he told The Times yesterday.

The plan, which he calls the biggest shake-up in Britain's power generation since the Industrial Revolution, requires 100 billion pounds of new investment but would lead to five years of higher gas and electricity bills from about 2015, he said.

Homeowners will be given financial incentives to fit their roofs with solar panels and there will be ambitious targets to increase their use from 90,000 today to seven million within the next 12 years. The plan also envisages a 90 per cent increase in the use of ground and air-source heat pumps that provide "free" heat by tapping the warmth in the air or the earth. Mr Hutton will also outline a "feed-in tariff" allowing homes that generate surplus electricity to sell it to the national grid as an incentive to switch.

The news comes a day after the chiefs of the big six energy companies gave warning that energy bills, which have already risen more than 15 per cent this year, would rise again within the next few months because of the rising price of oil.

Mr Hutton said the renewable cost would be "relatively modest", set against the current increases in the prices of coal, oil and gas and the scale would depend on movements in world oil prices. But he said that it was a necessary price to pay if Britain was serious about addressing climate change and switching to green technology.

More here




BBC: BIOFUEL USE 'INCREASING POVERTY'

The replacement of traditional fuels with biofuels has dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty, an aid agency report says. Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world's soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest. The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change. Its report urges the EU to scrap a target of making 10% of all transport run on renewable resources by 2020. Oxfam estimates the EU's target could multiply carbon emissions 70-fold by 2020 by changing the use of land.

The report's author, Oxfam's biofuel policy adviser Rob Bailey, criticised rich countries for using subsidies and tax breaks to encourage the use of food crops for alternative sources of energy like ethanol. "If the fuel value for a crop exceeds its food value, then it will be used for fuel instead," he said. "Rich countries... are making climate change worse, not better, they are stealing crops and land away from food production, and they are destroying millions of livelihoods in the process."

More here




OOPS: ANTARCTIC SEA ICE AT RECORD LEVELS

The Antarctic set a new record (since records began in 1979) for sea ice extent at the end of last winter. It stayed well above the normal through the summer with icemelt 40% below the normal. As a new height of irony and hype, the media made a big deal about a fracture of a small part of the Wilkins ice sheet in late February (160 square miles of the 6 million square mile Antarctic ice sheet (0.0027% of the total).

Media headlines blared: Bye-bye, Antarctica? and Massive ice shelf collapsing off Antarctica. But as you can see from this Cryosphere chart, the extent never dropped to less than 1 million square km ABOVE NORMAL during or after the brief event. Currently Antarctic ice extent is running nearly 1 million square kilometers higher than last year at this time. Peak comes at the end of the southern winter (September).

This chart, also from Cryosphere, shows the Global Sea Ice Area from 1979 to present. It begs the question, where's the melt?

More here




GREAT MOMENTS IN ALARMISM

Apparently a number of papers are "commemorating" today the 20th anniversary of James Hansen's speech before Congress warning of catastrophic man-made global warming. So let's indeed commemorate it. Here is the chart from the appendices of Hansen's speech showing his predictions for man-made global warming:



I have helpfully added in red the actual temperature history, as measured by satellite, over the last 20 years (and scale-shifted to match the base anomaly in Hansens graph). Yes, 2008 has been far colder than 1988. We have seen no warming trend in the last 10 years, and temperatures have undershot every one of Hansen's forecasts. He thought the world would be a degree C warmer in 20 years, and it is not. Of course, today, he says the world will warm a degree in the next 20 years -- the apocalypse never goes away, it just recesses into the future.

This may explain why Hansen's GISS surface temperature measurements are so much higher than everyone else's, and keep getting artificially adjusted upwards: Hansen put himself way out on a limb, and now is using the resources of the GISS to try to create warming in the metrics where none exist to validate his forecasts of Apocalypse.

More here

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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26 June 2008

Huge volcanic fires under the Arctic icecap discovered

Reality trumps theory again: An international expedition has discovered gigantic volcanic eruptions in the Arctic Ocean. Ya think it might melt some of the ice above it? This blog has had posts about Gakkel ridge vulcanism since Feb, 2005. See also another of my posts of Jan. 1, 2007 on the subject



An international team of researchers was able to provide evidence of explosive volcanism in the deeps of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean for the first time. Researchers from an expedition to the Gakkel Ridge, led by the American Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), report in the current issue of the journal Nature that they discovered, with a specially developed camera, extensive layers of volcanic ash on the seafloor, which indicates a gigantic volcanic eruption.

"Explosive volcanic eruptions on land are nothing unusual and pose a great threat for whole areas," explains Dr Vera Schlindwein of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. She participated in the expedition as a geophysicist and has been, together with her team, examining the earthquake activity of the Arctic Ocean for many years. "The Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and buried thriving Pompeii under a layer of ash and pumice. Far away in the Arctic Ocean, at 85ø N 85ø E, a similarly violent volcanic eruption happened almost undetected in 1999 - in this case, however, under a water layer of 4,000 m thickness."

So far, researchers have assumed that explosive volcanism cannot happen in water depths exceeding 3 kilometres because of high ambient pressure. "These are the first pyroclastic deposits we've ever found in such deep water, at oppressive pressures that inhibit the formation of steam, and many people thought this was not possible," says Robert Reves-Sohn, staff member of the WHOI and lead scientist of the expedition carried out on the Swedish icebreaker Oden in 2007.

A major part of Earth's volcanism happens at the so-called mid-ocean ridges and, therefore, completely undetected on the seafloor. There, the continental plates drift apart; liquid magma intrudes into the gap and constantly forms new seafloor through countless volcanic eruptions. Accompanied by smaller earthquakes, which go unregistered on land, lava flows onto the seafloor. These unspectacular eruptions usually last for only a few days or weeks.

The Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean spreads so slowly at 6-14 mm/year, that current theories considered volcanism unlikely - until a series of 300 strong earthquakes over a period of eight months indicated an eruption at 85ø N 85ø E in 4 kilometres water depth in 1999. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute became aware of this earthquake swarm and reported about its unusual properties in the periodical EOS in the year 2000.

Vera Schlindwein and her junior research group are closely examining the earthquake activity of these ultraslow-spreading ridges since 2006. "The Gakkel Ridge is covered with sea-ice the whole year. To detect little earthquakes, which accompany geological processes, we have to deploy our seismometers on drifting ice floes." This unusual measuring method proved highly successful: in a first test in the summer 2001 - during the "Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge Expedition (AMORE)" on the research icebreaker Polarstern - the seismometers recorded explosive sounds by the minute, which originated from the seafloor of the volcanic region. "This was a rare and random recording of a submarine eruption in close proximity," says Schlindwein. "I postulated in 2001 that the volcano is still active. However, it seemed highly improbable to me that the recorded sounds originated from an explosive volcanic eruption, because of the water depth of 4 kilometres."

The scientist regards the matter differently after her participation in the Oden-Expedition 2007, during which systematic earthquake measurements were taken by Schlindwein's team in the active volcanic region: "Our endeavours now concentrate on reconstructing and understanding the explosive volcanic episodes from 1999 and 2001 by means of the accompanying earthquakes. We want to know, which geological features led to a gas pressure so high that it even enabled an explosive eruption in these water depths." Like Robert Reves-Sohn, she presumes that explosive eruptions are far more common in the scarcely explored ultraslow-spreading ridges than presumed so far.

Source




Richard Courtney shoots down a Greenie ignoramus

As noted here on 24th., Courtney recently took up the NRDC challenge to skeptical scientists to 'let NRDC's real climate experts take them on'. One of the Greenies did actually comment on Courtney's response. Below is the comment and Courtney's reply to it. The name of the Greenie suggests that he is a Finn, so perhaps he can be forgiven for not knowing that "Rick" is a customary abbreviation for "Eric"

Tuuka Simonen: "Richard S Courtney says that the temperature is similar to 1940. That is utterly bollocks. Rick himself is full of fossil industry money:"

No, it is not "utterly bollocks": it is simply true. Please do not take my word for it but check it for yourself. I cite CRU data from here.

In that CRU dataset the 1940 monthly values of temperature anomalies from the 30 year mean are presented in degrees Celsius.

They range between -0.191 and +0.057 with an annual mean of +0.018. In that same dataset the monthly 2008 anomalies to date are +0.053, +0.192, +0.430, +0.254 and +0.278. This is a mean value for the months in 2008 to date of +0.241.

The ranges of the monthly values for these years overlap; i.e. the highest monthly value in 1940 (+0.057) was higher than the lowest monthly value in 2008 (+0.053). I think it very reasonable to say they are "similar" when their ranges overlap.

However, my use of the word "similar" could be considered to an understatement because the mean values differ by only 0.223 degrees Celsius and the data has inherent error of +/- 0.2 degrees Celsius. So, within their inherent errors the mean values are not similar because THEY ARE THE SAME.

But atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has increased by more than 30% since 1940 and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is supposed to induce "dangerous" global warming.

Also, I am not impressed by reference to a blog that only exists to smear and defame climate realists. I fail to understand how that in any way refutes the facts I have presented here and that anybody can check with little effort.

So, Tuuka Simonen, if you are one of NRDC's "real climate experts" who wanted to "take on" climate realist arguments then you need to do much better than you have managed so far. However, I do give you credit for trying to address one of the points made here. You completely failed, but your attempt was the only one that NRDC's "real climate experts" have provided.

Incidentally, nobody calls me "Rick" (or they only do it once).

Source




Big Coal Fires Back Over James Hansen's Criminal Complaint

Reports Revkin of the NYT:

Big Coal is firing back at James Hansen, NASA's top climate expert, who on Monday told a House committee on energy and climate that he thought top executives of coal and oil companies should be tried for "crimes against humanity and nature."

Below is a note sent to me by Vic Svec, who you heard from here earlier in the year in relation to efforts by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, a rising star in the Democratic Party, to deny permits for two proposed coal-burning power plants because of their potential contribution to global warming. Mr. Svec is a senior vice president for Peabody, which is the largest private coal producer in the world (to get an idea of their volume, and mission, visit peabodyenergy.com and watch the amazing coal-sales "ticker" at the bottom reel off tons of coal sold per second). Here's what Mr. Svec said about Dr. Hansen's assertions:

1. His use of Holocaust analogies is outrageous and demeaning. It cheapens the dialogue and invites ridicule.

2. The suggestion that a dissemination of ideas be criminalized -- coming from a government employee no less -- does hearken back to World War II. It is stunning and should be pounced upon by everyone who advocates free speech, from the ACLU and talk radio complex to yourself.

3. Blaming big oil and big coal for the broad array of opinions about climate change is disingenuous. If he would imprison those who don't march in lockstep with his views, the jails would be very, very big. It would include thousands of scientists and university professors and the likes of the president of the Czech Republic, a former founder of Greenpeace and the former founder of The Weather Channel.

4. Speaking for Peabody, our time and energy are being devoted to satisfying an energy-hungry world's need for coal and advancing the commercialization of carbon capture and storage technology. Among other initiatives, we're proud to have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by more than 30% since 1990; to be the initial developer of a supercritical coal plant that will emit 15% lower carbon dioxide than existing plants; to be a founding member of the FutureGen Alliance; to be a part of Australia's low-carbon Coal 21 program; and to be the only non-Chinese partner in China's zero-emissions GreenGen project.

In short, while some are interested in sound bites, we'll keep going about the serious work of providing clean coal, energy solutions and environmental improvement.

Source




Climate Expert: Kyoto Would Save Only One Polar Bear a Year

Bjorn Lomborg explains greenhouse gas treaty would cost $180 billion annually, but do very little to help the mascot of global warming alarmism.

Want to save the polar bear? According to one expert, don't think you're going to do it by making significant lifestyle changes in order to reduce your carbon footprint. In May, the Interior Department listed the polar on its threatened species list because of the risks of shrinking sea ice. But Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish author and professor at the Copenhagen Business School, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 25 that the threat is exaggerated and wouldn't go away even if every country in the world signed and followed the Kyoto Protocol.

Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," explained during the speech in Washington, D.C., how inefficient and ineffective it would be to try to improve the polar bear population via massively curbing greenhouse gas emissions. "The polar bear has become the icon of global warming and certainly [former Vice President] Al Gore was a part of doing that," Lomborg said. "A lot of people think polar bears are threatened right now - actually that's not the case."

According to Lomborg, global polar bear population was about 5,000 in 1960. Since then, the population has quadrupled. Now there are an estimated 22,000 polar bears. But, Lomborg warned the polar bear still eventually could be threatened by the effects of global warming.

"My point is simply: if we actually care about the polar bear, why is that we are so intent on only discussing one option - that is cutting carbon emissions?" Lomborg said. "Nobody ever talks about what would be the effect of cutting carbon emissions. Well, let me show you - if everybody did the Kyoto Protocol all the way through the century, which is very, very far away, but if everybody actually did that, we'd save one polar bear every year."

Lomborg said he was all for saving that one polar bear a year, but questioned the costs. He estimated the worldwide annual cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be $180 billion. Kyoto is a treaty supported by Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He proposed a simpler solution:

"It strikes me as odd, that in this conversation, nobody seems to mention the fact that every year, we shoot somewhere between 300 and 500 polar bear," Lomborg said. "Wouldn't it be smarter to first stop shooting the polar bear?" "Why is it we care about polar bears in the least effective way and the most costly way, rather than dealing with the issue where we would do a lot of good?" Lomborg added.

Source




Wind turbines are 'unreliable and will cost each British home 4,000 pounds

The Government's plan to build thousands of new wind turbines across Britain is misguided, doomed to failure and will cost every household at least 4,000 pounds, a new report claims. Rather than trying to solve the UK's energy crisis by investing in wind power, ministers should focus on tidal energy, clean coal and nuclear power, it says.

The report from the Centre for Policy Studies - a right of centre think tank - comes on the eve of the Government's announcement on the future of green energy. Ministers will tomorrow reveal how the UK will meet the EU's target for producing 15 per cent of all energy from renewable sources within 12 years.

The plans include a six-fold expansion of wind farms on land, and a 30-fold increase in offshore turbines. To meet the targets, Britain will need to build one new turbine every day between now and 2020. The dash for wind is also being fuelled by concerns that Britain is running out of power. By 2015 new European clean air laws will have shut many coal power stations while many of the UK's ageing nuclear power stations will be shut, leaving a energy gap of up to 32 gigawatts.

"A rush to wind energy is not the answer to these problems," said Tim Knox, of the CPS. The report says wind is unreliable - and only provides power if the weather conditions are right. The UK will need a fleet of coal, gas or nuclear power stations in reserve for when the wind drops.

Turbines are also expensive. The Royal Academy of Engineering estimates that wind energy is two and a half times more costly than other forms of non- oil and gas electricity generation, according to the report Wind Chill: Why Wind Energy Will Not Fill the UK's Energy Gap.

The shift to renewables could cost 100 million - or 4,000 for every household in the country, it adds. "It is also impractical," Mr Knox added. "The UK does not have the capability to build the 3,000 new offshore wind farms that are proposed, nor can the national grid handle the enormous new strains that will be imposed upon it. "This matters. The increase in consumers' electricity prices required to pay for and maintain expensive wind energy will contribute to the difficulties faced by the six million householders facing fuel poverty."

A poll carried out for the report found just three per cent of people were willing to pay higher electricity bills to fund renewable power such as wind. Another 37 per cent were "very unwilling," while 24 per cent said they were "fairly unwilling". Only 12 per cent said they were happy to pay more.

The report - written by energy analyst Tony Lodge, concludes: "Greater reliance on wind power could lead to electricity supply disruptions if the wind does not blow, blows too hard or does not blow where wind farms are located."

The wind industry dismissed the criticisms. "The National Grid has said many times they can cope with the variability of wind," said Chris Tomlinson of the British Wind Energy Association. "Never in history has there not been wind blowing somewhere in the UK." Creating thousands of new turbines would be a "challenge", but the job was not impossible, he added.

Source




McCain is a moron

Just HOW is he going to cut CO2 emissions drastically without sacrificing economic growth?? The only way of getting any movement at all would be to replace all the coal-fired plants with nuclear and that is going to cost a hell of a lot more than pocket change -- particularly considering the huge costs that Greenie regulations impose. Such costs would amount to a huge burden on the economy. McCain is obviously talking through his anus

Republican nominee-elect John McCain Tuesday vowed to combat global warming without sacrificing economic growth, contradicting President George W. Bush on the need for binding emissions cuts. Unlike Bush, McCain pressed for mandatory cuts in emissions of warming gases as he spoke at a California event alongside Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who opposes the White House hopeful's call for offshore oil drilling...

Both McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama support "cap and trade" markets to slash emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, but the Republican took coded shots at Obama over who would offer greater leadership...

Obama, who wants to invest 150 billion dollars over 10 years in alternative energy like wind and solar power, also derided McCain for proposing 45 new nuclear reactors without spelling out where the waste would be stored. In the teeth of local opposition, the Bush administration wants to create a long-term nuclear waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain...

As the international community debates a successor to the Kyoto treaty on climate change, which Bush abandoned, McCain set out his proposal to reduce carbon emissions to 2005 levels by 2012. By 2020, he said, emissions should be cut to 1990 levels, "and so on until we have achieved at least a reduction of 60 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050." "In this way, we will transition into a low-carbon energy future while staying on a course of economic growth," McCain said.

More here

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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25 June, 2008

We Need a Modern Scopes Monkey Trial of Global Warming

Jim Hanson, NASA's leading Global Warming Alarmist, is calling for leading skeptics to be tried for "high crimes against humanity."

I welcome this call for a trial. I view it as a golden opportunity for the equivalent of a modern-day Scopes Monkey Trial to try the case for man-made global warming before a jury of average American citizens. The trial should be aired by all the news channels (it's certainly a more newsworthy topic than O.J. Simpson!) non-stop until its conclusion.

If the case for the "consensus" is so strong, it should certainly stand the scrutiny of a trial. Let it stand or fail on all the scientific merit, both pro and con.

Let the alarmists expound on how global climate is driven by positive feedbacks, contrary to most stable natural systems. Let them explain why a .6 degree C increase in average global temps over 150 years is a major concern when we've just witnessed a .7 degree C drop over the last sixteen months. Let them explain how CO2 can be the culprit when historically CO2 levels have FOLLOWED temperature increases rather than leading them.

Let Jim Hanson explain how his is the only organization currently finding temperature increases when all three of the other major meterological organizations around the globe are finding cooling.

The list of key issues is long, so I expect this to be an extended trial, possibly several weeks or more. So, bring it on Jim. Let the trial begin!

Source




Britons fear the carbon cops are coming

First there were the thought police, then the surveillance society, now Britons fear the carbon cops are coming to ensure compliance with climate change legislation, a survey showed on Wednesday. And with warnings of global catastrophe ringing in their ears some people fear that failure to cut personal carbon emissions will eventually result in enforced carbon behaviour re-education, the Energy Saving Trust said.

It said 41 percent of Britons think the country will need its own Carbon Police Force by mid-century and one quarter believe repeat offenders will have to go into carbon rehab and take carbon addiction classes."The UK's perception is that by 2050 we could have the sort of draconian infringements on our civil liberties that have been highlighted in our research. This need not be the case," said EST chief Philip Sellwood said."The carbon emissions we all produce from our homes and travel amount to over 40 per cent of the UK's total emissions so we all have a part to play."

The survey coincides with the EST's "Emission Impossible, a vision for a low carbon lifestyle by 2050."EST, set up to help people to kick their carbon habit, wants more home power generation, smart meters in homes to help cut power consumption, less water wastage, more reuse and recycling and more emphasis on efficient appliances.

"Our report outlines the Energy Saving Trust's vision for achieving a low-carbon lifestyle by 2050 where we meet our 80 per cent reduction targets without adopting austere lifestyles or making unpleasant personal sacrifices," Sellwood said.

Source




Why Almost Everything We've Been Told About Global Warming is Misleading, Exaggerated, or Plain Wrong

Learning to think like a geologist:

Geologists are one group of scientists who aren't part of Al Gore's "100 per cent consensus" that humans are the principal cause of global warming and that we have to take drastic steps to deal with it. For example, in March 2008, a poll of Alberta's 51,000 geologists found that only 26 per cent believe humans are the main cause of global warming. Forty-five per cent believe both humans and nature are causing climate change, and 68 per cent don't think the debate is "over," as Gore would like the public to believe.

The position of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists is quite clear: The earth's climate is constantly changing owing to natural variability in earth processes. Natural climate variability over recent geological time is greater than reasonable estimates of potential human-induced greenhouse gas changes. Because no tool is available to test the supposition of human-induced climate change and the range of natural variability is so great, there is no discernible human influence on global climate at this time.

Why do geologists tend to be skeptics? Is it because they are, as Gore and the "consensus" charge, in the pay of the oil industry? Perhaps, but there may be other, more scientific reasons. As Peter Sciaky, a retired geologist, writes: A geologist has a much longer perspective. There are several salient points about our earth that the greenhouse theorists overlook (or are not aware of).

The first of these is that the planet has never been this cool. There is abundant fossil evidence to support this - from plants of the monocot order (such as palm trees) in the rocks of Cretaceous Age in Greenland and warm water fossils in sedimentary rocks of the far north. This is hardly the first warming period in the earth's history. The present global warming is hardly unique. It is arriving pretty much "on schedule."

One thing, for sure, is that the environmental community has always spurned any input from geologists (many of whom are employed by the petroleum industry). No environmental conference, such as Kyoto, has ever invited a geologist, a paleontologist, a paleo-climatologist. It would seem beneficial for any scientific investigatory to include such scientific disciplines.

Among all my liberal and leftist friends (and I am certainly one of those), I know not a one who does not accept that global warming is an event caused by mankind. I do not know one geologist who believes that global warming is not taking place. I do not know a single geologist who believes that it is a man-made phenomenon.

Finally, a retired scientist who emailed me after reading one of my climate columns in the Times Colonist observed: "Most of my geology friends are skeptics - but it has become politically incorrect to voice such views."

Current climate conditions are not unusual

Geologists tend to question the anthropogenic theory because their education tells them that current climate conditions are not unusually warm, based on either the past few thousand years, or the past few hundred thousand years, or the past tens of millions of years, or even the past hundreds of millions of years. It's possible to look at a graph of the past century and conclude: "Oh, my God, the planet is burning up!" After all, the temperature has been rising, more or less, since the 1850's, with a dip from the 1940's to the mid-1970's. But what if we take a longer view? That presents quite a different picture. Only 400 years ago, the planet was quite cold, a period known as the Little Ice Age (roughly 1300-1850). Before that, though, during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 1000-1300), the planet was a degree or two Celsius warmer than today, to the point where Greenland was warm enough for settlement by the Vikings.

The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were clearly a natural occurrences since industrial carbon emissions weren't yet a factor.

Curiously, the temperature graph preferred by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the famous "hockey stick," smooths out the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age to create an impression that twentieth-century warming is "the warmest in 1,000 years". Faced with the flaws in this graph, the IPCC has since dropped it and now claims the climate is the coldest in 400 years, which isn't that impressive given that we're coming out of the Little Ice Age.

Over the past 4,000 years, the planet has also experienced warm and cool periods, again quite naturally. In fact, warm times seem to recur on a cycle of about 1,000-1,500 years. The 20th century's warming appeared pretty much in line with this millennial cycle.

Let's expand our view again, to the past 450,000 years. What do we see? A roller-coaster ride of glacials (cold times) and interglacials (warm times), on a cycle of about 100,000 years. In other words, even though our planet is warm right now, overall we are in an ice age. In fact, the planet is the coldest it's been in 250 million years.

Gore doesn't try to explain why this roller coaster has occurred, since if changes in carbon dioxide levels were causing the cycle of glaciations and interglaciations, then the logical question is what caused the changes in carbon dioxide levels? Gore doesn't say, because to do so would destroy his case, but here's what science says: temperature changes precede carbon dioxide level changes by several hundred years, and temperature changes are caused by changes in solar intensity called the Milankovitch Cycles, not carbon dioxide.



The Milankovitch Cycles, based on the earth's changing position in relation to the sun, appear to be the ultimate drivers of climate over the past few million years. The four previous interglacials were warmer than today's. Another interesting observation that Gore doesn't make because it would destroy his case: the four previous interglacials shown on his chart are all warmer than today's interglacial (the green line in Figure 4 shows how today's average temperature compares with that of the three previous interglacials).

Also, note that the interglacial peaks are very steep. Before an interglacial becomes a glacial, warming occurs relatively rapidly (if the warming was slow, the curve would be more rounded), and cooling also occurs rapidly. If our planet is near the top of its interglacial cycle, then we'd be getting - as part of a natural process - the rapid warming climatologists are so alarmed about. And, we can expect rapid cooling when the balance tips (the steep downward slope). To worry about global warming at this stage in our planet's geological history seems silly from this perspective.

As further evidence that we may be near the high point of the climate cycle, the planet has not warmed since 1998, even though carbon dioxide levels have increased steadily. We may well be heading into a new glaciation while worrying and spending billions of dollars on reducing carbon emissions on the false premise that the planet is getting too warm.

During the glacials, much of the northern hemisphere (and Antarctica, of course) is covered with ice two and three kilometres thick. Within our roughly two-million-year-old ice age, the glacials last about 80,000 years. The warmer interglacials, which make global civilization possible, last only 10,000-20,000 years. Our interglacial, the Holocene, began about 13,000 years ago, so we're well past the half-way point in this cycle of warming and looking at a new glacial in the next few centuries or millennia. Warming is, therefore, from the geologist's point of view, the least of our problems.

Temperatures have been falling for 65 million years

Suppose we take an even longer geological view: the last 65 million years. Here we see a temperature graph that looks like a double-diamond ski slope: the planet has been gradually but steadily cooling during this time. Note how the climate has seesawed in the past two million years, and how close the tips of the warming periods are to the point where glaciations return. The temperature 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were obliterated by a comet, was about 22 degrees Celsius; today, the planet's average temperature is about 12 degrees Celsius.

Carbon dioxide levels have also been falling over this time, but much more rapidly than the temperature (which should, in all but the most die-hard "consensus" climatologists' minds, destroy the idea that carbon dioxide drives temperature). For most of this time on our planet there were no polar ice caps and, yes, the sea levels were many metres higher than today. Humanity can deal with higher sea levels; we'll have a lot more trouble coping with three-kilometre-high walls of glacial ice.

Finally, let's look at the very long-range picture: earth over the past 600 million years. Again, we see fluctuations of temperature but, overall, the planet has been much warmer (and with much higher levels of carbon dioxide) than today, and yet life managed to evolve and flourish. The planet didn't experience "oblivion," as the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, suggested at the Bali conference on climate change in 2007.

It's curious that not one of the thousands of so-called climate experts at that conference saw fit to educate Ki-Moon on the geological facts before (or, apparently, after) his speech. Geologists are fully aware that our planet is not unusually warm at the moment, it is unusually cold. They also know that carbon dioxide is not the villain when it comes to warming - for most of earth's history, temperature and carbon dioxide have shown only the most tenuous relationship. The correlation today of rising carbon dioxide levels and rising temperatures that worries climate scientists so much is likely just coincidence. Overall, as Lamb observed, "Seemingly objective statistics may produce a variety of verdicts which are actually arbitrary in that they depend on the choice of observation period."

Alarmists like Al Gore have chosen to focus on the past century, and therefore they worry about warming. Geologists take a longer time-frame and know that the planet has been much warmer in the past without problems, that we are in an ice age, and that the biggest future problem we face is not warming but cooling.

Who's right, the geologists or the computer-based climate scientists? There is no certainty in science (a fact that "consensus" climate science seems to have forgotten). However, if we think like a geologist rather than a computer climate specialist, the planet's history makes it likely that today's climate change is based on natural, cyclical factors, not human factors, and that what we need to worry about is a planet that is colder, not warmer.

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When it Came to the Environment George Carlin Was skeptical

George Carlin's "The Planet Is Fine":

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these bleeping people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the bleeping planet?

I'm getting tired of that bleep. Tired of that bleep. I'm tired of bleeping Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a bleep about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are bleeped. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!

We're going away. Pack your bleep, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...bleephole.

So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that's begun. Don't you think that's already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat. Something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? Let's see... Viruses. Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh...viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps, this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus, making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.

Well, that's a poetic note. And it's a start. And I can dream, can't I? See I don't worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we're part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron...whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn't punish, it doesn't reward, it doesn't judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while."

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Global Warming Movement Turns Cool

Comments below by Award winning Chief Meteorologist James Spann of Alabama ABC TV

Let me warn you, this is a little longer than my usual posts here, but it was prompted by a big op-ed article in the Birmingham News this morning. Take the time to read it, if you dare. Seems like our local paper has settled on one side of the climate change debate, which is certainly their right. But, I have the right to publish this article as well..

Two years ago, it seemed like nothing could stop the global warming train. Most of the media, those in Hollywood, politicians (many on both sides of the cultural divide), and "enlightened environmentalists" were all telling us that man was causing runaway warming of the earth's atmosphere, meaning global catastrophe only decades ahead for all of us.

Scary stuff.

The problem is that a majority of those in this almost religious movement have little training in atmospheric science, and little understanding of the issue. They jumped on the bandwagon because it matches their worldview, or pads their pocket. This issue has generated great wealth on both sides of the argument, and I need to say up front I have absolutely no financial interest in climate. I am paid the same regardless of whether man is involved in climate change or not, and I have never taken a dime for a speech on the subject.

The simple truth is that the anthropogenic global warming train has slowed to a crawl, and the riders are jumping off as the facts are discovered.

What is the truth? Lets begin with something we all can agree on. The climate IS changing. It has always changed, it is changing now, and it will always change. Beyond that, here are some simple facts that make those left on the global warming train very uncomfortable:

*The earth is no warmer now than it was in 1998.
*Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a gas indispensable to plant life. Plants, in turn, release oxygen, which sustains animal and human life.
*The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor, not carbon dioxide.
*The lack of solar activity in recent months suggests global cooling might be our biggest potential climate change problem in coming years.
*The planet has had weather disasters, extremes, and anomalies since it has been here. We just didn't have 24 hour news channels and the Internet in prior decades to spread the news.

I have been doing the weather on local television for 30 years, and EVERY YEAR I have had people come up to me and tell me that they can "never remember the weather being this strange".

Most of those that you see and hear speaking on the subject have little scientific knowledge. Here is a quote from Dr. Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, from an article he penned recently:

"Alarmists like Al Gore will use pseudo-scientific justifications and comparisons in their attempt to make a connection between carbon dioxide and global warming. Even though CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, the alarmists insist on calling it a pollutant, referring to our atmosphere as an "open sewer." For instance, Gore likes to point out that Venus has far more CO2 in its atmosphere than the Earth does, and its surface is hot enough to melt lead. Therefore, more CO2 causes warming. But we also know that the Martian atmosphere has 15 times as much CO2 as our own atmosphere, and its surface temperature averages about 70 deg. F below zero. So you see, in science a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Dr. James McClintock (marine biologist at UAB) today, in an op-ed piece published by the Birmingham News, claims that Antarctica is "warming quickly". Dr. McClintock, I am sure, is an excellent marine biologist, and I would not even make an effort to challenge his knowledge of that science. But, what is his background in atmospheric science? And, where does that claim come from?

Here is what Certified Consulting Meteorologist (CCM) Joe D'Aleo says about this:

"The shattered part of the Wilkins ice sheet was 160 square miles in area, which is just 0.01% of the total current Antarctic ice cover, like an icicle falling from a snow and ice covered roof," D'Aleo wrote on March 25. "We are very likely going to exceed last year's record [for Southern Hemisphere ice extent]. Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica's ice sheet is also starting to disappear,"

D'Aleo added.

And, from climate scientist Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona:

"It is interesting that all of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) stories concerning Antarctica are always about what's happening around the [western] peninsula, which seems to be the only place on Antarctica that has shown warming. How about the net `no change' or `cooling' over the rest of the continent, which is probably about 95% of the land mass, not to mention the record sea ice coverage recently."

I also should note that the mythical UN IPCC "consensus" continues to crumble. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist who specializes in optical waveguide spectroscopy from the University of Tokyo, and a top UN IPCC Scientist, calls global warming fears: the "worst scientific scandal in history" in the weblog of former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke.

Here is what Canadian climatologist Tim Ball says about the IPCC:

"The IPCC is a political organization and yet it is the sole basis of the claim of a scientific consensus on climate change. Consensus is neither a scientific fact nor important in science, but it is very important in politics. There are 2500 members in the IPCC divided between 600 in Working Group I (WGI), who examine the actual climate science, and 1900 in working Groups II and III (WG II and III), who study "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" and "Mitigation of Climate Change" respectively. Of the 600 in WGI, 308 were independent reviewers, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. They accept without question the findings of WGI and assume warming due to humans is a certainty. In a circular argument typical of so much climate politics the work of the 1900 (less than one percent of the scientific population) is listed as `proof' of human caused global warming. Through this they established the IPCC as the only credible authority thus further isolating those who raised questions."

I find it interesting that most of the predictions coming from the IPCC are based on computer model output. Those of us in the trench, who deal with the Earth's atmosphere every day, know that computer model data is often horrible 24 hours in advance. how bad can it be out to 50 or 100 years?

The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine this month announced that 31,072 U.S. scientists (9,021 with PhDs) signed a petition stating that

". There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

John Coleman, meteorologist and founder of The Weather Channel, calls the GW movement the greatest scam in history. I encourage all of you to read material on BOTH sides of the issue and make up your own mind. Mr Gore, the science is "not settled", and the invitation for a debate remains wide open.

Heaven help us this fall when ABC television tells us that the world, as we know it, is about to end because of "global warming". Never let facts get in the way of a good story, especially one that scares you to death.

I consider myself an environmentalist. There are some serious environmental issues out there. "Global warming" is not one of them. One of the best ways to become a truly environmentally concerned person is to walk the banks of an Alabama river or stream for a half day and pick up trash and garbage. Anyone want to join me?

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A State of steam?

The devious reasoning in the report from Australia below is amazing. If the temperature were to increase by 5 degrees, we would be living in a steambath with constant rain -- not drought. Do these lamebrains not know that higher temperures cause more evaporation? And that evaporation off the oceans is where rain comes from? Have they ever seen steam come off a hot kettle? And with increased CO2 as well the crops would REALLY be lush. CO2 is prime plant food

QUEENSLAND's average temperature could increase by five degrees celsius by 2070 - bringing less rainfall and more intense tropical cyclones, a report warns. Entitled Climate Change in Queensland - What the science is telling us, the government report says Queensland's annual temperate had increased at a faster rate than the national average since 1950. Under the current high emissions scenario, Queensland's temperate would rise by 2.8 degrees by 2050 and five degrees by 2070.

The report warned the state would experience less rainfall, more severe droughts, an increase in flooding rains, sea level rises, more intense tropical cycles and an increased risk of storm surge. The Great Barrier Reef and wet tropics rainforest were vulnerable, as were most of the population, which lived on the coast. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were drastically reduced now, the build-up and long life of those gases guaranteed climate change would continue for the next few decades at least, it said. And there was a "growing body of evidence" that emissions were currently tracking above the highest emissions scenarios used in research.

Climate Change Minister Andrew McNamara said the report showed the state had much to lose if action did not occur.pe"No part of the Queensland community will be untouched by the impact of global warming and climate change," he said. Mr McNamara said Queensland's key industries of agriculture and tourism were particularly vulnerable.

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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24 June, 2008

A skeptical response to a Greenie challenge

The "National Resources Defense Council", a Greenie organization, has challenged skeptical scientists to 'let NRDC's real climate experts take them on'. Below is a response to the challenge from Richard Courtney, DipPhil, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant. The response was posted on the NRDC blog

Sirs:

You say: "And perhaps some scientists are coming out against the idea that humankind has warmed the planet and continues to spew increasing pollutants into our atmosphere. If so, they are awful quiet about their challenge. Perhaps they should post their arguments here and let NRDC's real climate experts take them on."

Well, I am an Expert Peer Reviewer for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); i.e. I am one of the often touted "thousands of UN Climate Scientists". I and thousands of others speak, publish and sign petitions in attempt to get the media to tell the truth of man made global climate change. And in response to your invitation I post that truth below.

The AGW-hypothesis asserts that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs) - notably carbon dioxide - in the atmosphere will cause the globe to warm (global warming: GW), and that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing the carbon dioxide in the air with resulting anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW). I think a clear distinction needs to be made between

(a) the science of AGW, and

(b) the perception of AGW - and the use of AGW - by non-scientists.

The science

The present empirical evidence strongly indicates that the AGW-hypothesis is wrong; i.e.

1. There is no correlation between the anthropogenic emissions of GHGs and global temperature.

2. Change to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is observed to follow change to global temperature at all time scales.

3. Recent rise in global temperature has not been induced by rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The global temperature fell from 1940 to 1970, rose from 1970 to 1998, and fell from 1998 to the present (i.e. mid-2008). This is 40 years of cooling and 28 years of warming, and global temperature is now similar to that of 1940. But atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has increased at a near-constant rate and by more than 30% since 1940

4. Rise in global temperature has not been induced by increase to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. More than 80% of the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide has been since 1940, and the increase to the emissions has been at a compound rate of ~0.4% p.a. throughout that time. But that time has exhibited 40 years of cooling with only 28 years of warming, and global temperature is now similar to that of 1940.

5. The pattern of atmospheric warming predicted by the AGW hypothesis is absent. The AGW hypothesis predicts most warming of the atmosphere at altitude distant from polar regions. Radiosonde measurements from weather balloons show slight cooling at altitude distant from polar regions.

The above list provides a complete refutation of the AGW-hypothesis according to the normal rules of science.: i.e. Nothing the hypothesis predicts is observed in the empirical data, and the opposite of the hypothesis' predictions is observed in the empirical data.

But politicians and advocates adhere to the hypothesis. They have a variety of motives (i.e. personal financial gain, protection of their career histories and futures, political opportunism, etc..). But support of science cannot be one such motive because science denies the hypothesis.

Hence, additional scientific information cannot displace the AGW-hypothesis and cannot silence its advocates (e.g. Hansen). And those advocates are not scientists despite some of them claiming that they are.

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Green driving

British humorist and motoring writer Jeremy Clarkson tells us how

It's no good. I can't sit here any more pretending that there's nothing wrong. Because there is. A man came to my house yesterday to fix the computer and he had a worried look on his face. He lives 20 miles away. The fuel tank in his little van was perilously close to empty and he simply didn't have enough money to fill it up again.

In the past I only ever stopped for fuel when the yellow light had been on for a month and the engine was starting to cough. Yesterday I stopped at a garage simply because its petrol was 4p cheaper than usual. That's a œ2.80 difference per tankful. Which works out at œ300 a year. That's 55 free packets of cigarettes.

Except of course these calculations are meaningless because oil, as I write, is $139 a barrel and no one thinks it's going to stop there. Not with Mr Patel on the economic warpath and Johnny Chinaman part-exchanging his rickshaw for a shiny new Toyota. They say it'll be $150 a barrel by the end of summer.

Global warming was never going to get people out of their big cars because we could see it was all a load of left-wing tosh. But when petrol is œ3 a litre - and anyone old enough to remember 1973 would not discount that as a possibility - you'd have to be a bit bonkers to drive around like your hair's on fire in a car that does only eight miles to the gallon.

Oh it's all very well now. You may be a footballer or a Sir Alan. You may see expensive petrol as a jolly good way of getting the poor and the weak off the roads. Soon, though, you will be hit too.

Think about it. When you have to have a fist fight with an old lady over the last loaf of bread in the shop, and your electricity bill looks as though it's been written in liras, you are going to find yourself in the same boat as my computer man: with a nice car on the drive and no wherewithal to make it go.

Of course there are lots of things you can do to lessen the impact of spiralling fuel bills - all of which are dreary.

Weight is one issue. If you remove that rolled-up old carpet from your boot, you'll be surprised at the impact it'll have on your bills. You could go further and remove your spare wheel and jack too. Maybe you could even go on that diet you've been promising yourself.

Then there's all the equipment. If you use a lot of electrical stuff while driving, the alternator will need to work harder, which means more fuel. Even Terry Wogan needs a bit of petrol. Your heated rear window needs an alarming amount. And air-conditioning? Turn that off and your fuel consumption will improve by as much as 12%.

Making sure that your tyres are inflated properly will save another 5%, and you know the roof bars? If you can manage without, there's another 3% saving right there. At this rate you are well on your way to turning your Range Rover Sport Nutter Bastard into something with the thirst of a newborn wren.

By far the biggest savings will come if you change the way you drive, though. Take the Audi A8 diesel as an example. Officially it will do 30.1mpg. Realistically it'll be nearer 25. With a bit of care, however, you can do 40. Maybe more.

Audi says that its big V8 oil-burner can go 580 miles between trips to the pumps but I managed to get all the way from London to Edinburgh and then back again on a single tankful. That's a whopping 800 miles. It wasn't much fun, at a fairly constant 56mph, with no radio, no air-con and no sat nav. But the savings were massive.

Things I learnt? On a downhill stretch, ease up on the throttle pedal and work with gravity to build up speed. Similarly you can ease off the power and use momentum to get you up the next hill. A cruise control system will not do this. It is a sledgehammer when what you need is the scalpel sensitivity of your right foot.

Look far ahead. If you think you will have to slow down, start the process early. If you use the brakes you are simply wasting the fuel you used to reach a speed that was unnecessary.

Already I'm bored with this. The notion that you have to drive at 56mph, with sweaty armpits, stopping every five seconds to check your tyre pressures, just to save a pound fills me with horror and dread. It would be like being told to lose weight by your doctor - and sawing your arm off. Effective but annoying. Which is why, when it comes to the price of fuel, I want to have my cake and eat it too. And then I want second helpings.

This brings me to the Mercedes-Benz SL 350. Ordinarily I'd dismiss this, the baby of the range, and suggest you bought the mountainous twin-turbo 6 litre V12 version instead. But in these dark and difficult times, I thought I'd give the weedomatic version a chance.

The fact of the matter is this. Officially the V12 version will return 18.7mpg whereas the 350 will do 28.5. That is a colossal difference. And handy too. On my old SL 55, a quarter of a tank would not get me from London to my house in the Cotswolds. A quarter of a tank in the 350 gets me there and back.

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Hansen's Anniversary Testimony

Post below excerpted from Icecap. See the original for links and more

On June 23, 1988 James Hansen, Astronomer by degree but climatologist by self appointment testified in front of congress. It was an orchestrated testimony coordinated by Senator Al Gore and a Senator from Colorado, Tim Wirth (now running Ted Turner's UN Foundation) who admitted they picked the day after calling the National Weather Service to ensure it was a hot day. He admitted proudly later they opened all the windows the night before, making air conditioning ineffective and making sure all involved including Hansen would be seen mopping their brow for maximum effect. Hansen testified "Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect."

See in the story below how hard Hansen has worked to try and make his prognostication verify by manipulating data. By his own comments to the UK Guardian "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime." Well the disinformation that comprises the GISS data then by his own words is a crime, and in his own words he "should be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature".

Here is the plot of actual NASA global satellite monthly temperatures since June 1988. Note the anomaly in May 2008 was lower than in June 1988 by nearly 0.3C. Of course, we don't have June 2008 numbers yet. Please note I am not saying that cooling began in 1988. Satellites show clearly that since 1979 there was a moderate warming which peaked in 1998. A cooling has taken place the last 6 to 7 years. Global station and ocean data with all its warts shows the warming from the early 1900s to the 1930s, cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s then warming again peaking in 1998. I am just making an observation that it is ironic that 20 years after his first testimony about global warming, it is half a degree F oooler globally, not supporting the drastic measure he advocates. Also we can explain not only the trends but each spike or dip with some natural phenomena as we have shown in recent posts.



Today unlike in June 1988, temperatures will be near normal in DC with temperatures in the 70s and 80s with thunderstorms. The last two weeks have averaged 2 degrees below normal.




Don't Panic Over Predictions of Climate Doom- Get the Facts on James Hansen and his lucrative climate scam

Post below excerpted from Marc Morano. See the original for links

NASA scientist James Hansen has created worldwide media frenzy with his call for trials against those who dissent against man-made global warming fears.

Sampling of Key Information about NASA's James Hansen (for full articles, see below):

1) The oil money's paltry contribution pales in comparison to the well funded alarmist industry. (LINK)

2) Earth has COOLED since Hansen's Dire Climate Warning in 1988 (LINK)

3) Hansen's Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis challenged by UN Scientists and new peer-reviewed studies. (LINK) & (LINK) & (LINK)

4) Hansen who alleged Bush administration muzzled him -- did 1,400 on-the-job media interviews (LINK) http://washingtontimes.com/national/20070320-120435-3136r.htm

5) Media Ignores Skeptical NASA Scientist's Claims of Censorship (LINK)

6) Hansen Claims 1988 Hottest Day Testimony was result of being `lucky' - `We were just lucky' (LINK)

7) Senator Admits Hot Day and AC Failure during Hansen's 1988 Testimony was `Stagecraft' (LINK)

8) An August 2007 NASA temperature data error discovery has lead to 1934 -- not the previously hyped 1998 -- being declared the hottest in U.S. history since records began. (LINK)

9) Hansen Received $250,000 from partisan Heinz Foundation & Endorsed Dem. John Kerry for Pres. in 2004 (LINK)

10) Media Darling Hansen Assailed by NASA Colleagues (LINK)

11) Scientist Alleging Bush Censorship Helped Gore, Kerry (LINK)

12) Hansen conceded that use of "extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change "may have been appropriate at one time" (LINK)

UK Register: Veteran climate scientist says 'lock up the oil men' - June 23, 2008: Excerpt: Veteran climate scientist James Hansen is marking the twentieth anniversary of his seminal speech to the US Congress on global warming by calling for oil company execs to be locked up for denying global warming.

UK Guardian: NASA scientist calls for putting oil firm chiefs on trial for 'high crimes against humanity' for spreading doubt about man-made global warming - June 23, 2008: Excerpt: Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientistú Speech to US Congress will also criticise lobbyistsú 'Revolutionary' policies needed to tackle crisis - James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer. Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable. Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading. [Note: See also July 2007 comprehensive report detailing how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation - LINK ]

Reality Check: Challenge to Hansen's funding data claims. The oil money's paltry contribution pales in comparison to the well funded alarmist industry. See full funding report here: Excerpt: Newsweek reporter Eve Conant was given the documentation showing that proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 BILLION in the last decade or so, but the Magazine chose instead to focus on how skeptics have reportedly received a paltry $19 MILLION from ExxonMobil over the last two decades. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate Environment & Public Works committee, explained how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears and so-called solutions. "In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one," Carter wrote on June 18, 2007.

Earth has COOLED since Hansen's Dire Climate Warning in 1988 - According to Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo: See how global temperatures have declined according to NASA satellites since Hansen's first testimony in June of 1988. See temperature chart HERE. Excerpt: Here is the plot of actual NASA satellite monthly temperatures since June 1988. Note we are colder than in 1988. See larger image here His testimony will no doubt include reference to upcoming or ongoing dangerous rises in sea level and ignore the data. See larger image here He will also no doubt repeat his claim he is being muzzled. He confuses a muzzle with a megaphone as shown by this table of actual Hansen media references by year. What Muzzling? Chart documenting James Hansen's Massive Media Megaphone - By Professor Roger Pielke, Jr., professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado. Excerpt: Hansen in the News: 1996-1997 - Must See chart HERE.

Hansen's Science Claims Continue to be Challenged - June 20, 2008 - Ivy League Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack Challenges `Consensus' View of CO2's role in Climate Change (Giegengack is from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Bio Link & Peer-Reviewed Research Link: Excerpt: We know (or we surmise) from model reconstructions (e.g. Berner, Royer, Cerling, and many others) that the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere has been higher, indeed much higher, than it is now for most of Earth history, but the average surface temperature has varied over much smaller amplitude than the greenhouse-gas concentration. If the influence of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases can be isolated from all the other factors that control Earth-surface temperature, we might be able to measure the role of CO2 concentration as a forcing mechanism directly, but we are not there and we probably can't get there (the system is far too complex). If we could get there, we would learn that the relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature is not linear. There have been times in Earth history when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were 5, 10, even 15 TIMES the present concentration, and the climate of Earth still supported animals not unlike ourselves. Indeed, the average CO2 concentration of the atmosphere, if Berner, Royer, Cerling, etc. are to be believed (and they began this work before the history of composition of the atmosphere carried any political implication), has been about 5 times the present concentration. [.] One or another Pole has supported a "permanent" ice sheet only for 5-10% of Earth history. [.] The bottom line is: it ain't that simple. CO2 is a player, but not the primary, and maybe not even a major, player in controlling, or "forcing," Earth temperature. (LINK)

Washington Times: Scientist Hansen who alleged Bush administration muzzled him -- did 1,400 on-the-job media interviewshttp://washingtontimes.com/national/20070320-120435-3136r.htm - March 20, 2007: Excerpt: Hansen Claims NASA Muzzled Him - But - A NASA scientist who said the Bush administration muzzled him because of his belief in global warming yesterday acknowledged to Congress that he'd done more than 1,400 on-the-job interviews in recent years. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who argues global warming could be catastrophic, said NASA staffers denied his request to do a National Public Radio interview because they didn't want his message to get out. But Republicans told him the hundreds of other interviews he did belie his broad claim he was being silenced. "We have over 1,400 opportunities that you've availed yourself to, and yet you call it, you know, being stifled," said Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican.

Media Ignores Skeptical NASA Scientist's Claims of Censorship. Skeptical Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, Formerly of NASA, Reveals Being Muzzled - June 3, 2008 See June 3, 2008 report: Media Double-Standard on Global Warming "Censorship" - (LINK): Excerpt: A NOTE ON NASA'S JAMES HANSEN BEING MUZZLED BY NASA - I see that we are once again having to hear how NASA's James Hansen was dissuaded from talking to the press on a few of the 1,400 media interviews he was involved in over the years. Well, I had the same pressure as a NASA employee during the Clinton-Gore years, because NASA management and the Clinton/Gore administration knew that I was skeptical that mankind's CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming. I was even told not to give my views during congressional testimony, and so I purposely dodged a question, under oath, when it arose. But I didn't complain about it like Hansen has. NASA is an executive branch agency and the President was, ultimately, my boss (and is, ultimately, Hansen's boss). So, because of the restrictions on what I could and couldn't do or say, I finally just resigned from NASA and went to work for the university here in Huntsville. There were no hard feelings, and I'm still active in a NASA satellite mission and fully supportive of its Earth observation programs. In stark contrast, Jim Hansen said whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to the press and congress during that time. He even campaigned for John Kerry, and received a $250,000 award from Theresa Heinz-Kerry's charitable foundation -- two events he maintains are unrelated. If I had done anything like this when I worked at NASA, I would have been crucified under the Hatch Act. Does anyone besides me see a double standard here? -Roy W. Spencer

Washington Post: Senator Inhofe: 'Alleged consensus over man-made climate fears continues to wane' - June 23, 2008. Excerpt: In an e-mailed statement, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the bill's failure was proof that Hansen's message had not caught on. "Hansen, Gore, and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it," Inhofe said. "It's back to the drawing board for Hansen and company as the alleged 'consensus' over man-made climate fears continues to wane and more and more scientists declare their dissent."

Hansen calls skeptics of man-made climate fears `Court Jesters' From August 20, 2007 EPW Report: Excerpt: NASA's James Hansen calls climate skeptics `court jesters' - In the face of this growing surge of scientific research and the increasing number of scientists speaking out, NASA scientist James Hansen wrote this past week that skeptics of a predicted climate catastrophe were engaging in "deceit" and were nothing more than "court jesters." "The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present," Hanson wrote on August 16, 2007. (LINK) & (LINK) & (LINK) [EPW Blog Note: It is ironic to have accusations of `deceit' coming from a man who conceded in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of "extreme scenarios" to dramatize global warming "may have been appropriate at one time" to drive the public's attention to the issue --- a disturbing admission by a prominent scientist. (LINK) Also worth noting is Hansen's humorous allegation that he was muzzled by the current Administration despite the fact he did over 1400 on-the-job media interviews. (LINK) ] If the scientific case is so strong for predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming, why do its promoters like Hansen and his close ally Gore feel the need to resort to insults and intimidation when attempting to silence skeptics? [EPW Blog Note: Gore and Hansen are not alone - See: EPA to Probe E-mail Threatening to `Destroy' Career of Climate Skeptic - LINK ]

Hansen Received $250,000 from partisan Heinz Foundation & Endorsed Dem. John Kerry for Pres. in 2004 - EPW Report on Hansen - July 11, 2006. Excerpt: For example, Brokaw presents NASA's James Hansen as an authority on climate change without revealing to viewers the extensive political and financial ties that Hansen has to Democrat Party partisans. Hansen, the director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed by former Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz. Subsequent to the Heinz Foundation grant, Hansen publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004, a political endorsement considered to be highly unusual for a NASA scientist. Hansen also has acted as a consultant to Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming, on which Gore's movie is based. Hansen has actively promoted Gore and his movie, even appearing at a New York City Town Hall meeting with Gore and several Hollywood producers in May. Hansen also conceded in a 2003 issue of Natural Science (http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh6.html ) that the use of "extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change "may have been appropriate at one time" to drive the public's attention to the issue --- a disturbing admission by a prominent scientist.




Carbon: the New Chemical Villain

According to the popular press, carbon has now joined toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium on Peck's Bad Boy list. The phrase "carbon footprint" in the lexicon of lazy pseudo science writers and amateur climatologists provokes images of radioactive dirty shoes betraying our every move leaving deadly indelible impressions on the path to oblivion.

Why has the image of carbon been so distorted and demonized? Most of us even having a glancing familiarity with organic chemistry at one time knew that carbon is the building block of life on earth. From simple sugars to amino acids and DNA from industrial polymers to Q-tips, carbon is everywhere on earth, as it necessarily must be as carbon's structure invites nearly every other element to bond with it.

Astrobiologists searching for life beyond earth know that carbon is plentiful, showing up as carbon monoxide CO, methane CH4 and even carbon dioxide CO2 . Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), hydrogen carbon combos that we would associate with petroleum and mothballs, are the most abundant complex molecules in the universe according to Pascale Ehrenfreund of the University of Leiden. Carbon, found in the proximity of hydrogen, oxygen and water, means life is possible. But carbon must be found in very specific combinations and patterns with oxygen and hydrogen along with the occasional nitrogen, forming uniquely shaped amino acids, proteins and sugars, for life as we know it.

Radio telescopes search the universe for even a hint of a tell tale wavelength for these complex biological carbon compounds. But nothing. Silence. The universe seems to be devoid of any biological organic carbon footprint anywhere else. Which means no sign of life. If we are utterly alone, it conjures one of two emotional states: profound loneliness at the realization life on earth may have been a random occurrence or unrestrained joy in appreciating that we are in God's exclusive province.

Of course the dreaded carbon footprint here on earth is enviro-nihilist shorthand for despising one life form in particular. Humans. While we search the heavens in vain for any sign of intelligent life, the one right here, right now, is under steady assault. The carbon footprint doomsayers would also deny one of the greatest gifts of Western Civilization-continuous discovery and innovation in the science of carbon-from eradicating smallpox and alleviating pain to inventing synthetic nylon pantyhose, fast cars and microbrewed ales.

The zero carbon footprint movement has its roots in the zero population growth agenda of Margaret Sanger's radical eugenics of the 1920s cloaked in the respectability of Planned Parenthood. In the 1960's, Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" further opened the backdoor entrance for the anti-capitalists and pro-choice lobby. The most recent dramatic example of post-humanism self-loathing is the -sexual-enviro thesis published last month by Robert Engleman in "More--Population, Nature and What Women Want".

Engleman's agenda about voluntary means to restrain population growth by giving women absolute control over procreation is just a precursor for forced sterilization, unregulated abortion on demand and acceptance of government run misanthropy.

Moreover as Lawrence Solomon points out in "The Deniers" the misguided priorities of the zero carbon footprint fanatics have produced such perversions as creating a financial market for carbon credits through displacing tens of thousands of people in third world economies from their native forest homes to make room for biomass agriculture or millions dispossessed of their land flooded for hydroelectric dam reservoirs. Of course massive government subsidies to convert foodstuff cropland into ethanol fuel biomass has created a food price spiral and spot shortages, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the ZPG Mathusians.

Rather than a metaphor for plague and scourge, our carbon footprint should be a life-affirming exaltation with primordial hopes of reproduction and immortality. Carbon footprint as villain is temporal, transitory and self-absorbed-a nihilist and narcissist absurdity. Narcissus, you will recall, unable to return the affections of the nymph Echo, was consigned to forever seek the embrace of his own reflection and be captive to an illusion. So what becomes of the illusion of the zero carbon footprint? Where does the line of sight beyond a zero carbon footprint world lead? Well, to steal a reference from philosopher Antony Flew in his essay on death, quoting the apocalyptic words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Outside the visual field nothing is seen, not even darkness...the world in death does not change, but ceases." Indeed, the world without our human carbon footprint does not change, but ceases.

Source




Some fun quotes

Question: What does global warming cause? Answer: Everything

Michael Schirber: "Since the late 1960s, much of the North Atlantic Ocean has become less salty, in part due to increases in fresh water runoff induced by global warming, scientists say."

Catherine Brahic: "The surface waters of the North Atlantic are getting saltier, suggests a new study of records spanning over 50 years. And this might actually be good news for the effects of climate change on global ocean currents in the short-term, say the study's researchers."

Barbara McMahon in Rome: "Climate change is bringing animals out of hibernation prematurely, making them lose weight and causing them stress, Italian scientists said yesterday."

Terra Daily: "Brown bears at one of Sweden's most popular safari parks, confused by an exceptionally mild winter, have finally gone into hibernation more than two months late despite unseasonally high temperatures, the park said on Tuesday."

Science Daily: "Global warming has had a surprising impact on the Great Lakes region of the U.S. - more snow."

Cosmos magazine: "A reduction in the volume of snow has been noted over the past 20 years, as well as a shortening of the period when snow falls, threatening the future of ski resorts below 1,800 metres and prompting the increased usage of snow cannons, machines turning water in snow which is then sprayed onto the pistes."

USA Today: "Shorter winters without wolves mean about 66% fewer elk deaths every April, which threatens starvation for scavengers. With wolves preying on elk, however, the drop in carrion is only about 11%, a much less dire situation."

USA Today: "Elsewhere, however, extreme weather changes have led to more snowfall in wet regions, which affects wolf and moose populations. On Lake Superior's Isle Royale, gray wolves now hunt in larger packs. As a result, they kill more moose, which was first shown in a 1999 study in Nature."

Thus the elk root for global warming, the moose oppose it and the wolves could not care less. They just eat whatever is available.

Sify News: "Establishing a link between climate change and mental health, the World Health Organisation has said extreme weather conditions like floods, droughts and natural calamities can lead to psychiatric illnesses."

Yes. It is called Global Warming Derangement Syndrome in which everything that happens in the world is linked to global warming.

Source

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23 June, 2008

Hansen unhinged! Calls for putting oil firm chiefs on trial for spreading doubt about global warming

Note: Hansen's funding data appears to be as skewed as his temperature data. The oil industry's contribution pales in comparison to the well funded alarmist industry. See full funding report here. Hansen is getting desperate for attention

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable. Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated.

Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

The current concentration is 385parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement. He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

A group seeking to increase pressure on international leaders is launching a campaign today called 350.org. It is taking out full-page adverts in papers such as the New York Times and the Swedish Falukuriren calling for the target level of CO2 to be lowered to 350ppm. The advert has been backed by 150 signatories, including Hansen.

Source




If Global Warming was a company decison, how would you vote?

Let's say this issue was on a company board of directors decision to choose to make changes to policy related to employee comfort. Some employees complain that the work environment is too hot and they have been suffering a long term effect. The board decides to hire four consultants with the mandate: "tell us if we should expend the money to replace all of our a/c units company wide in all of our world locations. The cost will be huge, so we need to know before we make a policy change to do this."

One of the consultants to members of the board who strongly advocates the policy change also has been lobbying company staff worldwide and other board members with the data he has collected and collated that shows that the trend is shifting in the direction that he advocates. As consultant, he is also the creator of one of the datasets used to evaluate the policy change.

Now when the time comes to make the decision, the board brings in all the data sets from consultants. They look at each one and see that the majority of them have no change in the last 11 years that supports the policy change to put in new a/c units. Yet the one consultant that has been pushing this policy change gives an impassioned speech that his data set tells a story that the others do not.

Some of the board members who are skeptical of this person and his data that supports the policy change do some research of their own. They discover that the dataset created by the consultant who advocates the policy change has been adjusted at many data points, almost without exception in favor of the policy change. Some board members also learn of some math errors in the data, point out the math errors, and also some of the questionable ways individual data points have been adjusted.

The consultant shrugs and retorts "you're just a bunch of court jesters".Meanwhile, it has been discovered that one of the business friends of the consultant who has been lobbying board members and staff has a company that trades in air conditioner systems. That person has been traveling to all of the worldwide offices of the company and lobbying the employees to tell them that their work environment is indeed getting hotter, and that the data from his friend the consultant proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

He tells them that his friend the consultant uses special techniques to find the "real" trend in the data and that the other datasets aren't as valuable as this one. He urges the employees to form pacts and unions to lobby the corporate board to make a change. The employees do just that.

The board looks at the data, they listen to the impassioned pleas of the employees, and they also listen to the one consultant who calls them "court jesters", and his friend the a/c salesman, who says "the time is now, you must act now'. But a few employees that are concerned that the expense the company may be about to undertake is unwarranted, they think the work environment is just fine, and the "solution" may hurt the company more than help it.

One of the employees finds that in the largest company facility, 78% of the temperature sensors used to collect environmental data in that facility have been installed incorrectly, and shows that they are too close to equipment that produces waste heat. They also discover that two of the consultants use IR sensors to get the data, but that the other two consultants are using the direct measure environmental sensors, 78% percent of which in the largest company facility are installed incorrectly.

These few employees that discover this also lobby the board by pointing out some of these issues with the datasets. So it is time for the board to vote. The one consultant who has lobbied the board most heavily says "don't worry about that 78% of the problematic environmental sensors in the biggest facility, I can adjust for that." But then one of the other skeptical board members says: "The employee that found this says "How can you adjust for these if you've never seen or visited them? How can you know they are all equally biased or not?". And, isn't it true that in some of the data you presented, there were no sensors present, and some of the data was interpolated by you, particularly at the far ends of the building?"

The consultant says: "I stand by my data and methods, and if you don't do something soon, your facility may reach a tipping point where you can no longer keep it cool enough to work in, your company productivity will tank." One of the board members says, "Ok lets stop and look at this differently". "What if we simply ignore the dataset from the consultant who calls us "court jesters" and has the buddy who's the air conditioner salesman?. Look, now there's no trend in the last 11 years".

So 3 of 4 datasets, each presented by independent consultants are in front of them and show no change in the past 11 years. The one that does show a trend has been heavily lobbied and has been shown to have errors in measurement by environmental sensors and questionable data adjustment methods applied. Plus the consultant who prepared it has insulted those members who dared to question his data and methods, and he is the only one of the four consultants who has links to the air conditioner salesman, as it was discovered that the air conditioner salesman invited the consultant to speak at one of his employee rallies.

How do you think the board of directors will vote on this policy change?

Source




Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer. The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The findings come just before the release of the government's long-awaited renewable energy strategy, which aims to cut the UK's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent over the next 12 years.The poll, by Ipsos MORI, found widespread contradictions, with some people saying politicians were not doing enough to tackle the problem, even though they were cynical about government attempts to impose regulations or raise taxes.

In a sign of the enormous task ahead for those pushing for drastic cuts to carbon emissions, many people said they did not want to restrict their lifestyles and only a small minority believe they need to make 'significant and radical' changes such as driving and flying less.

'It's disappointing and the government will be really worried,' said Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission. 'They [politicians] need the context in which they're developing new policies to be a lot stronger and more positive. Otherwise the potential for backlash and unpopularity is considerable.'

There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.

However Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case. 'Things that we do know - like humans do cause climate change - are being put in doubt,' said Lomborg. 'If you're saying, "We're not going to tell you the whole truth, but we're going to ask you to pay up a lot of money," people are going to be unsure.'

In response to the poll's findings, the Department for the Environment issued a statement: 'The IPCC... concluded the scientific evidence for climate change is clear and it is down to human activities. It is already affecting people's lives - and the impact will be much greater if we don't act now.'

Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that 'many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change', and that four out of 10 'sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say'. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way. Despite this, three quarters still professed to be concerned about climate change. Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income, said Phil Downing, Ipsos MORI's head of environmental research.'People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced,' said Downing. 'Despite many attempts to broaden the environment movement, it doesn't seem to have become fully embedded as a mainstream concern,' he said.

More than half of those polled did not have confidence in international or British political leaders to tackle climate change, but only just over a quarter think it's too late to stop it. Two thirds want the government to do more but nearly as many said they were cynical about government policies such as green taxes, which they see as 'stealth' taxes.

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Thermometers Are Doing the Talking

What a world!! Global warming alarmists bring us to the brink of world food shortage and economic collapse - using words and computer models, not higher temperatures. As a result, more wildlife species are threatened by palm oil plantations growing biodiesel than by climate change.

Heavy sea ice just trapped a big Russian ice-breaker for seven days in the Arctic's Northwest Passage, which the alarmists told us last year would soon be open sailing. The sunspots and a Pacific Ocean cooling phase are forecasting the earth will cool further over the next two decades. In the past, both have accurate in their in their predictions.

The blue collar world sees no warming, but they surely see economic ruin staring them in the face. Finally, the workers of the world are crying, "Enough of this man-made warming hype without warming!"

* Fishing fleets have gone on strike across Europe against ultra-high diesel prices, while the Greens demand that fuel become even more scarce and expensive

* Truckers are staging fuel-protest slowdowns in major European cities.

* Protesting French farmers have blockaded fuel stations.

* More than 70 percent of Britons now say they will not pay any extra taxes to "save the planet."

Meanwhile, the Vatican, widely flung governments, and dozens of universities have scheduled conferences on the global food shortage. Guess whose advice we took on shifting much of our cropland from food to biofuels? The advice of the same Greens who told us not to burn coal or oil. We shifted too much of our scarce cropland into corn ethanol and palm oil biodiesel. We forgot that the world's food and feed demand was in the process of doubling due to

1) the last surge in human population growth;

2) rising Third World incomes and expectations; and

3) millions more beloved cats and dogs as households have fewer children and more affluence

Assuming society is not yet ready to starve the poor or euthanize their pets, we must feed them. That means at least twice as much global food and feed per year by 2040. Nor do we want to clear the forests or drain the wetlands to grow more crops. That means there is no "spare" cropland for corn ethanol

Unless the planet starts warming again, quickly and significantly, the Green momentum for a low-carbon society will come to a screeching stop. There are many indications that we are in a long, moderate warming cycle, which began 150 years ago with the end of the Little Ice Age, and may continue for several more hundred years. There is no indication that this modest warming will be bad for humans, or for the wildlife.

The thermometers show a net global temperature increase of just 0.2 degree C since 1940 -and even that tiny increase has been inflated by the urban heat island effect. The big temperature increases are all in those unverified computer models so beloved by the Green movement.

The mothers of the world's kids and the workers who grow and catch its food now demand to see the thermometers climb more than .2 degrees before they renounce their food and jobs. Without energy, the workers can't work, the farmers can't farm, and the children can't eat. Until and unless the Greens and the UN can offer some evidence beyond the guesses of computer models that consistently over-estimate the warming that is occurring, we'll accept the unsung voice of the thermometers.

Source




Global Warming and Energy Implications: Will Nature Soon Cool Hot Debates?

Post below excerpted from Energy Tribune. See the original for more graphics etc.

Measurements by four major temperature tracking outlets reported that world temperatures dropped by about 0.65ø C to 0.75ø C during 2007, the fastest temperature changes ever recorded (either up or down). The cooling approached the total of all warming that occurred over the past 100 years, which is commonly estimated at about 1ø C. Antarctic sea ice expanded by about 1 million square kilometers - more than the 28-year average since altimeter satellite monitoring began.

But have these collective announcements ended the global warming debates? No, stay tuned for further developments. Cyclical, abrupt, and dramatic global and regional temperature fluctuations have occurred in observable patterns over millions of years, long before humans invented agriculture, capitalism, smokestacks, and carbon trading schemes.

To appreciate just how lucky we are to live in the present, consider climate cycles from a historical perspective. Over the past 400,000 years, much of the Northern Hemisphere has been covered by ice up to three miles thick, at regular intervals lasting about 100,000 years each. Very brief interglacial cycles lasting about 12,000 to 18,000 years, like our current one, have offered reprieves from the bitter cold. From this perspective, there can be no doubt that current temperatures are abnormally warm.

The average temperature of our planet has been gradually increasing on a fairly constant basis over the past 18,000 years or so since it began thawing out of the last ice age. About 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, the Earth had warmed enough to halt the advance of the glaciers and cause sea levels to rise. About 8,000 years ago, a land bridge across the Bering Strait submerged, cutting off migrations of people and animals to North America.



As recently as 1,000 years ago, from about 800 to 1300, much of the world climate was similar to what it is now, but Greenland was warmer. Icelandic Vikings began to settle on Greenland's southwestern coast in the 980s and raised cattle, sheep, and goats in the grasslands. Then around 1200, temperatures began to drop, causing settlements to be abandoned by 1350 or so. Atlantic pack ice began to grow around 1250, and shortened growing seasons and unreliable weather patterns, including torrential rains in northern Europe, led to the Great Famine of 1315-17.

Although the last 500 years have been generally mild, substantial climate fluctuations have occurred. An example is the Little Ice Age (which was not a true ice age) that brought frigid weather to the Northern Hemisphere between the 16th and 19th centuries. By the mid-17th century, alpine glaciers in Switzerland advanced to gradually engulf farms and villages. The Thames River and New York Harbor froze over by 1780, and sea ice closed shipping harbors in Iceland, where an estimated one-third of the population perished.

In about 1850, the northern climate began to warm again, although slight cooling recorded at certain ground stations in the 1970s prompted some media attention regarding a possible imminent ice age. Then, little more than a decade later, alarm was trumpeted in the press. Global warming was now an impending menace, and human-produced CO2 from fossil-fuel burning industries was indicted as its villainous agent.

Forcing the Issues

It is currently impossible to reliably forecast weather events over days and weeks, much less climate changes measured over decades. The variables are too numerous, and their interactions are too complex and dynamic, to support accurate long-term modeling. Many factors, and clearly the most dominant ones, involve naturally occurring events.

Key among these is believed to be changes in the Earth's orbital eccentricity around the sun, along with its slow axial "wobble" over many thousands of years. These conditions influence the amount of sunlight received on the surface and seem to correspond with glacial and interglacial cycles. Short fluctuations within interglacials appear to be linked to other influences. They include periodic cyclical variations in solar outputs, seasonal effects of cloud cover, precipitation and vegetation growth, and occasional volcanic eruptions producing warming greenhouse gases along with dust and aerosols that block sunlight to cause cooling.

Many scientists believe that Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation cycles associated with El Nino and La Nina conditions in combination with solar activity variances have had important climate influences during the past century. These factors may account for much of the observed warming trends of 1910-39, cooling from the 1940s to the '70s, and warming during the '80s and '90s.

Solar activity cycles of about 11 years and 200 years may modulate the effects of galactic cosmic ray magnetic fields, producing changes in cloud cover with both warming and cooling results.

Based upon current solar data, the Russian Pulkovo Observatory concludes that Earth has passed its latest warming cycle, and predicts that a fairly cold period will set in by 2012. Temperatures may drop much lower by 2041, and remain very cold for 50 to 60 years.

Kenneth Tapping at Canada's National Research Council thinks we may be in for an even longer cold spell. He predicts that the sun's unusually quiet current 11-year cycle might signal the beginning of a new "Maunder Minimum" cold period, which occurs every couple of centuries and can last a century or more. Then again, theories are only theoretical.

Comment from Christopher Monckton:

This projection of a prolonged solar cooling, to commence at the end of Solar Cycle 24 in about a decade and lasting for perhaps the remainder of this century, is consistent with Usoskin et al. (2003); Hathaway et al. (2004); Solanki et al. (2005); the proceedings of the 2004 Symposium of the International Astronomical Union; and the consensus of opinion among solar physicists (though we should be cautious about relying upon any "consensus" now that science has become so intensely politicized). The Sun's activity is now declining from the Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, that peaked in the early 1960s. During the Grand Maximum (which you won't hear much about in the media, but which has had a great deal of attention from solar physicists in the peer-reviewed literature), the Sun was more active, and for longer, than at almost any previous similar period in at least the past 11,400 years. It is only by some dubious prestidigitation that the UN manages to relegate the role of the Sun to a minuscule bit-part in recent warming.




THE COMING POPULATION BUST

Thomas Malthus has been dead for 170 years, but the Malthusian fallacy -- the dread conviction that the growth of human population leads to hunger, shortages, and a ravaged environment -- is unfortunately alive and well:

* America's congested highways are caused by "population growth wildly out of control," laments Californians for Population Stabilization and several allied groups in a new ad campaign. So are "schools and emergency rooms . . . bursting at the seams." And with every additional American, immigrant or native-born, "comes further degradation of America's natural treasures."

* In a new documentary, Britain's Prince Philip blames the rising price of food on overpopulation. "Everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food," the queen's husband declares, "but it's really that demand is too great - too many people."

* Overpopulation is "very serious -- very, very serious," the Dalai Lama tells a crowd of 50,000 in Seattle. Somewhat inconsistently, he also proclaims that "children are the basis of our hope," and that "our future depends on them."

* "Is our planet overstuffed with human beings?" asks columnist Johann Hari in The Independent. The "overpopulation lobby," he decides, has a point. "How can you be prepared to cut back on your car emissions and your plane emissions but not on your baby emissions? Can you really celebrate the pitter-patter of tiny carbon-footprints?"

Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones -- some of them in bestsellers like The Population Bomb, which predicted that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now" -- have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset -- the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love.

True, fewer human beings would mean fewer mouths to feed. It would also mean fewer entrepreneurs, fewer pioneers, fewer problem-solvers. Which is why it is not an increase but the coming decrease in human population that should engender foreboding. For as Phillip Longman, a scholar of demographics and economics at the New America Foundation, observes: "Never in history have we had economic prosperity accompanied by depopulation."

And depopulation, like it or not, is just around the corner. That is the central message of a compelling new documentary, Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. Longman is one of numerous experts interviewed in the film, which explores the causes and effects of one of what may be the most ominous reality of 21st-century life: the fall in human birth rates almost everywhere in the world.

Human fertility has been dropping for years and is now below replacement levels -- the minimum required to prevent depopulation -- in scores of countries, including China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, and all of Europe. The world's population is still rising, largely because of longer life spans -- more people live to old age than in the past. But with far fewer children being born today, there will be far fewer adults bearing children tomorrow. In some countries, the collapse has already begun. Russia, for example, is now losing 700,000 people a year.

Even in the United States, where birth rates are still (barely) at replacement level, there are hints of the dislocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. Pittsburgh's public school enrollment was 70,000 in the 1980s. It is 30,000 today -- and falling.

By mid-century, the UN estimates, there will be 248 million fewer children than there are now. To a culture that has been endlessly hectored about the dangers of overpopulation, that might sound like welcome news. It isn't. No society gains when it loses its most precious resource, and no resource is more valuable than the human mind. The coming demographic winter will chill us all.

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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22 June, 2008

The Prius is a huge waste of resources

The following is a clearly correct letter to the editor of "The Australian" by Anthony Hordern of Jamison, ACT

POLITICIANS’ comments about “green’’ cars are merely techno-babble they have picked up somewhere but don’t really understand. 

Hybrid vehicles are at best expensive and inefficient. Inefficient because they have two power sources instead of one, two control systems instead of one, two losses in converting mechanical power to electrical power and back again, two sources of electrical ``slippage’’ (generators and motors) instead of none in a manual transmission, plus they have heavy batteries to carry around. And those costly batteries need to be replaced every two to three years.

Meanwhile, so-called “zero-emission’’vehicles require much new science before they are available in the showroom, if ever. Hydrogen takes more power to produce than it replaces and “plug-in’’ electric cars are not the answer either. Techno-illiterates assume that pollution in the Latrobe and Hunter valleys simply disappears.

Turbo diesel is the way to go right now. The technology is well proven, diesel engines are inherently more efficient than petrol ones and they last longer.

Surely the four-cylinder engine plant Holden is closing at Fishermans Bend in Melbourne could readly produce modern turbo-diesel engines with minimum re-tooling and without funds from the taxpayer.

Source




Swedish scientists: 'No concrete global warming proof in polar region'



Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria is one of a number of Scandinavian royals making for the Arctic archipelago on the Swedish ice-breaker Oden this weekend to participate in an event to coincide with and promote International Polar Year. But will there even be a need for such ice-breaking vessels in years to come? Many commentators would have us believe that glaciers and ocean ice are about to go the way of the dodo.

Upon their arrival at Svalbard in Norway, however, the royals are likely to be informed by Swedish polar researchers that there is in fact very little concrete proof tying global warming to climate changes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. Some indeed argue that there is more change in today's political rhetoric than there is in the environment.

Last year Sweden invested more than 33 million kronor ($5 million) on research in the Arctic region, which covers almost one quarter of the nation's landmass. Most of the Swedish funding, according to many researchers, goes toward surveying the effects of climate change on glaciers and wildlife. Professor Goran Ericsson from Umea University will head a research delegation this summer to the Arctic north. His particular task is to study patterns of moose migration as they relate to climate change.

Ericsson can literally "ring up a moose." "We have attached GPS trackers on more than 40 moose. Once you dial the code to the GPS tracker, you can find the exact location of the animal," he says. "Humans sweat when they get warm, but moose cannot do that. If the weather gets warmer they move towards colder places, often risking food shortages," he tells The Local.

Ericsson says moose have always moved about in the sub-Arctic regions of the Swedish north. But what researchers are testing now is whether the animals are moving further north due to climate change. "Sometimes this proves right, and sometimes it proves wrong."

Tomas Berg works with the Fjallrav (mountain fox) project, a venture aiming to preserve wildlife in the region. He too says it is difficult to ascertain what is really happening when it comes to climate change. "We know that there is change, but we do not know in which direction. For example, the weather in the mountains might be warmer now, but in the long run it could get colder," he says.

Cecilia Johansson from Uppsala University is equally unwilling to link milder weather in the Arctic with more general climate fluctuations. A lecturer in meteorology, Johansson flies to the Arctic region twice a year to study the effects of climate change on snow patterns. "When it comes to weather and climate there are so many interrelated factors, triggering a chain of effects. For example, we had a warm winter in Sweden, but it was quite cold in the Mediterranean region. So we have to look at global warming from a global perspective."

Every researcher seems to display a similar reticence when it comes to drawing far-reaching conclusions. Andrew Mercer studies the changes in glacier forms in the Arctic region at Stockholm University. "It is quite a big picture -- we are talking about the whole planet. We have to compare many studies and often data is not available elsewhere in the same way it is here in Sweden," he says, before adding that churches in Sweden have meteorological records dating back a few hundred years.

Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, was one of the first Swedish scientists to study the effects of climate on wildlife. "In the 1980s and 1990s, Swedish glaciers grew in size, which should indicate that we have had colder weather. But in fact there were other factors that contributed to their growth," Mercer says.

However, climate has changed politics, especially in Sweden, as political parties include adaptation to climate change in their rhetoric and election campaigns. Mercer offers his view on the curious relationships between science and politics. "What happened was that scientists sent out the results of their studies to politicians and the general public. Initially only the general public showed an interest. Politicians didn't care. But once interest grew among the general public, the subject gradually made its way to the top of the politicians' list of priorities," he says.

The industrial sector also avoided the thorny issue of climate change for quite some time, thinking adaptation to a greener future a costly endeavour. "However, scientists were able to prove that industry was damaging the climate. Scientists presented industries with possible scenarios and ways to adapt their products and mitigate climate change. With the growing interest in the general public, they began to see a new market with new opportunities."

Mercer adds that industrialists are often on the same side as scientists, at least in Sweden. "There is no such thing as a free lunch, though," he says, explaining that it is cheaper for industries to avoid investing in new and green technologies, which are still in the development stage and remain expensive.

The discovery of oil has also added a new dimension to the geo-politics of the region. Investment has come pouring in from Europe, the US, Canada and Japan, as well as from Arab Gulf States, Latin America and China. According to National Geographic, 25 percent of all untapped global oil resources are to be found in the region.

But if oil reserves prove as plentiful as predicted, will there even be a need to drill through thick layers of ice in the future? The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, ACIA, anticipates the disappearance of all ocean ice in the period from 2060-2100 should global warming continue at the current rate. However, Swedish scientists are not convinced that today's meteorological trends will stand the test of time.

Source




Finnish data show warmest recent period was around a thousand years ago

An international conference was recently held in Zakopane, Poland hosted by the Department of Quaternary Paleogeography and Paleoecology at the University of Silesia and the Institute of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Wroclaw. The meeting also served as the Annual Conference of the Association for Tree-Ring Research. Over 100 scientists gave presentations at the meeting, most were from Europe, although one presenter was from Penn State University and two others from the University of Missouri made the trip to present their research in Poland. The Association for Tree-Ring Research is a credible organization with no agenda that we know of regarding the global warming issue.

One presentation there was entitled "Climate variation (cycles and trends) and climate predicting from tree-rings", and normally, we would be reluctant to feature conference presentations at World Climate Report. However, the work is an update of what the lead author recently published in The Holocene, the work is currently under review at an undisclosed scientific journal, and the authors have a history of publications in outstanding journals.

The work was conducted by three scientists from the Finnish Forest Research Institute and the University of Helsinki. They begin their piece noting that "The growth of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) is highly sensitive to June-July temperatures at the Finnish pine timberline. Exceptional preservation of pine wood and it accumulation in non-oxygen muddy bottoms of ice-cold lakes have made it possible to build a 7641 years long continuous tree-ring chronology." Basically, the annual tree rings record information about the temperatures in Finland in the summer (warmer is better for the trees), and if the tree happens to fall into a nearby lake at the end of its long life, the wood is preserved for thousands of years. Timonen et al. recover the wood, measure the width of each ring, cross-date the samples, and with a huge amount of effort and statistical wizardry, they can recreate summer temperatures in Finland going back thousands of years - very clever, indeed. They note "The characteristics of this chronology, the distribution of the samples (on both sides of the present timberline) and the strong June-July have provided exceptional tools for dendroclimatic analysis and reconstructions."

Are you ready to see over 7,500 years of summer temperatures from Finland? Figure 1 is the end product of their work, and the white line is the 100-year smoothed temperature values from the Scots pine reconstruction. The red and blue surfaces show the smoothed and highly stylized annual temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere (based on the work of others). At this scale, a case for recent warming can be made based on the tree-ring record, but the recent warming is paled by many past events including many red-hot summers in Finland 7,000 years ago. If nothing else comes from their figure, be keenly aware that climate always changes - flat line periods simply do not exist!


Figure 1. 7,500 year 100-yr smoothed reconstruction of Finnish summer temperatures (from Timonen et al., 2008).

The tree ring data in Figure 1 were smoothed using a 100-year sliding window; Figure 2 is for the last 1,300 years showing each summer and smoothings at the decadal, multi-decadal, centennial, and multi-centennial time frames. In describing the results, Timonen et al. write "The warmest and coldest reconstructed 250-year periods occurred AD 931-1180 and AD 1601-1850. These periods overlap with the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). The coldest and warmest of all reconstructed 100-year periods occurred AD 1587-1686 and AD 1895-1994, respectively."


Figure 2. (top) 1,300 year reconstruction of Finnish summer temperatures, (bottom) same as top but with the vertical axis rescaled to show more detail (from Timonen et al., 2008).

Obviously, the global warming alarmists will pass over the conclusion that the warmest period of the past 1,300 years occurred during AD 931-1180, but they will be thrilled to learn that over the past 1,300 years, the warmest century indeed was the most recent one. We can see the headlines now: "Unprecedented Warmth of 20th Century Confirmed Again." However, the scientists re-scaled the data and as seen in Figure 2(bottom), the summer temperatures in Finland peaked in 1950 and have been cooling ever since. During the most recent 50 years, and during a time of the greatest buildup of greenhouse gases, the Scots pine trees have sensed a cooling trend in Finland! We doubt the global warming crowd will raise that issue any time soon.

More here




Democrat climate bills would Reduce Emissions to 1910 Levels

Back then, `40 million people in America and two-thirds of them lived on farms and the method of transportation was foot power or animal power'

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, issued the following statement today as part of an Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee hearing entitled, "Legislative Proposals to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions: An Overview:"

"As you know, I'm a skeptic on this issue but on one thing you and I are in agreement: If anything is going to be done, it should be done in this committee. It should start in this subcommittee. We appreciate this hearing, we appreciate the number of witnesses and we appreciate the attendance of the audience and the panel. I also, on behalf of Republicans, wish to welcome our newest member to the committee, Congresswoman Matsui. We will soon have a subcommittee called the California Subcommittee. We are delighted to have another representative of the California delegation on this committee.

"Mr. Chairman, we are at a crossroads in the debate over whether to constrain carbon dioxide emissions by rationing energy. "As we all know, at the beginning of this Congress, our new speaker, Speaker Pelosi announced it was her objective to enact a carbon cap-and-trade bill in this Congress. Her intent was to establish a price signal on carbon - in other words, a strategy to make fossil energy more expensive in America in order to suppress public demand for it.

"Let's go back and see where we were at the beginning of this Congress in terms of a carbon signal. Regular unleaded gasoline was selling, on average, for $2.30. Today it's $4.07. I'd say that's a pretty strong signal. Diesel fuel was $2.58 per gallon; today it's $4.70. Natural gas was $6.60 a thousand cubic feet in February of 2007. It's expected to hit $12 by next February. $12 natural gas means home heating will come close to doubling; gas-fired electricity prices will rise significantly; and industries that rely heavily on natural gas-including chemicals, fertilizers and other manufacturing-will continue their exodus to other countries. We only have two fertilizer manufacturers still doing business in the United States, for example.

"Home construction has stalled, autoworkers are being laid off by the thousands, food prices are soaring, airlines are cancelling flights because they can't afford to pay for the aviation fuel and small businesses throughout the United States are failing. I met with a farmer yesterday who told me it cost him over $1,200 to fill up his tractor. Twelve-hundred dollars. How much more of a price signal do we need on carbon? How much greater a burden must we place on the American people?

"And for what environmental benefit? EPA estimates that if the Lieberman-Warner bill would have passed the Senate and been enacted, that it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by 25 parts per million. At that rate, it would not change the temperature not one degree. Not one degree would the temperature change if Lieberman-Warner were to be enacted and be implemented in the 2050 timeframe. It would not change global temperatures. It would transform the U.S. economy for the worst.

"If in January 2007 Speaker Pelosi had called for a consumer price signal as high as those we are suffering already today, she would have stood virtually alone in her strategy. But those price signals already are hitting us, they are hurting our economy and we do need to do something about them. Enacting a cap-and-trade bill, in my opinion, is not the solution.

"The World Resources Institute says that Mr. Waxman's bill, H.R. 1590, Mr. Inslee's bill, H.R. 2809, and the Sanders-Boxer bill would reduce greenhouse emissions in the U.S. by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Where does that number come from? I don't know. I'm told it is also Sen. Obama's proposal. I do know if we reduce CO2 by 80 percent below the 1990 level, it's going to take us back to an emission level that we last hit in 1910.

1910? When there were about 40 million people in America and two-thirds of them lived on farms and the method of transportation was foot power or animal power? In the state of Texas, the average per capita carbon emission today is 31 tons. In the great state of Vermont, it's zero. I don't quite understand that since each of us emits a third of a ton of CO2 a year just breathing. But whatever it is and whatever part of our great nation, going back to 1910 emission levels, in my opinion, makes no sense. In Texas alone, the National Association of Manufacturers said the Lieberman-Warner could cost the average household $8,000 per year.

"Mr. Chairman, I could go on and on. I think you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. I believe, and you believe, that we do need to look at this issue seriously. That's why I've endorsed and am a co-sponsor of your bill to begin a research program on how to best capture or convert CO2. That's putting the horse before the cart. Let's develop the technology, let's see what the problem is, let's continue to do research on the science, but let's not take the U.S. economy off a cliff by enacting some of the bills that are before us today.

Source




Science, dogma and dissent: Ross Garnaut's Heinz Arndt lecture

Comment by Peter Gallagher, a retired Australian diplomat -- referring to the Australian government's chief climate adviser. See the original article for links

What a disappointment. I hoped that Prof. Garnaut would use his Heinz Arndt Lecture to describe the balance he intended to strike in his recommendations between evidence for risky climate change and a growing body of evidence that the risks are low to moderate (at most). Given his well-known views, I expected to find the balance tilted in favor of the former but I hoped to find that it would be moderated by recognition of the latter. Unfortunately, Prof. Garnaut paid no attention to any scientific facts and made no attempt to strike a balanced risk assessment.

Instead, what really struck me was what the speech implied about the religious nature of Prof. Garnaut's own adherence to the 'climate-alarm' view. Ross Garnaut seems to believe that 'scepticism' about climate change is analogous to... or is, 'dissent'. That is, he prefers to describe critics of his views using a term drawn from religious history, identifying someone who rejects a dogma. My reaction on first reading was surprise at the use of a term that implies acceptance of man-made global warming is really a faith from which critics may 'dissent'. Did Ross Garnaut understand that (obvious) implication, I wondered?

Of course, he would not be alone in describing climate change conviction as a faith. Charles Krauthammer recently offered a similar observation in his Washington Post OpEd. But it was not a view I expected Prof. Garnaut to adopt.

Answering the question whether it is possible for 'dissenters' can be scientists, Ross Garnaut invokes Gallileo, whom he wrongly describes as a 'dissenter'-Gallileo was no such thing; Gallileo's conflict with the Church was about the appropriate role of empricism and contained no basic doctrinal dissent-as an exception that proves his rule. Garnaut agrees that dissenters may have scientific points to make, but he adds that this contrary example tells us little about modern science. The illustration does, however, tend to confirm that he considers those whom he describes-a little pompously-as being in the majority with the 'learned academies in the countries of greatest scientific accomplishment' (p.6), are in some sense an ekklesia.

It would, I suppose, be fair to call 'skeptics' dissenters if they were merely aesthetic or doctrinal opponents of the environmental religion. But the 'small minority [some minority - pwg] of reputed climate scientists' whom Garnaut acknowledges reject the vague, over-blown claim of the IPCC (dignified by Garnaut as 'bayesian uncertainties') do so on the basis of emprically refutable claims. These claims include, for example, the entirely scientific (because testable) assertion that the statements in his Interim Report about an alarming acceleration of increases in global temperature are wrong in fact (witness the evidence of the temperature record for the past decade) or based on basic statistical errors in sampling and estimating a time-series trend.

When Prof. Garnaut concludes 'the Dissenters are possibly right, and probably wrong', what evidence does he adduce? None. Not a shred. This is depressingly consistent with the approach taken in his Interim Report. He does not consider that the science offered in contradiction of the IPPCC pronouncements (the hypotheses of 'those who are best placed to know'-see p. 5 of his address) calls anything into question because it is 'dissent' and not science.

So much for name-calling. What positive reason does Prof. Garnaut offer for accepting the 'uncertainties' of the IPCC as reasonably indicative of a probability? No scientific reason, as it turns out. This is the most curious argument of all in his address. His reason for accepting the need for elaborate, 'impossible-to-measure' schemes of carbon-emission mitigation (the second two-thirds of his address) is a religious reason.

Prof. Garnaut invokes "Pascal's Wager" (p.7)-a sort of bargain struck de profundis in the heart of this brilliant but deeply disturbed 17th century philosophe-to accept the existence of God on the basis of faith alone, rejecting the counsels of reason, out of fear of the (metaphysical) consequences. Pascal resolved to accept the existence of God out of an irrational fear of an eternity of torment in hell should he deny God and happen to be wrong.

This is a sympathetic tale, of course. It's a 'wager' that many adolescents face at some point in dealing with a personal crisis. But as a psychic convenience, it is the abnegation-the abjuration-of science. Disagreements about climate change polices are not a personal crisis. They are a challenge to rational, democratically-informed, public policy. They deserve informed assessment and a careful dissection of interests (of present and future generations, in this case). In his address, Ross Garnaut has promised us elaborate economic models and detailed regulatory schemes based, ultimately, on an irrational framework (the models might not be all that reliable, either).

Source




The Green Frontier; Environmental Sentimentalism and Reverse Manifest Destiny

The traditional American zeal which accompanied settlement — and the evangelistic crusade to tame and purify it — is being channeled into modern Environmentalism.

America has always been a frontier nation. The first settlers, faced with the daunting task of conquering a hostile continent, embarked on what can only be described as an epic quest, a Biblical venture to "be fruitful and multiply, and subdue the Earth."  Fired with dreams of prosperity, idealism, and religious zeal, the early settlers set the nation on a course of expansion and settlement unprecedented in human history; Thomas Jefferson believed that it would take at least a thousand years to settle the newly-acquired Louisiana Territory, yet the land hunger and missionaristic spirit which inflamed so many of those coming to these shores drove Americans ever onward, filling the land in 1/10th that time.  Many of those who would become settlers were particularly ill-suited to the venture, yet they doggedly pushed forward despite dangerous weather, hostile natives, drought, dust storms, floods, fires, and even locusts. They defiantly stared down the Plagues of Egypt and possessed the land. 

The frontier spirit is indelibly etched in our American souls, and the final closing of that frontier had a profound effect.  Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had a Divinely ordained mission to "fill her natural boundaries" from the Atlantic to Pacific guided the actions of this nation to a large degree throughout her history, and provided the psychological underpinnings to the American character. Federick Jackson Turner made this precise argument in his seminal 1893  work "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  Turner believed that the closing of the frontier would usher in radical changes to the psychology of  the Republic, and that the peoples of the United States would be forced to find some new frontier or the nation would atrophy into Europeanism.

The frontier represented many things to many people; unlimited opportunity, a fresh start to criminals and the destitute, freedom to those chafing at the "bondage" of civil society, a sense of purpose. It was a symbol of what was free and untamed, of a pre-industrial world existing in a state of raw nature.  Even those who would never leave the comfortable confines of eastern cities were drawn to the frontier psychologically.  Consider the popularity of "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West Show, or the success of numerous western novels and periodicals.  All American children have played Cowbows and Indians at some point in their lives, and that goes all the way back to frontier days.  The frontier offered the nation a sense of purpose and a psychological (as well as physical) safety-valve; just knowing that freedom was a train ride away gave comfort to those running on the treadmill of everyday life.  It was a refuge for the restless and promoted civil order in the East as criminals and the combative often fled to the frontier.

America has always been a nation prone to evangelism, and the frontier offered an unique opportunity for the committed Christian preachers to fight Penury and Sin. By its very nature, an unsettled place is a place without law and order, and the desire to save souls from damnation could be well-satisfied amid the iniquity and evil which could be found tucked away in the raw frontier saloons and dance halls. Prostitutes, drunkards, gamblers, thieves and killers were all gathered together for the Lord's work, and the eternal battle against Satan could be waged perhaps not easily, but along a definable front. Bible and Sword were the tools of the trade as farmers replaced trappers and Indians.  The spiritual energy of a very religious nation was channeled into the conquest of Sin at the frontier.

To many, those thrilling days of old represent a lost Eden, a time where people lived by the work of their hands, a time of purpose and destiny and untamed nature at its pristine best. It was a time before lawyers, bankers, politicians, accountants, civil engineers.  It was a time before drivers licenses,  police issuing tickets, before the daily intrusion of hectic modernity into one's everyday life. 

Of course, most people forget the bitterness that accompanied the simple life.

In some regards, the Nation did slide into Europeanism; we had the rise of quasi-socialistic policies during the 20th Century, we tied ourselves into a gordian knot of entangling alliances, built a world-girldling empire, and many of our people lost their spirit to the seductions of the welfare state.  Who can doubt that Richard Nixon's vision of Détente and Realpolitik represented a far more European approach to the world than American?  Who could argue with the proposition that the Democratic Party has much greater kinship with Socialist parties in Europe than with a "don't tread on me" style of Americanism? Who would have believed in 1890 that we would allow Mexico to colonize the United States?

Americans have been in search of something to replace that lost Eden ever since. The frontier mentality has been translated into innumerable causes, some good and some bad.  Woodrow Wilson advanced the concept of spreading Democracy, and America has done that in an on-and-off fashion ever since. (Consider the Neo-Con argument of spreading Democracy in the Middle East as the key to fighting the War on Terror.)  Others have attempted to provide a frontier via science (clearly, the Apollo project was such an attempt) or political activism (witness the '60`s anti-Vietnam War movements; the push against the "tyranny" of our own government was possibly an expression of the desire for a return to a time of frontier life).  The Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Rights Movement, the Homosexual Rights Movement all represented a crusade into the political frontier. The temperance movement, too, and it turned Chicago and other cities into an actual frontier with gunfights, lawlessness, prostitutes and dance hall girls, etc. America's determination to win the Cold War was, I think, driven in part by this American vision of the frontier, and a desire to expand freedom against the nihilistic wilderness of communism. Now the Cold War is won, and the people are searching for yet another frontier to conquer.

Of course, many on the Left did not agree with waging the Cold War, and do not agree with our newest frontier — the War on Terror.  In their own way they were seeking after their own vision of Frontierism via the fight against the dark forces of an Americanism which they find repressive. They seek to re-institute the Frontier, to put the genie back in the bottle and restore those idyllic days.  To them, society and the rule of law have become the frontier that they must conquer.

The Left is, in general, Utopian.  Leftists believe in the perfectibility of Man and the malleability of human nature, and their goal is the "restoration" of a pastoral paradise, of a naturalistic Eden they believe is their birthright.

This dovetails with the uniquely American vision of the Frontier, and the two act to reinforce one another.  It is, I believe, at the root of the religiosity of the Green movement; the fundamental desire for the frontier is being coupled to this Rousseauian Utopianism, and the traditional American zeal which accompanied settlement — and the evangelistic crusade to tame and purify it — is being channeled into modern Environmentalism.

Global Warming is not, and has never been, about science so much as about revolution.  The Greens who promote this theory seek nothing short of the reorganization of Humanity into a post-industrial world with severe limits placed on industry, on wealth, on energy usage.  The purpose of these limits is to dismantle (over time) the industrial civilization we have built so that a return to the primitive state may be attained.  They think that they can reduce the world's population from billions to millions, and return the human race to a simpler, more (sic) peaceful time.  They are devotees of Rousseau, of Thoreau, and not of Hobbes.

If you want to understand the thinking of the more utopian of the Left — especially of the radical environmentalist — a reading of Thoreau is absolutely vital; Thoreau's Walden embodies everything the American Green dreams could be (except they would like to make it compulsory).  Thoreau conducted an experiment where he squatted on land he did not own and built a cabin.  He wanted to see if he could live a much simpler life, and he kept records on his expenditures. The upshot of Walden was that Man does not require the complications of modernity, as Thoreau managed to get by on very little and was completely satisfied.  The American Green dreams of every man building his Walden.

But Thoreau was wrong because his experiment would have failed had there not been a thriving civilization to allow him to drop out.  He built his cabin from materials he purchased, he bought seed for his garden from commercial growers, he resided in relative comfort on property that did not belong to him because others kept watch, protecting him from being assaulted or robbed. The Law protected him through the legal mechanism of Adverse Possession so that the worst the owner of the property could do was evict him.  The Sheriff, the Judge, the Prison awaited any who would molest him in his peaceful seclusion, and the soldier defended him from foreign attack. He had access to food, clothing, tools, weapons, materials, and medicines he would not have been able to acquire elsewhere.  Even the most primitive of peoples have had access to the assistance of the tribe, and few live in a state of nature in isolation.  Thoreau's simplicity was purchased by others in the society at large; he lived off the discarded scraps of civilization.

That is where the back-to-nature movement is so wrong; as John Donne put it, "no man is an island," and the enjoyment of the primitive must be purchased by someone.  Dropping out can be done, but others must carry the burden of the droppee.  The Green believes the Frontier can be recreated, that Man could dwell secure in comfort in a simpler world; the Green is frighteningly wrong. The world of nature is a world of fear, of want, of sickness and suffering.  It is true that the problems which plague the civilized man — the need to conform, the need to maintain what one owns, instant communications and access to information which may overwhelm, the pressures of competition — are not ever-present, but the very real presence of death stalks the primitive man.  While there are some tangible benefits, the lower life-expectancy, the poorer health, the discomfort of the simple life make it far less entertaining when practiced in true isolation.  Imagine a world where every cut could kill you because you don't have antibiotics!  Imagine no canned goods, or refrigeration!  What happens if you catch a tapeworm?  A broken leg is a death-sentence.  Something as simple as an inflamed slipped disc means death or permanent disability — which is pretty much the same thing.  In many Indian societies — and in the Inuit society of the far north — the sick and elderly would be abandoned on the trail to die when they could no longer adequately pull their weight; the Greens would have us return to such a world.

Actually what they believe is that they can have their cake and eat it, too; they want just enough industry to allow them to live simply.  Fine, but we live in an interrelated world, and the dismantling of those industries will likely lead to the inability to produce much of anything. We need industry to support industry, and the dismantling of technology will make other technical efforts impossible.  Where will they get those solar cells when nobody is manufacturing them anymore? Trade will be needed more than ever, and the efforts to reduce industry will make that increasingly difficult; where will they find trucks, or planes, when energy usage is so restricted that factories can't build them, or oil can't be refined to run them?  The technological miracles which we take for granted will become increasingly rare, and Man will either have to revive the hated civilization or fall back into the Neolithic, with all of its entertaining aspects — including vicious warfare, disease, famine, cruelty, and privation.

But the Greens appear to be winning, in that they have their propaganda everywhere; in schools, churches, synagogues, civic organizations.  Everywhere they tap into that most primal of American urges, the calling of the frontier.  Schoolchildren, eager to love fuzzy animals and filled with stories about cowboys and pioneers — along with the desire to "save the world" like their favorite superheroes — are easy prey for the indoctrination of environmentalism.  In Churches we are witnessing the rise of Green Christianity advanced by such Evangelical luminaries as Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life.

(This with complete disregard for the words of Scripture in which Christ states in John 29, "be of good cheer for I have overcome the World," or the Book of Revelation in which environmental destruction is something sent from God as punishment for sin.  This is a failure of faith in God's ability to control the very thing He created.  Nowhere in Scripture are we commanded to save the Earth, or told that we have any say over such matters whatsoever.  In point of fact, Green Christianity is violating the First Commandment by placing a strange god before the Most High.)

We are witnessing the rise of Green Catholicism as well. Even Newt Gingrich and Jim Manzi at the National Review are being taken in by this, and there is a move afoot by conservatives to throw in the towel and concede defeat, ostensibly to have some impact on the direction of the "solution." (Steven Milroy from Junk Science has a rather scrappy rebuttal to Manzi.) The Church of Gaia, using the scientifically dubious proposition of Global Warming and appealing to America's longing for the simplicity of the past, is pulling in converts from across the political spectrum.

Poll numbers would seem to bear that out; According to this March 2006 Time poll, a whopping 85% of respondents said Global Warming was real, with 60% saying it is a dire threat to future generations.  In a December 2006 poll by Rassmussen, 46% of respondents attributed Global Warming to Anthropogenic (human) causes, and 45% considered it a "serious problem."  This 2007 poll by Gallup shows 63% of respondents believed Global Warming has begun changing the climate.

But the internals suggest that America is not willing to walk the Kyoto plank, and this issue is hardly set in cement in the American mind. For example, a plurality of respondents to the Gallup poll say GW has begun but its primary effects won't be felt in their lifetime. Gallup had this to say:

The American public does not have a sense of urgency about the environmental issue at this time. It is not a hot political issue and does not appear in any meaningful way on any of Gallup's open-ended probes of the public's concerns.

There is underlying concern about the environment that could, in theory, be activated by politicians, particularly if the environment as an issue is connected to tangible aspects of day-to-day living for average Americans.

An ABC news poll concurs with this. 

The question that must be asked is, why haven't the Greens carried the day?  They have been the engine driving this discussion since the '80's, and a generation of children have grown up being told that Ragnarok is coming. Why don't even more Americans believe in this fable?

Well, partly it is the chicken little phenomenon; they have given us 10 years for the last 30, and things are pretty much the same. Their predictions of worldwide disaster keep coming to nothing.  Partly, too, is the growing body of science which suggests that the Lilliputian warming we have witnessed is natural, resulting from increased solar activity and certain mechanisms on Earth.

Many scientists have disagreed with this notion from the beginning; we had the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists, The Oregon Petition, the Leipzig Petiton, and the Heidelberg Appeal.  The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has a long list of scientists who have changed from believers into skeptics.  In fact, the consensus we are told exists among scientists appears to be largely hot air. Even Roger Revelle, one of the fathers of Global Warming theory and the man much touted by Al Gore in his mockumentary, came to, well, not disavow his theory, but to dismiss it as not any sort of credible threat to Mankind before he passed away.

The reality is that a large body of science supports a different interpretation of the amazing 1* rise in temperature; mainly, that normal cycles are at work.  The Sun has been more active in the 20th century, with extraordinary sunspot activity.  A more active sun suggests a warmer sun, and a more active sun means a stronger solar wind to broom away cosmic rays, which means fewer clouds to reflect sunlight.  Since the solar cycle has peaked the Earth's albedo has increased, suggesting that Svensmark's theory about cosmic rays is correct. 

Scientists have also learned that atmospheric CO2 follows a warming trend, not precedes it, and that current CO2 levels are far from unusual.  They have been as much as 10 times current levels in past eras.  We know the oceans have started cooling. 

More here

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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21 June, 2008

British Moths in peril from cold and wet weather

Hey! What happened to global warming? Warming's bad. Cooling's bad. Everything is bad to a Greenie

Last summer's rain and recent cold evenings may have worsened the plight of moths, which are in decline. Unseasonable weather this year could have further reduced the species, including the garden tiger moth, right, whose numbers declined by 89 per cent in 35 years to 2002. The decline could affect the survival of other wildlife, including birds, toads, bats and hedgehogs, which feed on moths or caterpillars. Butterfly Conservation, based at East Lulworth, Dorset, is asking the public nationally to join its Garden Moths Count from today to July 6.

Source




Al Gore personally proves the futility of his own policy recommendations

The morality play on offer from greenies and their media buddies holds that "we can't drill our way" to cheaper oil prices, but "conservation" and "new technologies" for "alternative energy" are the answer.

Thus, I am thankful to Al Gore for proving that even in a high profile demonstration project these "solutions" won't work. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reports that Gore's home in Nashville has increased its energy usage by 10% in the past year. This is in the face of proudly-announced (and expensive) energy-saving steps. Stop the ACLU cites the Soros-Funded Think Progress site for information:

Gore's family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology.

Now that Gore has proven his measures are ineffective, it is time to drill offshore, ANWR, mine coal and oil-bearing rock, and build nuclear power plants on an expedited basis.

Source




An extremely confused report

They try to make a Greenie silk purse out of factual pigs ears. Maybe their jobs depended on doing that, though

By Roger Pielke Jr.

Yesterday the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released an assessment report titled "Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate" (PDF) with a focus on the United States. This post discusses some interesting aspects of this report, with an emphasis on what it does not show and does not say. It does not show a clear picture of ever increasing extreme events in the United States. And it does not clearly say why damage has been steadily increasing.

First, let me emphasize that the focus of the report is on changes in extremes in the United States, and not on climate changes more generally. Second, my comments below refer to the report's discussion of observed trends. I do not discuss predictions of the future, which the report also covers. Third, the report relies a great deal on research that I have been involved in and obviously know quite well. Finally, let me emphasize that anthropogenic climate change is real, and deserving of significant attention to both adaptation and mitigation. [Note that he gives no evidence or reasoning for that last sentence -- not even a link. He just has to say that to retain respectability. He is a man aged 39 with children who is a professor of the environment. Unlike old guys such as myself and his father he has a lot of career ahead of him and cannot afford opinions that set him too far apart from academe generally]

The report contains several remarkable conclusions, that somehow did not seem to make it into the official press release.

1. Over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.

Yes, you read that correctly. From the appendix (p. 132, emphases added):

The final example is a time series of U.S. landfalling hurricanes for 1851-2006 . . . A linear trend was fitted to the full series and also for the following subseries: 1861-2006, 1871-2006, and so on up to 1921-2006. As in preceding examples, the model fitted was ARMA (p,q) with linear trend, with p and q identified by AIC. For 1871-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00229, standard error .00089, significant at p=.01. For 1881-2006, the optimal model was AR(4), for which the slope was -.00212, standard error .00100, significant at p=.03. For all other cases, the estimated trend was negative, but not statistically significant.

2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.

Yes, you read that correctly. From p. 5:

Averaged over the continental U.S. and southern Canada the most severe droughts occurred in the 1930s and there is no indication of an overall trend in the observational record . . .

3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation (pp. 46-50, pp. 130-131), there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).

From p. 53

Lins and Slack (1999, 2005) reported no significant changes in high flow above the 90th percentile. On the other hand, Groisman et al. (2001) showed that for the same gauges, period, and territory, there were statistically significant regional average increases in the uppermost fractions of total streamflow. However, these trends became statistically insignificant after Groisman et al. (2004) updated the analysis to include the years 2000 through 2003, all of which happened to be dry years over most of the eastern United States.

4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms

From p. 77:

There is no evidence for a change in the severity of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, and the large changes in the overall number of reports make it impossible to detect if meteorological changes have occurred.

5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor'easters.

From p. 68:

They found a general tendency toward weaker systems over the past few decades, based on a marginally significant (at the p=0.1 level) increase in average storm minimum pressure (not shown). However, their analysis found no statistically significant trends in ECWS frequency for all nor'easters identified in their analysis, specifically for those storms that occurred over the northern portion of the domain (>35øN), or those that traversed full coast (Figure 2.22b, c) during the 46-year period of record used in this study.

6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

From p. 39:

Analysis of multi-day very extreme heat and cold episodes in the United States were updated from Kunkel et al. (1999a) for the period 1895-2005. The most notable feature of the pattern of the annual number of extreme heat waves (Figure 2.3a) through time is the high frequency in the 1930s compared to the rest of the years in the 1895-2005 period. This was followed by a decrease to a minimum in the 1960s and 1970s and then an increasing trend since then. There is no trend over the entire period, but a highly statistically significant upward trend since 1960. . . Cold waves show a decline in the first half of the 20th century, then a large spike of events during the mid-1980s, then a decline. The last 10 years have seen a lower number of severe cold waves in the United States than in any other 10-year period since record-keeping began in 1895 . . .

From the excerpts above it should be obvious that there is not a pattern of unprecedented weather extremes in recent years or a long-term secular trend in extreme storms or streamflow. Yet the report shows data in at least three places showing that the damage associated with weather extremes has increased dramatically over the long-term. Here is what the report says on p. 12:

. . . the costs of weather-related disasters in the U.S. have been increasing since 1960, as shown in Figure 1.2. For the world as a whole, "weather-related [insured] losses in recent years have been trending upward much faster than population, inflation, or insurance penetration, and faster than non-weather-related events" (Mills, 2005a). Numerous studies indicate that both the climate and the socioeconomic vulnerability to weather and climate extremes are changing (Brooks and Doswell, 2001; Pielke et al., 2008; Downton et al., 2005), although these factors' relative contributions to observed increases in disaster costs are subject to debate.

What debate? The report offers not a single reference to justify that there is a debate on this subject. In fact, a major international conference that I helped organize along with Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re came to a consensus position among experts as varied as Indur Goklany and Paul Epstein. Further, I have seen no studies that counter the research I have been involved in on trends in hurricane and flood damage in relation to climate and societal change. Not one. That probably explains the lack of citations.

They reference Mills 2005a, but fail to acknowledge my comment published in Science on Mills 2005a (found here in PDF) and yet are able to fit in a reference to Mills 2005b, titled "Response to Pielke" (responding to my comment). How selective. I critiqued Mills 2005a on this blog when it came out, writing some strong things: "shoddy science, bad peer review and a failure of the science community to demand high standards is not the best recipe for helping science to contribute effectively to policy."

The CCSP report continues:

For example, it is not easy to quantify the extent to which increases in coastal building damage is due to increasing wealth and population growth in vulnerable locations versus an increase in storm intensity. Some authors (e.g., Pielke et al., 2008) divide damage costs by a wealth factor in order to "normalize" the damage costs. However, other factors such as changes in building codes, emergency response, warning systems, etc. also need to be taken into account.

This is an odd editorial evaluation and dismissal of our work (Based on what? Again not a single citation to literature.) In fact, the study that I was lead author on that is referenced (PDF) shows quantitatively that our normalized damage record matches up with the trend in landfall behavior of storms, providing clear evidence that we have indeed appropriately adjusted for the effects of societal change in the historical record of damages.

The CCSP report then offers this interesting claim, again with the apparent intention of dismissing our work:

At this time, there is no universally accepted approach to normalizing damage costs (Guha-Sapir et al., 2004).

The reference used to support this claim can be found here in PDF. Perhaps surprisingly, given how it is used, Guha-Sapir et al. contains absolutely no discussion of normalization methodologies, but instead, a general discussion of damage estimation. It is therefore improperly cited in support of this claim. However, Guha-Sapir et al. 2004 does say the following on p. 53:

Are natural hazards increasing? Probably not significantly. But the number of people vulnerable and affected by disasters is definitely on the increase.

Sound familiar?

In closing, the CCSP report is notable because of what it does not show and what it does not say. It does not show a clear picture of ever increasing extreme events in the United States. And it does not clearly say why damage has been steadily increasing. Overall, this is not a good showing by the CCSP.

Source




OVERHEATED CLAIMS

By Roger Pielke Jr.

The famous physicist Niels Bohr is attributed with saying that "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Anyone who pays attention to weather forecasts or economic predictions knows how true this is. But given that the future can't be predicted with perfect accuracy, seeing predictions fail is actually an important part of their usefulness. Whether one is faced with evacuating from a possible hurricane landfall or investing in a mutual fund, decision-making is improved when uncertainties are readily understood.

On the highly politicized issue of climate change, however, understanding uncertainties is made difficult when scientists advocating for action oversell the predictive capabilities of climate models, such as those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But action on climate change makes sense even if many climate scientists oversell predictive capabilities.

Scientists oversell the predictive capacity of climate models when they claim that the most recent weather events occurring around the world are consistent with predictions from climate models. For example, last fall a scientist who had contributed to the most recent IPCC reports said that the intense southern California wildfires occurring at the time "are consistent with what the latest modeling shows." Similarly, in 2006 a Berkeley professor and climate change expert asserted that "the current heat waves throughout much of North America and Europe are consistent with the predictions of our global climate models." A quick Internet search will reveal countless scientists who have made such claims about the predictive prowess of climate models.

But what does it mean to say that some weather events are "consistent with" climate model predictions? The implication of such statements of course is that models are reliable and offer accurate predictions that have been borne out by experience. But unfortunately, the real answer is that saying that any recent weather events are "consistent with" model predictions is an empty statement.

All of these claims of consistency between recent weather and model-based predictions might lead one to ask, in principle, what observations of weather events would be inconsistent with predictions from climate models. Guess what? It turns out that nothing that could be observed over a time period less than a decade or more - short of abrupt and unprecedented climate change, like an ice sheet advancing on New York - would be inconsistent with climate model predictions.

There are good reasons for why predictions of climate models are not useful on short time periods of less than a few decades. Urs Neu, a climate scientist from Switzerland, says that climate models are not designed to tell us anything about the evolution of the climate system in the short term; rather, they "are designed to simulate the long-term behaviour as accurately as possible. Long-term behaviour means the trend over at least 20-30 years." Similarly, two climate modelers, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, observed in a research paper that "it is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence in climate models must therefore come from other sources." ...

The reality is that the future state of the climate is uncertain, and as such it represents a type of risk management problem. In 2002 Steve Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford University and long-time advocate for action on climate change, explained "uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes." Combatants in the climate debate congregate around the extremes, emphasize either mild or catastrophic outcomes as is convenient and overstate the certainty of such outcomes.

When scientists advocating action overstate the certainty of predictions, and policy-makers commit political and other resources based on those claims, they find themselves in a difficult situation because, according to Frame and colleagues, "they are likely to face strong criticism if they revise up their estimates of uncertainty in the relatively near future." Scientists who oversell the predictive capacity of climate models provide a basis for legitimate criticism by their political opponents, and in the process, actually create obstacles to action on climate change.

I have been asked by some of my colleagues why I raise these points, since action on climate change is a good thing and those questioning climate models typically are opposed to action. So what, I am told, if action on climate change is based on some exaggerations and false claims to certainty, isn't the end goal important enough to justify bending the truth just a bit? After all, those opposed to action often show no hesitation toward exaggeration and hyperbole.

My short answer to such questions is that false claims to certainty were exactly what got us into the Iraq war. A somewhat longer reply involves explaining how both science and democracy flourish when we are open and honest about what science can actually deliver. Effective action on climate change is more likely when we fully appreciate what science can, and cannot, do. We should expect more from our scientific community.

Source




AS THE EARTH COOLS - WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE ENERGY INDUSTRY?

The earth warmed strongly between 1915 and 1940, cooled between 1940 and 1975 and then warmed strongly again between 1975 and 1998. The earth has been cooling in the opening years of this century even as carbon dioxide levels have risen appreciably since 1998. Many influential people in the industrialized world believe that global warming is a transcendent issue and human activity, especially the activity of the energy complex, is to blame and carbon management, at any cost, is imperative.

A growing number of influential people in the developing world (this includes China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, as well as Russia) are openly rejecting the idea that human activity has any measurable influence on the planetary climate or even that there is anything unusual or abnormal about the climate at present. Some of these people, joined by hundreds of scientists in the U.S. and Western Europe advance the idea that sunspot activity (which is cyclical) and the recently discovered (as recent as 1996) PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation: 20 to 30 year warming and cooling of the north-central Pacific Ocean) explain the cyclicality of global temperatures. According to those who hold this view, the planet has entered into a 30 year or so cooling period and carbon dioxide emissions even if they keep growing, cannot prevent this cooling.

In support they cite NASA's recent study that the global oceans are cooling and expected to cool for several years. NASA is the leading proponent of man-made global warming. They also quote data from the new Jason oceanographic satellite that the PDO is entering a multi-year cooling period. Jason is run jointly by NASA and a French team. Other support for this idea that global cooling not warming, is the planetary future within anyone's strategic planning horizon comes from experiments conducted by the Danish Space Research Institute, which links global climate behavior to variations in the magnetic wind of the sun, which is changeable, driven by sunspot cycles. Contrary to expectations, the current cycle (Cycle 24) is turning out to be very weak with negligible sunspot activity.

Two scientists at the National Solar Laboratory in Arizona project that sunspots will vanish by 2015, leading to a multi-decade down cycle in solar activity. The last time this happened was in 1645-1715 leading to bitterly cold winters and repeated crop failures (and to Napoleon's defeat in Russia during the summer never came). Between January 2007 and May 2008 the earth cooled by as much as it had warmed in the past 100 years, according to a meteorologist at the University of Alabama. On May 19, 2008, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine released a petition signed by over 30,000 U.S. scientists rejecting claims that global warming is caused by human activity and condemning the Kyoto Protocol for its damage to humanity. This was well received the proponents of the cooling view and condemned by adherents of the warming view.

Thus, there are now two belief systems about the climate. A largely Western belief system about steady and maybe catastrophic warming and a rest of the world belief system about impending cooling. The former belief system holds human activity responsible. The latter belief system scoffs at the ability of human beings to influence climate cycles. Belief systems, of course, drive policy and strategy which drive investment flows.

Energy industry executives increasingly find themselves caught between these irreconcilable belief systems. In the West, public policy, hence corporate strategy, is shaped by the first belief system. In the leading non-Western nations (NWNs), including Russia, the second belief system is implicitly ascendant despite official adherence (but not commitment) to the first belief system.

As food and energy riots grow in Asia, Africa and later in Latin America, the second belief system will go from implicit to explicit; it will no longer be whispered but proclaimed.

Cooling will create greater stress on energy, food and health care than warming. This stress can only be relieved by very large increases in energy output. For example, exposure to cold is more dangerous to the fragile old, the infirm, the injured and the ailing. More energy for space heating will be needed. Increasingly, the huge waste in the food supply chain from field to table in much of the world will require tremendous investments in spoilage reduction at every step of the local, regional, national and global food supply chain. Spoilage reduction is energy intensive. So is productivity enhancement via fertilizer, bio-engineered seeds, and water management. For those who hold the second belief system, cooling is a more frightening prospect than warming. The determination of NWNs to accelerate energy and food supply growth will only be strengthened as the second belief system attracts more adherents.

Food riots terrify the elites much more than energy riots. Marie Antoinette was beheaded because bread, not wood or coal, was so scarce for the poor. The Roman Emperors provided free bread to a third of the population of Rome, not free wood, because they were very fearful of the hungry and jobless mob.

For an increasing number of third world nations civil unrest, including violence, as a result of food and energy deprivation is now the most significant threat to regime continuity. Where the governments are freely or quasi-freely elected the issue can lead to power changing hands at the ballot. Where the regimes are tyrannical, violent regime change becomes increasingly likely. For such regimes generating more electricity and providing affordable cooking and transportation fuel become survival priorities. Carbon based power generation and fuel is about the only significant near to mid term option available to those nations: diesel and coal and to a much lesser extent LNG and piped gas.

More here




The Global Warming Bubble

Rarely has so much hectoring produced so little. After all the magazine covers, celebrity sermonizing and U.N.-certified-expert hand-wringing, the fight against global warming got a real-world test in the U.S. Senate a few weeks ago in the debate over a proposal to limit carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system. After a small dose of the argument, supporters of the proposal couldn't wait to drop it. It was leading opponent Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, who declared he'd be happy to talk about cap-and-trade for a month.

As an indirect tax on carbon, cap-and-trade would increase energy prices when people are already straining under $4-a-gallon gas. Even a political naif -- which McConnell assuredly is not -- would realize the benefit of hanging the proposal around its supporters' necks. Lately, we've seen the tech and housing bubbles burst, and now -- at least as an urgent political issue -- the global-warming bubble is getting pricked.

Let's count the ways: First, those gas prices. They are just one way that the soaring price of oil has put a crimp in the standard of living of Americans. They have little taste for seeing it crimped more, and why should they? The cost-benefit analysis of battling global warming is never going to make sense for Americans.

The places that would be hurt by global warming tend to be warm, wet, and low-lying. Think Bangladesh. For the U.S., warming isn't much of a threat. So, stringent measures against global warming are really a massive foreign-aid program, but an intangible and speculative one. If the predicted warming materializes, and if it has the drastic effects warned about (e.g., big rises in sea levels), people living in faraway countries a century or more from now may be adversely affected -- in short, a theoretical benefit to people as yet unborn.

We should feel a moral obligation to aid Bangladesh and similar places with mitigation measures, when (and, again, if) the time comes. Until then, our consciences should rest easy, given the $20 billion annually we spend on development assistance, including billions of dollars fighting AIDS, malaria, and other diseases affecting people whose suffering isn't theoretical.

Second, there's China. It has passed the U.S. as the world's leading emitter of carbon dioxide, and it accounted for two-thirds of the increase in the world's emissions in 2007. Global action against global warming makes little sense without China taking part, and it won't. If we can't get China to quit jailing dissidents and arming a genocidal Sudan, what hope is there of getting it to stop something -- rapid economic development -- that's otherwise unobjectionable? With hundreds of millions of Chinese people living in abject poverty, the country's economic growth is one of the world's most important initiatives against human misery.

Finally, there's the global-cooling spell. The world hasn't been warming since 1998, and an article in the journal Nature says warming won't pick up again until 2015. Since global warming is a long-term trend, a decade-long or more stall in temperatures doesn't mean much -- except that environmentalists have banked so much politically on whipping up hysteria based on imminent catastrophe. The stall in temperatures shows how little we know about global warming. It means that the .3 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures predicted during the next decade by the U.N.'s much-vaunted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen.

No matter what the price of gas is, the most sensible policy in the U.S. is to avoid costly schemes to fight global warming. If our economy keeps growing, we will be better positioned -- richer, and more technologically proficient -- to help others mitigate its effects decades from now. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid huffs that global warming is "the most critical issue of our time." Really? More critical than energy prices? Than health care? Than wages? Than terrorism? Than nuclear proliferation? Keep huffing, Mr. Reid -- that deflating bubble needs all the air it can get.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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20 June, 2008

A little bit of fun

Read the following and see what you think



New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago. The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of "global warming" is comprehensively and urgently addressed.

The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990. Dr Chalko said that global seismic activity was increasing faster than any other global warming indicator on Earth and that this increase is extremely alarming. "The most serious environmental danger we face on Earth may not be climate change, but rapidly and systematically increasing seismic, tectonic and volcanic activity," said Dr Chalko.

"Increase in the annual energy of earthquakes is the strongest symptom yet of planetary overheating. "NASA measurements from space confirm that Earth as a whole absorbs at least 0.85 Megawatt per square kilometer more energy from the Sun than it is able to radiate back to space. This 'thermal imbalance' means that heat generated in the planetary interior cannot escape and that the planetary interior must overheat. Increase in seismic, tectonic and volcanic activities is an unavoidable consequence of the observed thermal imbalance of the planet," said Dr Chalko.

Dr Chalko has urged other scientists to maximize international awareness of the rapid increase in seismic activity, pointing out that this increase is not theoretical but that it is an Observable Fact. "Unless the problem of global warming (the problem of persistent thermal imbalance of Earth) is addressed urgently and comprehensively -- the rapid increase in global seismic, volcanic and tectonic activity is certain. Consequences of inaction can only be catastrophic. There is no time for half-measures."

For further information please read Dr Chalko's scientific article published at NU Journal of Discovery. http://nujournal.net/EarthquakeEnergyRise.pdf. Dr Tom Chalko, MSc, PhD, former Melbourne University academic (between 1982-2001) is Head of Geophysics Division at Scientific Engineering Research, Mt Best, Australia.

Source

It sounds sort of plausible, doesn't it? Until you think about it. How can minor changes in the atmosphere affect events deep down beneath the earth? I downloaded the story from a press-release service that Tom Chalko used to circulate it. So did quite a few other people. No need to think much more about it, however. It is pseudo-science -- as even a Leftist blogger pointed out.

The amusing thing, though, is that Associated Press -- the great grand fact-checking news service that newspapers worldwide rely on -- was also taken in and included it in their feed. And even the proudly-fact-checking CBS (remember Dan Rather?) was taken in. They have however now taken it down. If you have forgotten the CBS Dan Rather fun and games, see here. Once again pajamas beat the (largely mythical) media fact-checkers.

For yet another AP booboo see here (fifth picture caption).




LA Times: Is famine coming? Claims global warming 'reducing grain output' around the world

Oh really? Then why do we see headlines such as "Cold temps shorten growing season". And why do greenhouse owners feed extra CO2 into their greenhouses to promote growth? Both extra warmth and extra CO2 are GOOD for crops

We're not "headed" for a major global food shortage this year -- it's already here. Because of a perfect storm of drought, booming demand from Asia and ill-considered energy policy, global grain reserves have fallen to their lowest level in half a century. The real question is whether today's crisis is short-term and, if not, what action needs to be taken.Conventional wisdom holds that these are both temporary and self-correcting: High prices will encourage the farm sector to bring on new supplies -- by planting more acres and by boosting per-acre yields with new technologies. That's how we've solved previous shortages -- as when we used Green Revolution seeds and fertilizers to avert famine in East Asia and Africa -- and, say optimists, that's what we'll do again, this time with a hot new stable of genetically modified, or GM, crops.

However, a growing number of skeptics, including myself, worry that the factors driving today's crisis make it much harder to solve. Demand, for example, is much stronger than before. Not only is population soaring, but many of the newcomers are wealthy enough to eat meat, our most resource-intensive food -- it takes an average of eight pounds of grain to make a pound of meat. All told, we'll need to boost total grain output by 50% by 2030, and no one knows how, or even if, all that extra grain can be grown. Farm land is increasingly scarce -- most of the readily arable land is already under cultivation, and much of what remains is in forest.

Further, many of the inputs of industrial farming are much more expensive today than they were even a decade ago. Oil, the lifeblood of modern agriculture, costs more than 10 times as much as it did during the Green Revolution. Synthetically manufactured nitrogen fertilizers, which are responsible for 40% of the calories produced worldwide, have tripled in price in the last year. Water is increasingly scarce: One sixth of the populations of India and China, for example, are now fed using irrigation systems that are draining underground water systems.

And overlaying this is climate change, which is already reducing grain output not only in destitute Africa but in grain powerhouses like the United States. The "100-year" floods that are currently erasing the Midwest grain crops (and derailing the market's attempts to "correct" this crisis on its own) are precisely the kind of natural disaster that, under many climate forecasts, will become routine a few decades from now.

In short, just as basket cases like sub-Saharan Africa, their populations swollen by earlier Green Revolution success, are in desperate need for our famous grain surpluses, we may not have as much to send them.

What can be done? In the near term, the U.S. and the European Union must step up relief efforts to afflicted regions while reducing subsidies for biofuels, which are draining off critical food supplies. Longer term, we'll need to commit serious money to developing alternative forms of agriculture that need less energy, water and fertilizers, and which can tolerate a changing climate. (And don't expect a GM silver bullet any time soon: Boosting yields "trans-genically" is much harder than most GM proponents will admit.)

Lastly, we must start a global conversation about meat. One needn't be a vegetarian (and I'm not) to realize that the current trend in global meat consumption simply cannot be sustained and that if we're to achieve a global per capita intake that is sustainable and equitable, countries like the United States will have to reduce their intake, which is currently 230 pounds a year.

None of these steps will be easy or appealing. Spending more on alternative farming will be politically challenging -- as will urging Americans, the world's top carnivores, to eat less meat. But sooner or later (and probably sooner, given how badly flooding is likely to hurt this year's grain crop), we'll need to face the fact that the current crisis isn't just a repeat of past crises and that to solve it, we will need new ways of making, and thinking about, food.... blah, blah, blah

More here




No shortage of land for food

Across a great arc of the Eurasian steppe from Ukraine through Russia to Kazakhstan lies enough arable land to feed the world for years to come, with spare for biofuels to help plug the energy gap. In the days of Nikita Khrushchev - a great enthusiast for the vast Sovkhoz collectives - the Soviet Union farmed 240m hectares, badly. The same territory now farms 207m hectares. These reserves of idle soil are alone enough to meet the entire global need of 30m extra hectares over the next decade, as estimated by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The Moscow investment bank Troika Dialog says that just 43pc of the arable land in Russia is cultivated. Crop yields in the trio of leading ex-Soviet states remain at pre-modern levels. Yields can be doubled in Russia, and tripled in the Ukraine using modern kit and know-how. "The potential is tremendous," said Kingsmill Bond, Troika's chief strategist.

The great leap forward may at last be underway as the clutter of Soviet-era restrictions are broken down and Russia's new found wealth pours into high-tech farm investment. It comes in the nick of time. World corn prices are flirting with the once unthinkable level of $8 a bushel - up fivefold in little over two years. This has lifted the entire nexus of grains in its wake as farmers switch to corn. Soybeans are up 84pc in the past year.

Troika Dialog has written a detailed report - "The New Frontier" - to guide western investors through the Slav land boom and on how to play the opportunities on both the Moscow bourse (for the brave) and European stock exchanges (for the timid). The message is simple. Buy those who control the "bottlenecks" between the land and the market: the processors, the logistics firms, the shippers and movers, the silo makers and fertilizer companies.

Strictly speaking, there is no global shortage of land. Cereal production peaked at around 740m hectares in 1981 and slid steadily for over two decades before recovering a little in the latest revival to 680m, according to the FAO. Urban sprawl accounts for some of this loss, especially on China's eastern seaboard, but the chief reason is that crop yields rose so fast that marginal or high-cost farms were driven out of business.

Troika's pitch is that investment funds scrambling to buy land - almost anywhere, at any price - on assumptions of a Malthusian food crisis are likely to face a rude shock. "The consensus view that the world is running out of land is a fallacy," said the bank. "Global population growth has long since peaked. Calorie consumption per capita has peaked in most developed markets and China is at 90pc of [Western] calorie levels. Even the switch to meat is a less powerful driver than it was."

More here




An older example of kids being brainwashed

The Warmists have some nasty antecedents

A chilling essay, written by a 10-year-old schoolboy praising the Nazis, is to be auctioned in Britain. The rare essay was written by German pupil Gunther Himpfel as a gift for Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday in 1939.

The 20-page booklet entitled 'Der 50 Gerburtsag des Fuhrers' which translates as 'The Fiftieth Birthday of the Fuhrer', was discovered at a flea market in Berlin and is now set to fetch 150 pounds at auction in Shropshire.

The pupil received top marks for the essay in which he pays tribute to "greatest leader Germany have ever had" and says he hopes Hitler will live for many years to come. Experts say the booklet serves as a chilling reminder of how the Nazi propaganda machine even extended to vulnerable schoolchildren.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, a historical documents expert at Mullocks auctioneers who will sell the booklet at Ludlow Racecourse next Wednesday, said: "You never cease to be amazed at depths the Nazi propaganda machine plunged in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II. "Here you have a ten-year-old schoolboy who should be involving himself with childhood things, instead being used as a political pawn in the Nazis' evil game."

Source




Kiwis commit chilling climate crime

Two New Zealand refrigeration engineers have been convicted of depleting the ozone layer - by letting the gas out of a drinks chiller. The country's Ministry for Economic Development prosecuted the two men in the first ever case taken under a 1996 law protecting the ozone layer. The pair released an ozone-depleting substance, chlorodifluoromethane HCFC22, into the atmosphere as they were repairing a drinks chiller, and ignored a warning that it was hazardous.

The ministry said it took the case as a warning to industry. The two were convicted and fined $NZ750 ($600) each. Permits are needed to handle HCFCs, which will be banned under an international agreement from 2015.

Source




Scientists advocating for action are overselling the predictive capabilities of climate models

By Roger Pielke, Jr.

The famous physicist Niels Bohr is attributed with saying that "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Anyone who pays attention to weather forecasts or economic predictions knows how true this is. But given that the future can't be predicted with perfect accuracy, seeing predictions fail is actually an important part of their usefulness. Whether one is faced with evacuating from a possible hurricane landfall or investing in a mutual fund, decision-making is improved when uncertainties are readily understood.

On the highly politicized issue of climate change, however, understanding uncertainties is made difficult when scientists advocating for action oversell the predictive capabilities of climate models, such as those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But action on climate change makes sense even if many climate scientists oversell predictive capabilities.

Scientists oversell the predictive capacity of climate models when they claim that the most recent weather events occurring around the world are consistent with predictions from climate models. For example, last fall a scientist who had contributed to the most recent IPCC reports said that the intense southern California wildfires occurring at the time "are consistent with what the latest modeling shows." Similarly, in 2006 a Berkeley professor and climate change expert asserted that "the current heat waves throughout much of North America and Europe are consistent with the predictions of our global climate models." A quick Internet search will reveal countless scientists who have made such claims about the predictive prowess of climate models.

But what does it mean to say that some weather events are "consistent with" climate model predictions? The implication of such statements of course is that models are reliable and offer accurate predictions that have been borne out by experience. But unfortunately, the real answer is that saying that any recent weather events are "consistent with" model predictions is an empty statement.

All of these claims of consistency between recent weather and model-based predictions might lead one to ask, in principle, what observations of weather events would be inconsistent with predictions from climate models. Guess what? It turns out that nothing that could be observed over a time period less than a decade or more - short of abrupt and unprecedented climate change, like an ice sheet advancing on New York - would be inconsistent with climate model predictions.

There are good reasons for why predictions of climate models are not useful on short time periods of less than a few decades. Urs Neu, a climate scientist from Switzerland, says that climate models are not designed to tell us anything about the evolution of the climate system in the short term; rather, they "are designed to simulate the long-term behaviour as accurately as possible. Long-term behaviour means the trend over at least 20-30 years." Similarly, two climate modelers, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, observed in a research paper that "it is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence in climate models must therefore come from other sources."

If climate models are designed to make predictions about trends in the global climate system over several decades, then there is nothing that can be said about a model's accuracy on time scales of less than a decade, much less one fire season, or a few heat waves, or any other transient phenomena. Consequently, any claim that recently observed weather events are "consistent with" predictions is actually quite misleading.

On a longer term, more can be said about predictive accuracy of climate model predictions. The first IPCC projections of future climate were issued in 1990, and with more than 17 years of observations since that prediction we can confidently state that the IPCC's 1990 "best guess" overstated the global temperature increase as well as sea level rise for the subsequent two decades. But such retrospective evaluations are typically dismissed because those predictions were made using outdated models based on earlier understandings. The IPCC issues predictions for 20- to 30-year periods into the future, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capabilities can never be evaluated against real world data. As Tebaldi and Knutti observe, "climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes."

So in the debate on what to do about climate change, what are we to make of the overstated claims of predictive accuracy offered by many scientists?

Not surprisingly, the reason for overstated claims lies in the bitter and contested politics of climate change. Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who has studied climate modelers, finds that many of these scientists are acutely aware of the fact that any expressed "caveats, qualifications and other acknowledgements of model limitations can become fodder for the anti-environmental movement." She documents how, more than a decade ago, a prominent climate scientist warned a group of his colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, home of one of the main U.S. climate modeling efforts that informs the IPCC, to "Choose carefully your adjectives to describe the models. Confidence or lack of confidence in the models is the deciding factor in whether or not there will be policy response on behalf of climate change."

I witnessed this dynamic in practice while I was waiting to testify on climate policy before the U.S. Congress in 2006. A prominent climate scientist testifying on the panel appearing before mine was asked by a member of Congress about uncertainties in predictions from climate models. The scientist replied, enthusiastically and accurately, that there are a range of important uncertainties coming from scenario inputs and choices in parameterization schemes, instantly overwhelming his congressional audience with technical detail. Much later, and after a long break, the scientist requested an opportunity to clarify his earlier comments, and this time he said, "I would like to give you a little more direct answer to the question on reliability of climate models. I think they are reliable enough to be a very useful guide into the future."

Lost in the Manichean debate over climate change is the real significance of what climate models really are telling us: We should act on climate mitigation and adaptation not because we are able to predict the future, but because we cannot. The academic literature, far from public view, contains a much more realistic perspective on the uncertain predictive capabilities of climate models. Oxford University's David Frame and colleagues, all climate modelers, explain that "Rather than seeing models as describing literal truth, we ought to see them as convenient fictions which try to provide something useful."

They are useful because the predictions from models suggest that the climate patterns experienced in the past century or so may not be a useful guide to the future - but exactly how change might occur is uncertain. Ten years ago Simon Shackley and his colleagues warned that "The impression that climate change can be so predicted and managed is not only misleading, but it could also have negative repercussions should policy makers act on this assumption." By this they meant that "the societal perception that the `climate change problem' is being adequately handled could inhibit the emergence of, and support for, creative social, policy and economic responses to the challenge of coping with a possibly inherently unpredictable system such as climate."

The reality is that the future state of the climate is uncertain, and as such it represents a type of risk management problem. In 2002 Steve Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford University and long-time advocate for action on climate change, explained "uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes." Combatants in the climate debate congregate around the extremes, emphasize either mild or catastrophic outcomes as is convenient and overstate the certainty of such outcomes.

When scientists advocating action overstate the certainty of predictions, and policy-makers commit political and other resources based on those claims, they find themselves in a difficult situation because, according to Frame and colleagues, "they are likely to face strong criticism if they revise up their estimates of uncertainty in the relatively near future." Scientists who oversell the predictive capacity of climate models provide a basis for legitimate criticism by their political opponents, and in the process, actually create obstacles to action on climate change.

I have been asked by some of my colleagues why I raise these points, since action on climate change is a good thing and those questioning climate models typically are opposed to action. So what, I am told, if action on climate change is based on some exaggerations and false claims to certainty, isn't the end goal important enough to justify bending the truth just a bit? After all, those opposed to action often show no hesitation toward exaggeration and hyperbole.

My short answer to such questions is that false claims to certainty were exactly what got us into the Iraq war. A somewhat longer reply involves explaining how both science and democracy flourish when we are open and honest about what science can actually deliver. Effective action on climate change is more likely when we fully appreciate what science can, and cannot, do. We should expect more from our scientific community.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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19 June, 2008

A PALPABLE HIT ON THE PALEOBOTANIC ORTHODOXY?

An email from Steve Short [steve@ecoengineers.com] below:

A new paper has been published in the journal Nature entitled: 'Subtropical to boreal convergence of tree-leaf temperatures' by Brent R. Helliker & Suzanna L. Richter, which has implications for climate reconstructions using tree ring and leaf data. The Abstract states:

The oxygen isotope ratio (18O) of cellulose is thought to provide a record of ambient temperature and relative humidity during periods of carbon assimilation. Here we introduce a method to resolve tree-canopy leaf temperature with the use of 18O of cellulose in 39 tree species. We show a remarkably constant leaf temperature of 21.4 2.2 øC across 50ø of latitude, from subtropical to boreal biomes. This means that when carbon assimilation is maximal, the physiological and morphological properties of tree branches serve to raise leaf temperature above air temperature to a much greater extent in more northern latitudes. A main assumption underlying the use of 18O to reconstruct climate history is that the temperature and relative humidity of an actively photosynthesizing leaf are the same as those of the surrounding air. Our data are contrary to that assumption and show that plant physiological ecology must be considered when reconstructing climate through isotope analysis. Furthermore, our results may explain why climate has only a modest effect on leaf economic traits in general.

There is a summary of the paper in Nature News here.

Now if I were a member of a certain school of paleobotany, I would be rather depressed right now. Quite apart form the 18O issue, your readers should be aware that entire careers have been built on the widespread use of leaf species and stomatal indices as proxies for past temperature, humidity and CO2 concentrations. There has emerged a 'consensual' school of paleobotany which claims the paleobotanical record clearly shows CO2 has generally been the major determinant of paleoclimates. Extra `kudos' has been gained (?) by this school by `linking' their work with that of prominent paleogeochemists (who would mostly barely know a leaf from a twig) e.g.: here

This effort has rolled on like a stream train despite odd cracks in the edifice popping up at annoyingly regular intervals e.g.: here and here

However, as we all know it is in the nature of orthodoxy to ignore `minor issues'. However, this time seems an even bigger dog has come to bite! So far it has not been seen with the scientific AGW establishment that one single paper comes along to destroy more or less the whole basis of many careers (yet) but I'd say this new Nature paper looks to be getting very close to such an occasion. Expect a firestorm of rebuttal, dissembling, and (dare I use the term?) denial.




British MP: 'Yes, I am a heretic on global warming'

By Ann Widdecombe

Much has been made of my voting with the Gov-ernment to allow the police to detain terror suspects for 42 days, rather than 28, in special cases. Yet there was a more important vote last week, in which I was one of only three Members of Parliament to vote against the might of all parties and defy the Climate Change Bill which will cost Britain hundreds of billions of pounds, will not mean any other country has to follow suit and, as we are responsible for only two per cent of the world's carbon emissions, will make no difference to the climate or to global warming.

Climate change has become a religion, with anyone who dares to throw?out?a?question?or?two instantly accused of heresy. I have had my doubts for some time, and certainly about major unilateral action on the part of the UK, but these have crystalised since reading Nigel Lawson's book An Appeal To Reason, subtitled A Cool Look At Global Warming.

Appallingly, this gem could not find?a British publisher because none was brave enough. One wrote: "My fear with this cogently argued book is that it flies so much in the face of prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide market."

Everybody who has English to GCSE standard can understand it and anyone who has uncritically swallowed the belief that the Earth is warming dangerously should open his or her mind at least a little bit.

It is a FACT that there has been no global warming this century, yet never has there been so much production of carbon dioxide, with India and China increasing their activity by the week.

It is a FACT that global temperature has varied throughout history and scientists explain this by changes in solar activity.

It is a FACT that not all climate scientists agree with the prevailing orthodoxy. Those who dare to dissent are treated with about as much respect as Galileo was by the medieval church.

Even if the predictions are true all they offer is a small increase in the globe's temperature over the next hundred years. As Lawson points out, the difference between the temperature in Finland and that in Singapore is vast but in both countries people thrive and so do their economies. Therefore we might be better off adapting rather than trying to reverse the trend.

I need not go on. You may believe one side of the argument or the other or, like me, you may suspend judgment but until matters are somewhat clearer, I am most certainly not prepared to vote to commit Britain to a course of action which will make not a jot of difference to global temperatures but which could change our way of life and leave us unable to compete with those countries that keep a better sense of proportion.

Some of the worst mistakes are made when all political parties agree. Our entry into Europe is a pretty good example with Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and Jeremy Thorpe all urging a "yes" vote and dissenters dismissed as flat-earthers. Yet what we thought we were joining (a tariff agreement and economic union) was very different from what we are now proved to have joined (a political union with gradual loss of control over our own affairs).

Healthy opposition is needed, if only to ensure that all arguments are heard. The media had a great deal to talk about last week and three MPs calling for a pause for thought over something most commentators consider a cast iron certainty did not get a great deal of attention. Yet the Bill still has some way to go before it becomes law. There is still time for a challenge if anyone is interested enough to take his head out of the sand.

Source




ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: ARE THE SCEPTICS RIGHT?

The Julian Hodge Bank lecture given at Cardiff, April 2008 by Colin Robinson, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Surrey:

Many people in this audience will believe that significant changes in the world`s climate are already under way and that, in the medium to long term future, there will be further changes that will have catastrophic economic and social consequences if action is not taken in the near future to avert them. Virtually all the world`s opinion leaders subscribe to that view. As one example of this `doomsday view', take the comments of the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon who said of the scenarios in a report compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[2] in November 2007, `These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie. But they are even more terrifying, because they are real'[3]. Ban Ki-moon is talking about views of the future which cannot in any accepted sense be `real': his comment shows that the inevitability of severe climate change is now so taken for granted that the future has become merged with the present.

The hypothesis and some broad issues

Put simply, the usual hypothesis about climate change is that emissions of carbon dioxide and other `greenhouse gases', from the use of energy and from other human activities, will lead to a future trend towards warming of the earth and consequential damage to economic and social life.

There is general (though not universal) agreement that there has been some warming of the earth in the last hundred years or so, but it is relatively modest[4]. The IPCC puts the increase in global annual mean temperature at around 0.75 degrees centigrade over that period[5]. Future warming has become the main focus of concern: there is a wide range of estimates, varying from about 1 to over 6 degrees C[6], comparing the end of the twentieth century with the end of the twentyfirst century. Obviously, I cannot provide a critique of the hypothesis from a climate science viewpoint[7] but economists are in a position to comment on some of the underlying methodological issues, on the economic and social consequences of climate change and on possible policy responses and their effects. I begin by outlining the links in the chain that lead to the view that climate change will be damaging and make some initial comments on them.

1.1 A climate change trend?

Since the climate is always changing, the damaging change hypothesis is difficult to pin down, but I was careful to specify it as implying a trend towards global warming. I take it that those who support the hypothesis must think there is a such a trend. If we were merely in the upward phase of a cycle, caused by natural forces, presumably there would be much less cause for concern because, by definition, the direction of the cycle would reverse and global warming would be replaced by global cooling. Determining whether warming is a trend or just part of a cycle is extremely difficult, given the apparent very long time scale of climatic change, yet, from a policy point of view, the distinction between trend and cycle is clearly vital: if warming is to be replaced by cooling in the relatively near future, as part of the same natural cycle, action now to curb warming might well have perverse effects. The amplitude and length of any cycle are also critical issues.

1.2 The link with greenhouse gases

There is scientific evidence that, other things equal, increasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will bring rising world temperatures. However, in the absence of complete scientific knowledge, the list of the `other things' and their effects is long but incomplete. There is considerable controversy over the significance of man-made emissions, compared with all the other effects on temperature. Most climate scientists would, like most economists, readily admit that their models are gross simplifications and that large areas of ignorance remain. Working out what happens when other things are constant is therefore not easy and it seems that experience in the twentieth century must lead to some doubts about the exact causal link between emissions and warming: despite continuously rising emissions during the century, the warming occurred in two periods (1920-1940 and 1975-1998), with slight cooling in between the two periods and no clear trend in the last ten years or so.

Economic and social consequences

Even if it could be established that there is a clear warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions, there are still important questions to be answered about the extent to which natural adaptation will deal with any economic and social consequences or whether, if action to combat the trend should be taken, what form it might take and what the costs might be compared with the benefits. Some economists, such as Sir Nicholas (now Lord) Stern, have attempted to answer these questions and to say what actions are required[8]. But, in the process, they have used some of the most heroic assumptions I have ever seen and tried to peer into the far distant future.

Bearing in mind these broad issues, in the rest of the lecture I will try to deal with a number of matters which seem important in deciding whether scepticism is justified about claims that damaging man-made climate change is in prospect. My purpose is not to say that there is no such prospect, but to argue that the sceptics should be taken seriously and that we should be careful not to plunge into large-scale, expensive, centrally run programmes to combat prospective climate change based on the assumption that we know more about the future than is possible. After making some rather critical comments about climate alarmism in the first part of the lecture, at the end I will accentuate the positive and suggest how it might be best to face a very uncertain future prospect.

My starting point is to try to place the global climate change debate in a more general context.

More here




DOMINIC LAWSON: THE SHEER HYPOCRISY OF THIS DEBATE ON OIL

Oil makes hypocrites of us all. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general who last year took office declaring that his main goal was to fight "man-made climate change", has spent most of his weekend in Jeddah attempting to persuade King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to ramp up the kingdom's oil production.

This is just the global edition of Gordon Brown's earlier plea to the Saudis to "do something" about the high price of oil; a remarkable display of diplomatic chutzpah from a man who, as Chancellor, spent a decade telling us that increasing the price of petrol on British forecourts through fiscal means was very much in the best interests of the whole planet.

Meanwhile the US Senate has threatened to launch a prosecution of OPEC for its alleged fixing of the world oil market, to the detriment of the American consumer. The American legislature's hypocrisy in this matter takes a different form to ours: the politicians who are now howling with rage about the shortage of oil supply are in essence the same people who have long blocked the oil industry from developing vast deposits both in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off their own coastline - about 80 per cent of the US continental shelf is out of bounds, on environmental grounds.

I imagine that when King Abdullah told Mr Ban that "national policies in the West" were partly to blame for the current very high price of crude oil, the Americans' refusal to drill for oil in their own most geologically promising territories might have been one of the factors he had in mind.

Ban Ki-moon was not, needless to say, acting solely as an emissary for the United States: he was representing the teeming billions in nations as diverse as China, India and Malaysia. Yet if you look at this seizure in the oil market from the point of view of demand, rather than supply, then these same countries have also contributed directly to the problem they have asked Mr Ban to sort out for them.

All have for years had a policy of subsidising the price paid by their consumers and industry for oil products - and on a vast scale. According to the head of the International Energy Agency, Nobuo Tanaka, such subsidies are currently running at a rate of about one hundred billion dollars a year. In other words, these countries' biggest energy consumers are being shielded from the effects of high oil prices, and therefore are not adjusting their consumption downwards - quite the reverse, in fact.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the People's Republic of China. Beijing has a rigorous price cap, which means it simply pays companies such as PetroChina and Sinopec vast sums to compensate them for a state-imposed inability to pass on their increased raw material costs to the end-users. While crude oil prices have doubled, the price of a tank full of petrol on the forecourts of the Middle Kingdom has not increased by a single renminbi - and is not likely to do so this side of the Olympic Games.

In this context, the article by the vice-premier of China's state council in yesterday's Financial Times was almost comical. Wang Qishan argued that his government "gives high priority to energy and resources conservation and the protection of the environment". No one can doubt the pressures the Chinese Politburo is under to meet the aspirations of its people and neither should we in the West criticise their desire to enjoy the opportunities which industrialisation bestowed on us. But still, how can the representative of a government which pays its industries to burn more fuel expect to be taken seriously as a proponent of "energy conservation"?

This seems, on the surface, to be one of the greatest paradoxes of the modern world: while democracies such as those in the European Union have been sufficiently insensitive to the wishes of their consumers as to have provoked disturbances over the price of petrol and diesel - augmented as they have been by very high taxes - totalitarian states such as China have pre-empted the possible political consequences of high domestic gasoline prices.

Perhaps it is because the rulers of such countries know their people do not have the safety valve of elections to let off steam; so if things get ugly they could get very violent indeed. There is a less charitable explanation. In China, only the wealthiest two per cent own a motor car; the proportion is not much more in many of the other developing countries with high petrol subsidies: so we are seeing the subsidisation of the richest in the Third World at the expense of all.

This is not unusual: indeed it is absolutely standard in the upside-down world of market intervention. It is exactly the same as the global food market, in which subsidies ostensibly designed for the benefit of everyone are in fact disproportionately directed at the richest, paid for by national exchequers which supposedly represent the interests of nations as a whole.

Just as in agriculture, while the West is rightly condemned for the distorting effects of its subsidies, the developing world tends to escape criticism for the consequences of similar policies, which are ultimately to the greatest detriment of its own people; BP's chief economist, Christof Ruehl, pointed out last week that the developing world uses more than three times more energy per unit of Gross Domestic Product than the developed countries of the OECD.

So it's not just that these poorer countries are building up their national debt to subsidise the use of oil; their economies will ultimately lose out in competitiveness to those in the West, where prices are liberalised. It won't seem so at the moment to heavy users of fuel in the developed world, naturally: but in the long term, if oil prices stay at these levels, the countries which change the way they use energy will suffer the least pain.

It is, despite all the dire forecasts which are now the rage, not certain that the unprecedented high price of oil will hold. The Saudis have no long-term strategic interest in the world learning how to cope with much less oil. That might possibly be why last weekend King Abdullah told Ban Ki-moon that the kingdom would increase its output by 500,000 barrels a day in July.

The strange thing is that there isn't an absolute shortage of oil in the markets, despite the sentiment of fear which haunts them. There's already a sufficient amount of the black stuff to go round to meet current levels of demand, as the Saudis have wearily insisted often enough over the past few months.

In fact, King Abdullah's pledge to the UN secretary general is the purest politics, simply to get the weight of the world's opprobrium off his kaffiyeh. I don't blame the King, however; when hypocrisy abounds it is hard for anyone not to pay homage to it, even an absolute monarch.

Source




Afloat on an Ocean of Oil

Considering how much untapped oil is known to exist, not just in the United States, but worldwide, one would think that its current price was some kind of anomaly — and it is. It is more the result of speculation than anything else.

The most basic fact about oil worldwide is that there is lots of it. Though frequently overlooked, the ability to refine crude oil plays an essential role in the supply and demand equation. More refining capacity is needed worldwide. Finally, there’s the fact that, in general, oil is very expensive to get at and often found in the most inhospitable places on Earth.

For sheer insanity, however, consider a nation that has an estimated 31 billion barrels of oil offshore of its coasts and 117 billion barrels of oil under land owned or managed by the government, plus 139 billion barrels beneath privately held land.

In just one area, a desolate place designated a wildlife refuge, there’s an estimated 7.7 billion barrels untapped. The nation with this abundance of oil is, of course, the United States of America. Most of the areas where oil is known to exist have been ruled off-limits to any exploration or extraction by the government. In the areas where it is accessible, drilling for it is hugely encumbered and often denied by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.

If, however, you connect the dots, you will have noticed by now that America’s energy problems, namely the price of a gallon of gasoline or heating oil, are making everyone miserable thanks in great part to environmental legislation designed to make it impossible to access oil on both public and privately held lands. Then, just to make matters worse, the government requires that every gallon of gasoline include the additive, ethanol, which reduces mileage and increases its cost.

Further, we’re told that Senator Barack Obama, if elected, intends to seize “windfall profits.” This is sufficient reason for American oil companies to decide to drill anywhere else. The last time a windfall profits tax was implemented was at the end of President Carter’s term. It had such a negative impact on U.S. oil companies that drilling for oil domestically dropped dramatically. It has stayed that way since the 1980s. Their actual profits are now less than pharmaceutical, high tech, and other elements of the economy. Imagine how thrilled they were to hear Rep. Maxine Waters’ threat to nationalize them.

No profits. No exploration. No drilling. And no domestic oil with which to correct our dependence on foreign oil and thus provide a measure of security to a nation that runs on oil. If you wanted to bring the United States to ruin, you could not have designed and implemented a more perfect scheme. Along with too many members of Congress, environmentalists are America’s Fifth Column.

As my friend, Seldon B. Graham, a veteran petroleum engineer and oil industry attorney, and a graduate of West Point says of oil, “If it is worth dying for in the Near East, it is worth drilling for in the United States.”

As to the claim that the Earth is running out of oil, that can be easily dismissed simply by reading information available in respected publications such as Business Week that, “The Saudis have embarked on an ambitious expansion program that should see more than 2 million barrels of new production capacity come onstream by the middle of next year.”

Those of us who follow energy trends read the Energy Tribune because it has some of the best information available on what is really occurring. In its May edition, Matt Pickard wrote about the expansion worldwide of offshore drilling, noting that today’s prices are being driven by increased demand from rapidly developing nations such as China and India. This demand is going to increase over the next two or three decades. Unless the United States begins to free up its own oil and natural gas reserves, Americans are going to be paying more at the pump and in their homes for a very long time to come.

The good news is that the offshore oil and gas industry, despite the huge risks and costs involved and despite an aging, understaffed workforce, is making strides to meet demand. Whether it’s in the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea, the icy waters of the Barents Sea or offshore of Brazil and Africa, massive new reserves of oil are being found.

“Large discoveries offshore Brazil, the continued progress in every region’s major projects, and the ongoing push for Arctic exploration and production point to the industry’s potential for growth over the next 20 to 30 years,” wrote Pickard. Brazil is poised to become a major producer. In its Tupi field, “Petrobas announced an aggressive development plan, with an early production system possible within two or three years,” reports Pickard. The nearby Jupiter field has gas reserves to rival Tupi. None of this is a secret! Both privately owned U.S. and foreign national oil companies are going to find more oil and gas.

Neither candidate for President is telling the truth these days because both believe global warming is real and both keep blathering on about “alternative” energy. The big problem for the rest of us is that you can’t pour wind or solar energy into a gas tank.

The U.S. mandate for ethanol as a gasoline additive has already significantly put the world’s food supply in jeopardy, but most Americans are blissfully unaware that it requires 1.5 gallons of ethanol to produce the same energy as a gallon of gasoline. It actually emits more carbon dioxide than gasoline. It is an environmental hoax.

The world is afloat on an ocean of oil. Meanwhile, the United States continues to rule 85% of its offshore oil off-limits to exploration and extraction. This is occurring while the Chinese prepare to pump oil just offshore of Cuba, a mere 90 miles from Florida. It is occurring while the Russians are looking to plant their flag on potential reserves of subterranean oil in the Arctic.

The next time you hear a politician say we need to be “energy independent,” ask him or her why Americans cannot have access to the oil reserves known to exist in California, in Alaska, and in many of our other States or off the coastlines of Florida and elsewhere. Ask them why the fate of the condors and little known species is more important than the family budget of Americans forced to make choices between more food and more gasoline. Ask them why they continue to claim that global warming is a threat when the entire Earth is now in a decade-old cooling cycle. Ask them why they insist on blaming investor-owned oil companies whose own reserves are barely four percent of the world’s known oil reserves? Ask them how they expect these oil companies to compete in the global marketplace when they threaten to seize their profits.

Energy is the master resource. It determines which nations thrive and which lag behind. For now, America is being ill-served by a Congress that refuses to permit access to our own energy resources. Ask yourself how we have arrived at a point in time when both candidates for President believe in a non-existent global warming and whose proposals offer no practical solution to our current and future energy needs.

Source




Australia: Crown-of-thorns starfish on wane at Great Barrier Reef

Global warming was often blamed for the starfish plague so I guess this proves global cooling.. Since the climate IS cooling, maybe this is one they got right!

The potentially devastating crown-of-thorns starfish is in retreat on the Great Barrier Reef, with its numbers hitting a 20-year low, researchers say. Findings from the Australian Institute of Marine Science released Tuesday, June 17, indicate the latest outbreak of the coral-eating pest is near an end. Surveys of the Reef in 2007 detected fewer crown-of-thorns starfish than in any year in the past two decades, the head of AIMS' long-term monitoring program, Hugh Sweatman, said. "There were outbreaks on 6 per cent of the 104 reefs surveyed in 2006, and on just 4 per cent of the reefs we surveyed in 2007," he said. "Historically, the numbers of the starfish have increased drastically every 15 years, and in 2000 up to 17 per cent of the reef was afflicted." However, the crown-of-thorns starfish remains a "mysterious phenomenon", according to AIMS, and it is not known when the next outbreak could begin.

AIMS researchers have also detected a fall in coral cover on outer sections of the Reef due to coral diseases, particularly a disease known as white syndrome. The cause of the disease was unknown but it killed off massive areas of coral on previously healthy reefs, Dr Sweatman said. "The disease is found particularly where hard coral cover is high," he said. "What we see is that the healthy reefs with lots of coral cover are the ones at risk."

Seven reefs in the Capricorn-Bunker sector and six in the Swain sector of the Great Barrier Reef were surveyed. No crown-of-thorns starfish were recorded on Swain reefs but scuba surveys found the starfish for the first time at Fairfax Reef in the Capricorn-Bunker group.

Source

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18 June, 2008

INTERSTELLAR DUST AS A CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

An email from Andy Nimmo [andynimmo@yahoo.com] below

The [much cited] 1939 paper, "The Effect Of Interstellar Matter On Climatic Variation" by Fred Hoyle and R.A.Lyttleton, in the Proceedings of The Cambridge Philosophical Society, which showed that when our Solar System passes through an interstellar dust cloud, the percentage of our Sun's radiation increases in direct proportion to the density of the dust and inversely according to the cube of the difference in velocities of the Solar System and the dust cloud, has almost certainly been mentioned in previous messages. Among other things they showed that very slight changes in these effects could bring about changes in radiation of from 1% to a 1,000%. They said whether there is an ice age or a heat age such as the Carboniferous, would depend on the relative velocities, lower velocities giving heat and higher velocities, ice. While there would be mass changes, these would be minimal.

Readers will recall that in 1977 NASA reported that both their Pioneer probes had found hydrogen and helium (10 particles per cc) flowing into our Solar System from ahead of the Sun's path in space at 72,400 kph and I understand the Voyagers also reported this so it hasn't come as much surprise that reports of global climate change have begun to come in since then.

So far as I'm aware, this hydrogen and helium is still flowing into our system - or has it ceased to do so and I've simply missed the report? Apart altogether from hydrogen and helium though, there seem to be some indications from recent analysis of dust captured by various probes in interplanetary space that at least some of this is carbonaceous and much denser than either hydrogen or helium. Do we know for certain that all such has been in our Solar System since its birth and that none of this more dense material is still flowing in?

Some now say our world is warming and some that we are cooling. Perhaps for political reasons born maybe out of jealousy of what they see as wicked industrialists and/or of envy of wealthier folk than themselves flying off to Spain or further for their holidays, rather than for scientific reasons, a large proportion of the warming lobby insist that this is caused by human CO2 emissions and that Earth's own environment has nothing or little to do with it. Clearly though, any such belief must result at least partially from ignorance as Earth's own space environment must scientifically affect our environment on the surface in some manner however small.

Accordingly it seems that Hoyle and Lyttleton have been correct to at least some extent whereby if hydrogen and helium and just maybe something else, are still flowing into our Solar System it must be in our interest to determine how much of what have entered our system, how much is still likely to do so, where in our system this is likely to accumulate and what effects this may have on our future? If our Solar System is entering an interstellar dust or gas cloud, how large is this and how long will we be in it?

While I am in no way trying to maintain that Hoyle's and Lyttleton's thesis is the sole cause of any change that may be taking place it does seem likely to be relevant to at least some extent so the above questions do need to be answered or the effect as more and more accumulates, perhaps between us and the Sun, may be much greater in the future without our having been properly forewarned. In view of this, might the expertise of a number of CCNet readers between them be able to come up with at least some of the necessary knowledge? Perhaps some are already trying to check the answers to these or similar questions?

I would expect that educated sensible Governments have already ordered that such research be undertaken. If not, I do very much wonder why not? It seems strange to me that the media don't seem to have mentioned this aspect of climate change at any time.




CLIMATE JUNKFESTS

An email from Bob Carter [bob.carter@jcu.edu.au]

You will undoubtedly have marvelled over the last few years at the large number of "Climate Conferences" that are held around the world. I would guess that on average they amount to at least one large conference a month - all sponsored and supported by some combination of the IPCC, governments, government science agencies, embassies and industry associations.

The publicity and press treatment that these conferences receive portrays them as if they were "science" conferences. In fact, nearly all are carefully contrived political events, and the scientists who attend them are there for networking and political purposes; presenting or listening to new science is almost never the objective, and known climate rationalist scientists are almost universally excluded from participation.

Knowledgeable, research-active climate scientists understand this conference junkfest phenomenon, and that their own personal professional credibility rests upon delivering papers at genuine science congresses such as the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco every December, or at regional and special-interest group research meeetings.

In 2006, three much publicised climate conferences were held in Australia and New Zealand. Subsequent to the one that was held in Wellington I conducted an appraisal of its nature and outcomes. Muriel Newman has recently posted my review of this conference on her widely read website. An extract follows.

POLITICIZATION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE CONFERENCES

"The Wellington Climate Change and Governance conference succeeded in reinforcing the already strong public impression that dangerous human-caused climate change is occurring, and that this change can be prevented by limiting human emissions of greenhouse gas. However, to the degree that the conference was intended to contribute to a balanced public debate on human-caused global warming, it failed.

The major sponsors of the conference included organisations whose charter includes the disinterested presentation of high-quality science, and civil social responsibility; these organisations failed in their duty of public care.

In addition, media coverage of the conference was "balanced" in only the most superficial way; news reports concentrated heavily on climate alarmism, and failed to follow up on the caveats which were expressed by the more responsible speakers at the conference.

Troublesome ethical issues emerge, the most important of which include the role in society of scientific organisations and universities, and the way in which government-employed and other scientists are today constrained in the public comment that they can make on controversial issues of the day. Another major concern is the way in which scientific results are now routinely deployed into the public domain with a clear propaganda intent.

The Wellington climate conference displayed clearly the unacceptable price that society pays when it allows science to be corrupted by politicization. The future assessment of complex scientific and technological issues like climate change needs to be much more rigorously bias-proofed. At the very least this will require the routine use of counterweight and audit panels for rigorous verification of all major policy recommendations.

These major conclusions about the Wellington climate conference apply also to many other similar climate meetings that are held around the world."

More here

Muriel Newman published an editorial by Ron Smith at about the same time that also deals with the issue of the politicization of climate science.

SCIENCE, POLITICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

"In the contemporary world of public financing of intellectual activity, there are also more subtle pressures towards conformity. One of the many baleful consequences of directed or 'performance'-based research funding is the extent to which it privileges the prejudices and paradigms of those holding power in the system at any time. The result is to favor for research support and publication those who follow the party-line. This characteristic, and the dominating connection between this activity and promotion, ensures the production of vast quantities of mediocre and repetitive material in our universities and like establishments and discourages the long-term and more speculative activity that used to be their academic glory. It is to the continuing shame of all the New Zealand universities that this is so. In this connection it is noteworthy that in the UK the panels making these systemic judgments about academic worth have now been instructed to destroy all the notes on which the judgments were made."

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Environmental group ties floods to global warming

They would. Floods, droughts, who cares? It's ALL due to global warming. Australia had a bit of a drought a year or so ago and all the pundits said it was an effect of global warming

The disastrous floods that ravaged southern Wisconsin this week are consistent with global warming predictions by Clean Wisconsin in a January 2007 report. The report, "Global Warming Arrives in Wisconsin," forecast that global warming would lead to increased instances of severe droughts, more intense floods and increased snowfall, Clean Wisconsin said in a news release. Clean Wisconsin, the state's largest environmental advocacy organization, was founded as Wisconsin's Environmental Decade.

"In the year and a half since the release of this report, we have seen a summer of extreme drought end with intense flooding, a winter of record snowfall and now a spring ending with some of the worst flooding in recent memory," Keith Reopelle, senior policy director at Clean Wisconsin. "Many of the impacts of global warming are occurring much sooner than predicted."

While no single weather event can be attributed to global warming, the increasing intensity of weather patterns suggests we may be witnessing the first major impacts in Wisconsin, the organization said. Scientists predict that increased temperatures will increase winter precipitation by 15 to 30 percent while decreasing summer precipitation by up to 20 percent. Less frequent but more intense storms explain the increased likelihood of summer droughts and floods. "This week we have all witnessed the economic, environmental and emotional devastation intense weather events can bring," Reopelle said. "These floods demonstrate the terrible risks associated with global warming."

More here




Australia's muddled "Green" policies

By Barry Cohen (Barry Cohen is a former environment minister in the Hawke Labor government)

I'm confused. And I'm not alone. For eons environmentalists have been rabbiting on about our dependence on coal, oil and the carbon emissions they produce. "Let's go solar," was their cry, for the one thing Australia was not short of was sun. And we have the skin cancers to prove it. With our engineers and scientists in the vanguard of solar technology it appeared the way to go. I was convinced to go solar many years ago. While the electricity bill remained unchanged, I gained a psychological advantage over my critics. As environment minister, there was no shortage of those. The introduction by the Howard government of an $8000 rebate on solar panels, had tempted me to try again. The balance of $12,000 was a small price to pay for that feeling of superiority and the warm inner glow.

The dream ended when the budget restricted rebates to those with incomes of under $100,000. Overnight, 90 per cent of orders were cancelled. The industry, unable to sustain that level of cuts was, to put it mildly, thoroughly pissed off while environmentalists are having difficulty recognising the Government that received a standing ovation in Bali.

Environment minister Peter Garrett, asked at Question Time to apologise to the solar industry, had an interesting response. He told the house that the program, "was oversubscribed and would have overheated and produced, in the solar industry, demand fluctuations such that it would have made this industry very difficult to be sustainable. Compressing the plan for five years to three years the industry would have greater sustainability." Having spent a lifetime in business, I had difficulty grasping how an industry going gangbusters could be in trouble. My experience had been the opposite.

The decision, we were told, was an exercise in cutting down on middle-class welfare. However, the rebate was not welfare but an incentive to encourage as many people as possible to go solar to cut carbon emissions. What difference does it make if those that do are rich, poor or middle class? The result is the same. If anything, the more affluent are likely to use more electricity and produce more carbon emissions. Ask Al Gore.

Equally confusing was the decision to whack the rich by pushing up the price of luxury cars. Now, I define the rich as anyone who earns more than me, so I'm all for making them suffer but surely the way to go is to use the tax system to encourage motorists to switch to fuel-efficient cars. Again, it doesn't much matter who cuts down carbon emissions as long as it happens. The rich can afford to pay and think how good they'll feel. The recent budget was the opportune time to abolish the tariff concessions on 4WDs. Introduced originally as a subsidy for farmers, it became a fashion statement for yuppies who rarely, if ever, went off-road. OK, I have one but so would you if you owned a wildlife sanctuary and had to drive up and down cliffs.

I've previously 'fessed up to being a climate-change sceptic which, these days, is marginally better than being a pedophile but I will support any measure that reduces pollution and congestion. If the Government is serious about climate change, then they should use the taxation system to lower the cost of fuel-efficient cars and increase the price of gas-guzzlers. There will never be a better time.

The most surprising omission from this, and past budgets, was the failure to end the financial advantage given to those who drive to work over those who use public transport. The former can claim all car expenses against their taxable income while the latter can't claim anything. Work vehicles aside, it should be the other way around.

Soaring fuel prices have already caused hundreds of thousands to switch to public transport but isn't that what we wanted? Reverse tax deductibility and it will snowball. Cities will become livable again and our transport system will be profitable.

Finally to an obsession that has been with me since I entered parliament 40 years ago: controlling our population growth. I was stunned at the recent news that next year Australia will bring in 300,000 immigrants. That's about double the average over the past 50 years, so we can expect to have 30 million within 20 years. Guess where most will live? In our capital cities, of course. Imagine Sydney and Melbourne each with about an extra three million. It's madness. As global warming and climate change are the direct result of individual demand for more and more energy then surely we should be trying to contain our population growth?

"We need more skilled workers," the pro-migration lobby cries. Fine, bring in skilled workers and limit the other categories.

I'm reluctant to give prime ministers advice, mainly because they don't take kindly to advice from feather dusters. Let me make an exception. Prime Minister, there is, at the moment, an extraordinary amount of goodwill in the nation towards you and your Government. Australians understand there is a crisis and are prepared to make sacrifices and suffer pain providing you take them into your confidence and the pain is fairly and evenly distributed. They also want consistency. At the moment there are too many contradictions.

At the risk of being melodramatic this is the time for you to go Churchillian and call for "blood, toil, tears and sweat", not palliatives and cosmetics.

Source




SPANISH PROPERTY OWNERS SUE GREENPEACE FOR CLIMATE DISASTER PREDICTION

A group of real estate developers and property owners in La Manga del Mar Menor - a spit of sandy, low-lying coastal land and Murcia's premier beach resort - are threatening to take Greenpeace to court over its graphic predictions of what global warming may do to the area, which they say have caused house prices to plummet. The lawsuit, which the plaintiffs plan to present unless Greenpeace agrees to an out of court settlement of almost EUR 30 million in damages, comes more than six months after La Manga featured prominently in a photo book published by the environmental organisation that was intended to shock Spain into action on climate change.

Along with photos of a dried up Ebro River in Zaragoza and a desert in an area of Valencia now filled with lemon and orange groves, the book, Photoclima, shows digitally modified photos of La Manga submerged in water with only the tops of hotels, apartment blocks and palm trees emerging from the blue Mediterranean. Greenpeace says the book is a graphic portrayal of the conclusions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has predicted that global warming will cause sea levels to rise around the world over the coming decades. "We want to create alarm and a call to action," Juan Lopez de Uralde, Greenpeace's director in Spain, said when the book was published.

The photographs certainly caused alarm in La Manga. According to Jose Angel Abad, a lawyer who has taken up the case of the area's aggrieved developers and home owners, prices have plunged by "50 percent" in recent months - a dramatic fall even in light of the end of a nationwide house price boom. "Greenpeace manipulated the expected rise in sea levels of half a metre to cause alarm. It has sunk the real estate market: no one is buying and everyone has put their apartments up for sale," Abad claims. He says his clients are seeking EUR 27 million in damages to cover the decrease in the value of their properties.

However, Greenpeace has no intention of settling out of court, arguing that the La Manga property owners are trying to "blackmail" it into footing the bill for their speculation in the real estate market. "They're trying to blame Greenpeace and its campaign for the problems they have encountered in a market saturated thanks to real estate speculation," Uralde said this week. "We are not going to be intimidated."

Source




Monsoon rains arrive early in India

Global cooling?

India's annual monsoon rains have swept across the country about two weeks ahead of schedule, their earliest for over a century. The rains are essential for the farms that provide a livelihood for 60 per cent of India's 1.1 billion people. Rainfall over the first two weeks of June was more than 40 per cent above average for the time of year, good news for consumer hit by rising food prices. But officials said that at least 23 people had died in floods, landslides and building collapses caused by the monsoon.

Subhash Chander Bhan, the director of the India Meteorological Department, said that widespread rainfall cooled northern India, with the region's high temperature today pegged at 93F (34F), 11F (5C) below normal. He said that the monsoon hit New Delhi yesterday - the earliest arrival of the rains in the city since recordkeeping began 108 years ago - and would soon cover almost the entire country, Bhan said. The early monsoon is not being linked to climate change.

The monsoon usually begins sweeping across the subcontinent in early June, but rarely reaches New Delhi and the rest of northern India before the beginning of July. In one district of Assam, at least 50,000 people had be taken to higher ground by rescuers in motorboats and rowing boats.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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17 June, 2008

ALL Greenie scenarios lead to disaster

So eat, drink and be merry?

Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve - and what the eventual impact might be on the earth's climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.

We gave each scenario a name. The most pessimistic was labelled "agree and ignore" - a world where governments meet to make commitments on climate change, but then backtrack or fail to comply with them. Sound familiar? It should: this scenario most closely resembles the past 10 years, and it projects emissions on an upward trend until 2045. A more optimistic scenario was termed "Kyoto plus": here governments make a strong agreement in Copenhagen in 2009, binding industrialised countries into a new round of Kyoto-style targets, with developing countries joining successively as they achieve "first world" status. This scenario represents the best outcome that can plausibly result from the current process - but ominously, it still sees emissions rising until 2030.

The third scenario - called "step change" - is worth a closer look. Here we envisaged massive climate disasters around the world in 2010 and 2011 causing a sudden increase in the sense of urgency surrounding global warming. Energised, world leaders ditch Kyoto, abandoning efforts to regulate emissions at a national level. Instead, they focus on the companies that produce fossil fuels in the first place - from oil and gas wells and coal mines - with the UN setting a global "upstream" production cap and auctioning tradable permits to carbon producers. Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall. The auctioning of permits raises trillions of dollars to be spent smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy and offsetting the impact of price rises on the poor. A clear long-term framework puts a price on carbon, giving business a strong incentive to shift investment into renewable energy and low-carbon manufacturing. Most importantly, a strong carbon cap means that global emissions peak as early as 2017.

This "upstream cap" approach is not a new idea, and our approach draws in particular on a forthcoming book by the environmental writer Oliver Tickell. However, conventional wisdom from governments and environmental groups alike insists that "Kyoto is the only game in town", and that proposing any alternative is dangerous heresy.

But let's look at the modelled temperature increases associated with each scenario. "Agree and ignore" sees temperatures rise by 4.85C by 2100 (with a 90% probability); for "Kyoto plus", it's 3.31C; and "step change" 2.89C. This is the depressing bit: no politically plausible scenario we could envisage will now keep the world below the danger threshold of two degrees, the official target of both the EU and UK. This means that all scenarios see the total disappearance of Arctic sea ice; spreading deserts and water stress in the sub-tropics; extreme weather and floods; and melting glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas. Hence the need to focus far more on adaptation: these are impacts that humanity is going to have to deal with whatever now happens at the policy level.

But the other great lesson is that sticking with current policy is actually a very risky option, rather than a safe bet. Betting on Kyoto could mean triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and crossing thresholds that involve massive methane release from melting Siberian permafrost. If current policy continues to fail - along the lines of the "agree and ignore" scenario - then 50% to 80% of all species on earth could be driven to extinction by the magnitude and rapidity of warming, and much of the planet's surface left uninhabitable to humans. Billions, not millions, of people would be displaced.

So which way will it go? Ultimately the difference between the scenarios is one of political will: the question now is whether humanity can summon up the courage and foresight to save itself, or whether business as usual - on climate policy as much as economics - will condemn us all to climatic oblivion.

Source




NEW TREE RESEARCH CHALLENGES PALEO-CLIMATE ASSUMPTIONS

Leaves are nearly as homeostatic as people! "Hockeystick" Mann hangs his hat on three rings. Goodbye hat! There is now yet another source of error in already shaky estimates. No doubt he will make the best of it by adding in yet another layer of assumptions, however

Trees in warm places might be able to shrug off global warming better than those in the UK and colder climes because they contain a remarkable "thermostat" that keeps them the same temperature. The temperature inside a healthy tree leaf is affected much less by outside temperature than originally believed, from England to the Caribbean, according to biologists at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers found that all tree leaves maintain a near constant temperature

They are concerned that trees in colder regions, such as Britain, could overheat as the climate warms as a result of this hitherto unrecognised mechanism. However, species adapted to warmer climates are likely to take their place. Surveying 39 tree species ranging in location from subtropical to northerly climates, researchers found a nearly constant temperature in tree leaves.

The conversion of light into chemical energy - photosynthesis - most likely occurs when leaf temperatures are about 21øC, and the outside temperature plays little, if any, role. This means that in colder climates leaf temperatures are elevated and in warmer climates tree leaves cool to keep the temperature just right. "It is not surprising to think that a polar bear in northern Canada and a black bear in Florida have the same internal body temperature," says Dr Brent Helliker, who reports the work with Suzanna Richter in the journal Nature. "Like us, they generate their own heat.

"However, to think that a black spruce in Canada and a Caribbean Pine in Puerto Rico have the same average leaf temperature is quite astonishing. "Our research suggests that they use a combination of purely physical phenomena - like the cooling from water evaporation or the warming caused by packing a lot of leaves together - to maintain leaf temperature, a phenomenon we call homeostatisis."

He stresses that this does not mean tree canopies maintain a constant temperature through a day or a season, but rather that this ideal temperature is a long-term target value.

However, the study suggests a new theory for how and why trees in the north will suffer from global warming, by overheating due to the mechanisms they have evolved to 'keep their leaves warm.' Additionally, weather forecasting models rely on accurate estimates of surface water evaporation, a lot of which comes from tree leaves. Knowing the temperature of these leaves is crucial to accurate predictions of future climate scenarios.

The research contradicts the longstanding assumption that temperature in a healthy leaf are coupled to ambient air conditions. For decades, scientists studying climate change have measured the oxygen isotope ratio in tree-ring cellulose to determine the ambient temperature and relative humidity of past climates.

This new work challenges the potential to reconstruct climate through tree-ring isotope analysis, since it suggests the method does not provide direct information about past climate, providing misleadingly warm estimates. The discovery will be a boon for ecologists because it opens the potential for the reconstruction of tree responses to both average climate and climate change over the last couple of centuries.

Source




BRITISH PARLIAMENTARIANS CLASH OVER CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The "apocalyptic visions" of environmentalists are not justified by the evidence about global warming, according to a Midland MP. John Maples (Con Stratford) told the House of Commons he did not believe scientists really understood what was happening to the earth's climate. He sounded a note of scepticism in a debate which highlighted the lack of consensus among Britain's politicians about the environment.

Black Country MP Rob Marris (Lab Wolverhampton South West) told colleagues to "wake up and smell the coffee" and accept the world was not going to stop creating the pollution believed to cause global warming. Most MPs and staff failed even to turn the lights off in the Commons toilets, he said. Britain should focus on how it was going to cope with global warming, instead of hoping it could avoid the problem by cutting back on carbon emissions, he said.

They were speaking during a debate on the Climate Change Bill, which will set a legally binding target for reducing UK carbon dioxide emissions by at least 26 per cent by 2020. Mr Maples said: "Until a couple of months ago, I was happily riding this consensus and accepted the received wisdom. I thought it was probably being exaggerated a bit, but then people usually do that. However, I then made the mistake of reading a few books and quite a lot of analysis ... that has led me to a couple of conclusions that trouble me a lot.

"I do not believe that the science is anything like as settled as the proponents of the Bill are making out. In fact, the scientists hedge their predictions with an awful lot of qualifications and maybes that those who invoke them often omit. "The science is a bit like medicine in the 1850s. The scientists are scratching the surface of something that they do not really understand, but no doubt will. "They are probably on to something, but nothing like the whole story. What they say does not justify any of the apocalyptic visions that we have heard set out."

He said none of the models scientists had developed to predict how carbon emissions might affect the environment could account for the climate change that had actually taken place. "The record shows that the climate warmed from 1920 to 1940, cooled from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 2000, and since 2000 ... has not risen at all. In the past seven years, global temperatures have not increased."

Mr Marris was also sceptical about plans to reduce carbon emissions, but for different reasons. He said: "I welcome the Bill and I accept that human activity is affecting the climate adversely. I am not a flat-earther." But he did not accept the "cosy consensus" that everything would be fine if plans were made to cut carbon dioxide emissions, he said. Emissions were currently going up rather than down, he added.

Some MPs were calling for an 80 per cent cut, he said. "I say to honourable members, `wake up and smell the coffee'. We are not going to achieve 80 per cent - it will be hard to reach 60 per cent, if we consider the number of air trips our constituents make."

Global warming would affect Britain's plans, wildlife and food production, he said. "They will affect issues such as building design and planning regulations; roads and railways, with rails buckling in the heat; water supply, with a need for new reservoirs; what we have to do about coastal defences with rising sea levels; inland flooding, which we saw dramatically last year and which will only get worse; possible civil unrest and its security implications, which other countries and, potentially, we will face; and international development."

Source




NORTHERN IRELAND'S NEW ENVIRONMENT MINISTER IS AN OUTSPOKEN CLIMATE SCEPTIC

There has been a mixed reaction to East Antrim representative Sammy Wilson's appointment as Environment Minister, following a reshuffle of the DUP's Stormont team. Amid the back-slapping over the Assemblyman and MP's elevation to the Executive has come sharp criticism from leading environmentalists over the local politician's "sceptical" views on climate change.

Mr. Wilson, who replaces DUP colleague Arlene Foster in the post, said he was "very happy" to take on a job in which he could deal with issues affecting the people of East Antrim. He cited in particular the planning system which had caused "much frustration for many people". Mr. Wilson added: "I am also keen to ensure that we protect the beauty of Northern Ireland and keep it in its current state for future generations to enjoy. "There is also an important job be done with local government: I want to see efficient councils in Northern Ireland which provide good services and are accountable for what they do." ...

Mr. Wilson's promotion brought a less favourable response from other quarters. The Green Party expressed disappointment at Mr. Wilson's "climate change sceptic views" and urged him to refrain from commenting on the subject until he has acquainted himself with the findings of the Inter-governmental Panel on climate change.

Said Green Party MLA Brian Wilson: "Sammy Wilson has a duty to the people of Northern Ireland and the environment to ensure that his comments are evidence-based and not the uninformed babble of someone who should be spending more time reading his First Day briefs." He urged the East Antrim politician to attend UN talks on climate change, adding: "No serious scientist has attributed all climate change to human activity. "Even the school children of Northern Ireland understand the distinction."

Mr. Wilson's appointment also caused raised eyebrows within environmental group, Friends of the Earth. Describing the move as "a mistake," the organisation's Northern Ireland director, John Woods, commented: "Mr Wilson is well known for his sceptical views on climate change. "It is difficult to see how a Minister who holds such views in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence could be a credible protector of our environment. But the test will be how Sammy Wilson approaches his new responsibilities. "The jury is out on this appointment - he has a good deal to prove."

Responding to the criticism, the new Environment Minister said: "I am not convinced and I don't think that there is any firm evidence to show that all climate change is due to CO2 emissions. "I think we have to make sure we do not allow the agenda for NI to be dominated by the people who can sometimes be described as green fanatics."

More here




OIL SHORTAGE A MYTH, SAYS INDUSTRY INSIDER

There is more than twice as much oil in the ground as major producers say, according to a former industry adviser who claims there is widespread misunderstanding of the way proven reserves are calculated.

Although it is widely assumed that the world has reached a point where oil production has peaked and proven reserves have sunk to roughly half of original amounts, this idea is based on flawed thinking, said Richard Pike, a former oil industry man who is now chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Current estimates suggest there are 1,200 billion barrels of proven global reserves, but the industry's internal figures suggest this amounts to less than half of what actually exists. The misconception has helped boost oil prices to an all-time high, sending jitters through the market and prompting calls for oil-producing nations to increase supply to push down costs.

Flying into Japan for a summit two days after prices reached a record $139 a barrel, energy ministers from the G8 countries yesterday discussed an action plan to ease the crisis.

Explaining why the published estimates of proven global reserves are less than half the true amount, Dr Pike said there was anecdotal evidence that big oil producers were glad to go along with under-reporting of proven reserves to help maintain oil's high price. "Part of the oil industry is perfectly familiar with the way oil reserves are underestimated, but the decision makers in both the companies and the countries are not exposed to the reasons why proven oil reserves are bigger than they are said to be," he said. Dr Pike's assessment does not include unexplored oilfields, those yet to be discovered or those deemed too uneconomic to exploit.

The environmental implications of his analysis, based on more than 30 years inside the industry, will alarm environmentalists who have exploited the concept of peak oil to press the urgency of the need to find greener alternatives. "The bad news is that by underestimating proven oil reserves we have been lulled into a false sense of security in terms of environmental issues, because it suggests we will have to find alternatives to fossil fuels in a few decades," said Dr Pike. "We should not be surprised if oil dominates well into the twenty-second century. It highlights a major error in energy and environmental planning - we are dramatically underestimating the challenge facing us," he said.

Proven oil reserves are likely to be far larger than reported because of the way the capacity of oilfields is estimated and how those estimates are added to form the proven reserves of a company or a country. Companies add the estimated capacity of oil fields in a simple arithmetic manner to get proven oil reserves. This gives a deliberately conservative total deemed suitable for shareholders who do not want proven reserves hyped, Dr Pike said.

However, mathematically it is more accurate to add the proven oil capacity of individual fields in a probabilistic manner based on the bell-shaped statistical curve used to estimate the proven, probable and possible reserves of each field. This way, the final capacity is typically more than twice that of simple, arithmetic addition, Dr Pike said. "The same also goes for natural gas because these fields are being estimated in much the same way. The world is understating the environmental challenge and appears unprepared for the difficult compromises that will have to be made."

Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone, a book on peak oil, is not convinced that Dr Pike is right. "The flow rates from the existing projects are the key. Capacity coming on stream falls fast beyond 2011," Dr Leggett said. "On top of that, if the big old fields begin collapsing, the descent in supply will hit the world very hard."

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Global Warming Alarmists Like High Gas Prices

Gas has finally hit $4 a gallon. Most Americans are upset about the cost, but to some journalists, environmental activists and politicians, high gas prices are good news. Even though the media have complained about "sky-high" gas prices, reporting the pain caused at the pump, they have declared energy conservation the "clear winner" from rising prices and have even called for higher prices to boost the "green" movement, as The New York Times did as early as 2005.

Not very long ago, CNNMoney.com Managing Editor Allen Wastler called for "a tax to make it $4 a gallon right now." At the time - April 30, 2007 - gas averaged $2.95 a gallon, meaning Wastler called for more than $1 in extra gasoline taxes "because when you saw us flirting with $3, all the sudden we got a burst in hybrid production, we got a burst in ethanol production."

Meanwhile, elected officials have offered short-term proposals to lower gas prices - like Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) summer "gas tax holiday" - and long-term proposals to hike gas prices, like Rep. John Dingell's (D-Mich.) idea to raise the federal gas tax by 50 cents per gallon. And environmental activists overtly praise pain at the pump and lobby for more federal taxes on fuel. "The biggest lie in America [sic] politics today is to say you care deeply about global warming and advocate for the price of gas to go down. Those are mutually exclusive concepts," AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson said in the April 25 Newsweek, pointing out the great hypocrisy of anyone in the "green movement" complaining about high gas prices.

The media have had it both ways, bashing Big Oil for allegedly making prices high while praising the same high prices for the effect they may have on warming-related emissions. "[I]t's time to pay a price to curb global warming," the Christian Science Monitor declared in a May 12 editorial. "Rather than prevent $4-a-gallon gas now, legislators should welcome it." "Congress must impose a `carbon' tax on fossil-fuel use," the newspaper's editors said, "from electric utilities to home furnaces to gas-guzzling vehicles." Brian O'Connor, the Money & Life editor for the Detroit News, wrote in a May 31 column that high gas prices would be good for Michigan's struggling economy. In its "Conventional Wisdom" feature May 22, Newsweek declared energy conservation "the clear winner as oil creeps toward $200 a barrel."

The media have been pushing for more expensive gas for years - all while complaining about high gas prices, as CNN did on "American Morning" May 23 when host John Roberts repeated a viewer's complaint that high gas prices forced him to abandon satellite television. Wastler wasn't the first to suggest more gas taxes on CNN. In April 2006, Miles O'Brien said there "could be a good argument for a gas tax in all of this to help pay for these alternative fuels." "I hope gas prices go as high as they have to go to get the rest of these morons off the road in these big Hummers," CNN's Jack Cafferty said on "In the Money" March 25, 2006.

Members of the media have been waiting a very long time for prices to hit $4. "For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy - with no political strings attached," Wired.com contributing editor Spencer Reiss wrote in December 2005. "And smile when you see a big black $3 or $4 out in front at the gas pump. Those innovators need all the encouragement they can get. Shale oil, uranium, sunlight - there's enough energy out there for a dozen planets."

In October 2005, when gas was around $2.85 a gallon, The New York Times called expensive gas "the best solution" to terrorist, environmental and economic threats. "The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina high of $3-plus a gallon," the newspaper's editors wrote in an editorial.

In his 2000 book "Earth in the Balance," former Vice President Al Gore advocated increasing energy taxes on consumers to decrease the incentive to pollute. Seven years earlier, in 1993, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to increase the federal gas tax to 18.4 cents, where it stands today. Elected officials in Congress are still working to harness the power of federal taxes to fund the "green" agenda and have been working to raise the price of gas even as it rises due to market forces.

In August 2007, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., floated the idea of increasing the federal gas tax by 50 cents per gallon. The Christian Science Monitor called him "courageous." Dingell shelved the plan in April 2008, when gas was nearing $3.50 a gallon, saying "now is not the time for us to put any additional burden on the working families of Michigan or this nation."

In January 2008, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, a group created by Congress in 2005 to study surface transportation needs, recommended a 40-cent increase in the gas tax spread out over five years for infrastructure upgrades.

Recently the Senate rejected the Lieberman-Warner "cap-and-trade" bill, legislation aimed at reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Opponents warned the measure would lead to increases at the pump of anywhere from $1.50 to $5 per gallon.

Politicians like Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican nominee for president, have publicly supported efforts to reduce the cost of gasoline. McCain proposed a widely criticized "gas tax holiday" that would have eliminated the federal gas tax for the summer. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., formerly a contender for the Democratic nomination, supported a similar plan that would have added a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies. Her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), now the Democrats' candidate, opposed the gas tax holiday and also supports taxing oil companies more.

But all three support global warming-related energy control legislation that would increase the cost of energy, leading some - like AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson in Newsweek - to point out the mutual exclusivity of global warming legislation and lower energy prices.

Alternative forms of energy are less efficient and usually less attractive to an open market than oil and coal, but higher gas prices give environmentalists an opportunity to exploit pain at the pump. NBC's Anne Thompson noted on the March 12 "Nightly News" that higher energy prices would be good for alternative forms of energy like solar and wind power, which can cost two to four times as much as coal and oil.

In May 2006, Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown proposed a gasoline tax hike of 30 cents per gallon every year for the next 10 years. He said higher prices would spur investment in alternative energy and public transportation and decrease dependence on foreign oil. In March 2008, as gas prices rose closer and closer to $4, Brown maintained that an increased tax was a good idea, telling Fox News that "a tax on gas is a way to reduce dependence on import oil, reduce traffic congestion and reduce carbon emissions."

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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16 June, 2008

How can so many be so wrong?

After reading some of the False Alarm website, which is highly critical of the scientific "consensus" that humans are the principal cause of global warming, a friend sent me an email the other day that read, in part: "How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about this (if your premise is correct)? I don't think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. Has there ever been another case when so many "leading" scientific minds got it so wrong?"

This is a really good question. I'm not a climate scientist (but, then, neither is Al Gore); I'm an ex-journalist, now an academic. I teach professional writing. How dare I claim to know more than, say, the 2,000 or so scientists who contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports? These are the experts, after all, and they say that humans are the principal cause of global warming at the moment. How could the experts possibly be wrong?

Of course, many, many people (not just scientists) have been wrong before on many, many topics. Until the 1960s, few scientists believed in continental drift. Millions of intelligent people continue to believe in communism even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. After Rachel Carson's Silent Spring came out in 1962, many, many people believed DDT was bad when in fact, if used properly, DDT could have saved millions of lives in places like Africa.

Science is a process of systematically weeding out the wrong ideas and replacing them with better wrong ideas, as it were. But getting on to global warming

How can so many be so wrong?

Well, for a start, here's a comment from the Summary of the IPCC's 2007 report: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.

The only problem with this statement is that it isn't true: it's now widely accepted in scientific circles that the climate system hasn't warmed since 1998 although, curiously enough, this hasn't been announced to the public. Why not? You'd think it would be in big, bold, front-page headlines: GLOBAL WARMING OVER (at least for now). Yet, somehow, the writers of the 2007 IPCC report managed to find increases in warming when the planet wasn't warming, which was a triumph of ideology over fact.And, when Official Climate Science did discover that it isn't warming, they tried to keep this information from the public as much as possible by ignoring it, or by saying the flat-lined warming is just "temporary" (which it may be).

Too many scientific careers (and billions in scientific grants) are riding on the hypothesis that humans are the main cause of warming to give it up easily.

How can so many be so wrong?

Ten years of no warming is a bit more than the normal year-to-year fluctuations - it's more like a trend - but none of the IPCC's sophisticated computer models predicted it. Yet, since carbon emissions are continuing to increase, the trend should be continuous warming if humans are the principal cause of climate change, as the IPCC believes (although it puts its bias in probabilistic language-"it is highly likely that.").

How can so many be so wrong?

Here's the IPCC's mission statement: The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation

There's nothing wrong with having a mission; it's unavoidable. The IPCC is a kind of global-warming think tank and most think tanks have a mission. The mission of the Fraser Institute, for example, is to promote free markets. The mission of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is to promote socialism, although its mission statement doesn't say this directly. Both seek to be as "objective" as possible, but they start from different premises.

Similarly, the mission of the IPCC is to investigate and promote the idea that human activities are the main cause of global warming. Its mandate isn't to explore the idea that perhaps humans aren't at fault. However, a key difference between the IPCC and the Fraser Institute, or the IPCC and the Centre for Policy Alternatives, is that most readers of a Fraser Institute or CPA document know that the organization has a bias and take that into account in assessing the information they are receiving. (3) The IPCC, on the other hand, promotes itself to the public as a fully scientific, unbiased source of information on climate change, when, in fact, as anyone who carefully reads its mission statement (few, apparently, have bothered) would know, it is not.

How can so many be so wrong?

The next sentence of the IPCC's mission statement reads: "Review by experts and governments is an essential part of the IPCC process" . Yet, surely if the IPCC was truly taking an "objective" look at climate change from a balanced, purely scientific perspective, its findings would not be subject to "review by governments," which are political bodies with political, not scientific, agendas. Does anyone today believe that Galileo should have had to present his findings to the Church before publishing them? True science is not subject to review by governments.

How can so many be so wrong?

No truly objective scientific body would be striving for "consensus" in its reports, although we expect consensus from think-tank publications - the Fraser Institute isn't going to put out a document calling for the nationalization of the Canadian oil industry, for example. This striving for consensus meant that the IPCC was not interested, right from the start, in giving legitimacy to views that didn't fit its mandate. For example, the 1990 IPCC report said of dissenters: "Whilst every attempt was made by the Lead Authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus".

Yet reaching a consensus was the IPCC's task when it was started in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. What consensus? The one approved by the politicians who bankrolled the process, which is why, again, and incredibly, the IPCC's conclusions undergo "review by governments."(5) That is, the IPCC has to meet a political (ideological) as well as a scientific agenda.

Since the IPCC's mission isn't to investigate possible natural causes of climate change, but to determine the role of "human-induced" climate change, it's not surprising that the IPCC finds what it seeks. How do we know there is bias rather than objective science at work? Because when scientists who aren't part of the "consensus" suggest other, natural mechanisms for climate change, they are not only not given a respectful hearing, as you'd expect from disinterested scientists, they are denounced as heretics.

For example, when physicist Henrick Svensmark suggested that cosmic rays might be one explanation for climate change, former IPCC chairman Bert Bolin denounced his theory as "extremely naive and irresponsible," and another scientist at a conference called it "dangerous."(6) Similarly, research questioning the validity of ice-core CO2 readings was declared "immoral." These responses are reminiscent more of religion than science.

What is the proper scientific attitude toward new ideas? Here's what philosopher of science Karl Popper had to say: If you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can; and if you can design some experimental test which you think might refute my assertion, I shall gladly, and to the best of my powers, help you to refute it.

This is the opposite of the IPCC's approach, which is to shout down or ignore critics, and even make it difficult for them to continue their research or get published. When the Official Science peer-reviewed journals refuse to publish articles by skeptics, as they do, Official Science can then say the skeptical science doesn't have peer-reviewed publications: it's a Catch-22. Official Climate Science has made up its mind as to the (human) culprit in global warming and isn't interested in any other suspects.

All of the above may be wrong, of course: the IPCC may be doing a totally accurate, bang-up job of assessing the science on climate change. Unfortunately, the process - a bias toward human causes of climate change and "review by governments" - means that the IPCC is not the objective scientific body it presents itself as to the public. It is driven by agendas other than science......

Let me conclude by saying this:

I can't claim to be an expert on climate science. But, as a former journalist, I do claim an ability to know when someone is not dealing honestly with the public. And everything I have read since I began my research convinces me more and more, as my book title argues, that most of what we, the public, have been told about global warming is misleading, exaggerated, or plain wrong, including the claim that the planet is warming.

You don't need to be a climate expert make this discovery, as I have, but you need time and patience and some idea of where to look. Of one fact I am now sure: the public won't get a balanced, objective viewpoint from the Official Climate Science "consensus."

How can so many be wrong? The real question, once we've seen the way Official Climate Science spins the facts, is how can we be sure anything it tells us is right?

Much more here

A comment from radiochemist Alan Siddons [alan618034@earthlink.net]:

Let me propose yet another reason. The IPCC and other authorities commit the same error that most people do. The earth is enclosed in a perfect thermal insulator, the vacuum of space. Since most people believe that space is incredibly cold, however, they've also been misled into believing that the earth is kept warm by an atmospheric blanket which inhibits the energy emitted to space - an outmoded conjecture now disproved by satellite observations. But a desperate belief in "the greenhouse effect" still persists, for people feel that isolating earth from the "coldness" of empty space is the only way of sustaining the earth's warmth. Short of installing a gigantic mirror around our planet, however, nothing but space can preserve the earth's temperature longer. That's how so many people can be so wrong, skeptics included. Their ideas about space come from science fiction.




Solution Found to Global Warming

The post below is not wholly logical but it is at least as logical as Warmism

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reports that parks in cities are up to 12 degrees centigrade cooler than commercial centers. A ten percent increase in green areas reduces the average city temperature by about 4 degrees; offsetting the UN climate committee's extreme predictions of temperature increases over the next century.

Many scientists have criticized the UN predictions for lack of correspondence with real climate data. Al Gore and others have suggested an extreme political agenda in response to the predictions. The political agenda has been criticized for its projected devastating effect on western civilization without any corresponding benefit. Even assuming the UN predictions are correct, new thinking about the problem is demonstrating that there are effective ways to deal with city heat without such extreme political measures.

Source




More Signs of the Sun Slowing Down

Says meteorologist Watts. See the original for links and graphics

A few months ago, I had plotted the Average Geomagnetic Planetary Index (Ap) which is a measure of the magnetic field strength but also daily index determined from running averages of eight Ap index values. Call it a common yardstick (or meterstick) for solar magnetic activity.

I had noted that there was a curious step function in 2005, almost as if something had "switched off".Today, since it is fathers' day, and I get to do whatever I want, I chose to revisit this graph. Later I plan to take my children to launch model rockets, but for now, here are some interesting new things I've found.

First, I've updated the original Ap graph to June 2008. Source data, NASA Space Weather Prediction Center

As you can see, the Ap Index has continued along at the low level (slightly above zero) that was established during the drop in October 2005. As of June 2008, we now have 32 months of the Ap hovering around a value just slightly above zero, with occasional blips of noise. Since it is provided in the same dataset, I decided to also plot the smoothed Ap Index. I had noted to myself back in February that the smoothed Ap Index had dropped to minus 1.0. I figured it was just an artifact of the smoothing algorithm, but today that number remains there, and there doesn't appear to be any change even though we've had a bit of noise in March that put the Ap Index back up to 10 for that month. I also plotted my own 24 month smoothing window plot, shown in magenta.

I find it curious that the smoothed value provided by SWPC remains at -1. I figure if it is a software error, they would have noted and fixed it by now, and if they haven't then perhaps they are standing by the number. Odd.

While I was searching for something that could explain this, I came across this plot from NOAA's NGDC which was used to illustrate solar storm frequency related to sunspots

But what I found was most interesting was the data file they provided, which had the number of days in a year where the Ap Index exceeded 40... What is most striking is that since 1932, there have not been ANY years prior to 2007 that have zero data. The closest was 1996

Now we have almost two years. I also decided to plot the 10.7 centimeter band solar radio flux, also a metric of solar activity. It is in the same SWPC dataset file as the Ap Index, in columns 8 and 9. Oddly the smoothed 10.7 CM flux value provided by SWPC also has dropped precipitously and stayed there. I also provided my own 24 month wind smoothed value which is plotted in magenta. Like the smoothed Ap Index, it has also stayed that way a few months. This is truly odd, either the smoothed value that SWPC provides is accurate based on their algorithm, and they know it, or the value is just plain wrong and nobody has caught it for months. My running 24 month window curve suggests the SWPC smoothed values are wrong.

Either way it appears we continue to slide into a deeper than normal solar minima, one not seen in decades. Given the signs, I think we are about to embark upon a grand experiment, over which we have no control

Source




No Drilling. No New Refineries. Get a Horse!

I keep wondering how long it will take Americans to connect the dots and figure out why the most powerful economy the world has ever seen cannot manage to drill for oil in its own backyard and then get it refined nearby.

The news on June 10, if anyone was paying attention, was about the way the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups were able to thwart the plans of ConocoPhillips to expand its refinery in Roxana, Illinois. An appeal to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was upheld because, said the EPA, its air permit, previously granted, just did not meet all the excruciating requirements involved.

For the record, ConocoPhillips was and is prepared to invest an estimated $1 billion to add a second coker, otherwise known as a crude oil processor. The company wants to expand in order to process Canadian tar sands oil. These days it refines approximately 306,000 barrels of oil per day to produce gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, asphalt and other products."

This explains in part why ExxonMobil has just announced it will sell off its gas stations because the real money is made "upstream" as they say in the oil industry. The profits from the "downstream", in this case at the pump, are so small as to be a drag on earnings.

All those members of Congress that want to punish the oil companies for making a profit should check the balance sheet. From 2003 to 2007, ExxonMobil paid taxes (in all forms) in the amount of $64.7 billion. This actually exceeded its U.S. earnings by more than $19 billion! You do the math. Exploration, discovery, and drilling are where the money is. Wisely, this company has diversified into chemicals and a variety of petroleum related products.

Meanwhile, the only thing that the Greens are pumping is more hot air about global warming. According to the Sierra Club, "climate change is decimating many species" and pushing Congress to pass the Global Warming Wildlife Survival Act. Another name for it might as well be the "Do Not Drill for Oil, Mine for Coal, and Build a Pipeline for Natural Gas Act." The world is not running out of polar bears, but Americans who have to pay $4 plus for a gallon of gasoline are beginning-at last-to run out of patience.

Over at Friends of the Earth, they are very annoyed that America's high school students studying civics might read a new textbook that raises questions about global warming and/or climate change, based on real science, not the lies they and other Greens have been putting out for decades. FOE is currently flogging something they call "climate equity." According to them, "The next President must acknowledge that the U.S. has contributed more global warming pollution to our atmosphere than any other nation."

Oh yeah? What about those coal-fired plants that China can't build fast enough to provide electricity? Or comparable efforts in India to meet the needs of a growing economy? In the end, the Greens are utterly opposed to any development, i.e., modernization, anywhere and they don't care how many lies they have to tell.

Actually, they don't have to worry that much. The next President will either be a Democrat who wants to further destroy what's left of the oil industry in America or a Republican who believes global warming is real.

The Greens here in America don't want you to drive your car, your truck, your tractor or that big Harley-Davidson hog. They don't want any oil company to drill for oil anywhere on or offshore of America. They don't want any new refineries built. In short, get a horse!

Source




The Climate Alarmist Manifesto

Just as class struggle forms the nucleus of Marxism, so does it sit at the very core of the Left's climate alarmism. At a glance, the regressive nature of fiscal Carbon control schemes, be they taxation or cap-and-trade, would appear to be antithetical to liberal thinking. But beneath the veneer of both the domestic and international green agenda lies a devious wealth-redistribution plan compared to which all predecessors pale.

Take, for instance, the recently tabled Lieberman-Warner Bill. The Act would have empowered government to control key aspects of -- while extracting trillions of dollars from -- our economy by forcing the auction of greenhouse gas (GHG) credits upon industry and power companies. And, while the left lauds penalizing bourgeois "big business" success, advocates for the poor were quick to point out that the inescapable consequent increase in energy costs across the board (electricity, home heating, gasoline, etc) would have placed a disproportionate burden upon proletarian lower wage-earners.

Ah, but the Democrats -- champions of the downtrodden that they are -- were just as quick to respond. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) offered a substitute amendment bearing her name, Subtitle I of which provided "Financial Relief for Consumers" as follows:

"The bill sets aside a nearly $800 billion tax relief fund through 2050, which will help consumers in need of assistance related to energy costs. The precise details of the relief will be developed by the Finance committee."

And if Senator Boxer's plan of doling out $800 billion in industry profits to the "needy" sounds like class warfare to you, just wait until you hear what's brewing down the hall.

Late last month, chairman of the Special House Committee On Global Warming, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), unveiled even harsher climate change legislation. Unlike Lieberman-Warner, which would have at least eased industry and power companies into compliance over time, Markey's bill would require permits for virtually all emissions right from day one, in a crazy effort to roll atmospheric CO2 back to levels 85 percent below 2005 by 2050 (that's 15% more than even the doomed Senate bill).

Also unlike its Senate counterpart, Markey's Investing in Climate Action and Protection Act (ICAP) requires no amendments to begin redistributing the profits of domestic commerce. Actually, Subtitle A: Climate Trust Tax Credits and Rebates is quite clear in describing how $4.3 trillion (which represents an estimated 55 to 58.5% of auction proceeds) will:

"be used for refundable tax credits and rebates for middle- and low-income households, to compensate for any increase in energy costs resulting from the bill. Tax credits will be used to reach middle-income wage earners and senior citizens, and cash rebates -- distributed through the Electronic Benefits Transfer systems used for food stamps -- will be used to reach low-income households. All households earning under $110,000 will be eligible. Virtually all costs from climate regulation will be covered for households earning under $70,000, with benefit levels phasing out gradually for households earning $70,000 to $110,000."

Of course, under the cloak of a "market-based" solution, cap-and-trade's government command-and-control system is, as George Will so brilliantly describes it, already nothing more than "a huge tax hidden in a bureaucratic labyrinth of opaque permit transactions." Adding unabashedly obvious wealth-redistribution to the formula merely strips any fa‡ade of capitalism's skeleton beneath.

It seems that giddy anticipation of further power gains next year -- combined with hope of the most liberal among them living in the White House -- has caused many Dems to lower their guard with respect to their aims. Just last month, before a House Judiciary Committee, Maxine Waters apparently cared little for Shell Oil President John Hofmeister's response to her questions about guaranteeing a drop in oil prices were he allowed to drill off US shores. Visibly flustered, the California Democrat let slip to an astonished audience:

"And guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be all about socialize -- uh, uh, would be about basically taking over and the government running all of your companies."

What still escapes me is just why anyone might be surprised by her faux-pas. Such is precisely the Left's rationale for jumping aboard the bogus GHG bandwagon in such earnest almost to the very man and woman.

In the section Das Klima Kapital of my recent piece celebrating the death of Lieberman-Warner for its lack of scientific merit, I also pointed out why cap-and-trade is the perfect liberal synergy of environmentalism and socialism:

"In 1867, Karl Marx argued that capitalism's cycle of labor exploitation could not endlessly sustain itself and would ultimately be its doom. Modern greenies insist that capitalism's cycle of environmental exploitation will not endlessly sustain itself and will ultimately be not only its doom -- but the entire planet's."

But, indeed, the reach of this ecosocialism extends far beyond our borders. Internationally, the Left has always accused capitalist western nations of growing fat through the exploitation of poorer countries. And they now argue that those same fat-cat nations have exploited the planet to the brink of doom, also to the simultaneous exclusion and detriment of those less fortunate.

And for their imaginary sins of both economic and ecological abuse at both the national and global level, liberal-elitists have decreed that now is the time for the successful to atone. Translation: "developed" nations must not only clean up their own mess, but also pay to help "undeveloped" nations clean up theirs.

Much as Vladmir Lenin promised in 1920 that centralized electrification and "advanced technology" would abolish "the division between town and country" and "conquer completely and decisively the backwardness of the countryside, its scattered economy and its ignorance," so do the ecosocialists plan to uplift "developing nations." But unlike the first soviet leader's GOELRO project, which coalesced Russian scientists and peasant cooperatives to bring modernizing power to their own country, contemporary ecosocialists would simply play Robin Hood with the wealth and patented technology of "prosperous" nations under the false pretense of "saving the planet."

Through Carbon trading, taxes, mandatory "clean energy" technology transfers, and other austere regulations, proposed UN-controlled international climate treaties to succeed Kyoto would penalize wealthy, innovative, capitalist countries while subsidizing poorer nations with waivers and foreign aid. And with most "good governance" requirements for beneficiary nations lifted, this equates to coerced underwriting of military regimes, dictatorships and, of course, socialists.

In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx defined the basis for a communist society with the words "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." What a marvelous creed for today's climate alarmists, who would steal from flourishing countries, enterprises and citizens in order to give to those they deem chronically underprivileged. And, by spreading their woefully unproven yet widely accepted GHG horror stories, would do so on a global level that Marx and Lenin themselves dared only dream of. And would wield more centralized control of international economies than either ever dared envision. In his book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, Vaclav Klaus wrote:

"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.''

With all due respect to the wise Czech President, they are indeed one in the same.

Source




The Chilling Costs of Climate Catastrophism

Comment from Australia

VACLAV KLAUS has given us a salutary reminder of the seriousness of the danger Australia is now facing from the "warmists". Both the Rudd government and the federal Opposition, currently led by Brendan Nelson, have promised us an emissions trading scheme; in the case of Prime Minister Rudd, by 2010. The responsibility of advising the federal and state governments on how such a decarbonisation regime should be established lies with Professor Ross Garnaut, a noted economist and diplomat, and a passionate advocate on the benefits of free trade and of the advantages of an ever-closer relationship between Australia and China.

The Garnaut Inquiry has issued two interim reports and Garnaut has given a number of papers to professional audiences in recent months. Three observations emerge from immersion in these documents.

The first is the childlike, unquestioning belief which Garnaut has in the IPCC story of global warming caused by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, which, if not curtailed, will result in climatic and economic disaster for the whole world. Many people have noted the religious-like quality of faith in this story of human sin (particularly of Western mankind); the calamitous consequences following failure to repent; and the possibility of redemption through repentance and sacrifice under the wise guidance of green prophets such as Al Gore, James Hansen, Bob Brown, Peter Garrett, and now Ross Garnaut.

The second is the refusal to face the political reality posed by Chinese and Indian "intransigence" in the face of demands from the West, the EU in particular, to decarbonise their economies. India and China are embarked on trajectories of extraordinary and historically unprecedented economic growth. China is commissioning two new coal-fired power stations every week. Both countries are also operating and building nuclear power stations. China has ten operating nuclear power plants, one under construction, and six planned; India has fifteen operating nuclear power stations, eight under construction, and four planned. These are not countries devoid of technological and scientific expertise. The idea that they should give up their dash to modernity has been repeatedly and emphatically rejected by their most senior political leaders.

The third is the Orwellian use of the words market and price to persuade people to accept a degree of control over their lives which is unprecedented in the Anglosphere, except in time of war. This control is the necessary consequence of permanent decarbonisation regimes which will dramatically lower living standards.

The foundation on which the Garnaut (and Stern) prescriptions for global decarbonisation are based has to be repeated. It is taken as given that global temperatures have increased, are increasing, and will continue to increase to catastrophic levels because, and only because, mankind is emitting greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, and that these emissions have caused atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to rise, and global temperatures to increase as a consequence.

In order to save the planet (redemption in religious terms), mankind must stop "polluting" the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. This means reducing the current emission rate of approximately 25 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum (7 gigatonnes of carbon) to 5 or 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. There is competition between the various prophets of decarbonisation as to the extent of the purification process required to save the planet. They are united, however, in the great urgency of the task. Delay in decarbonisation, they insist, will be disastrous, and they conjure up a "tipping point", some magical proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which will bring about runaway heating, or alternatively, perhaps, the next ice age. The tipping point is rather like the second coming of Christ, that final moment in history when Christ will come again in glory and power to judge the world.

As I argued previously (Quadrant, March 2008), such massive decarbonisation can only take place if the entire world's current stock of coal-fired power stations is replaced with nuclear power stations by 2050 (the currently favoured target date). At the same time all motor vehicles, ships and aeroplanes currently using liquid hydrocarbons (kerosene, petrol and distillate) as fuel for their engines, will have to convert to hydrogen, or accept batteries in lieu of internal combustion engines. The only alternative approach which will achieve the degree of decarbonisation the Greens and Garnaut demand, is to return to the living standards which were characteristic of Britain and North America in the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution. China and India have rejected any such option.

Returning to the way of life of Adam Smith's Britain and George Washington's North America is not a politically feasible project, at least not in the Western democracies. So the Greens and their allies in this project go to considerable trouble to disguise their ambitions. One tactic they use to disguise the cost is to conduct econometric studies which predict very modest decline in GDP over the decarbonisation period, or even no decline at all. The fundamental problem with this is that per capita GDP is not a reliable measure of living standards and prosperity. As Frederick Bastiat pointed out over a century ago, deliberately smashing windows and then producing and installing replacements will contribute to GDP, but at the same time reduce living standards, because the resources required to build and install the new windows will have to be diverted from other more productive activities.

The decarbonisation parallel is that measured GDP will not be affected by the extra resources required to build wind farms relative to the resources required to build the same quantity of coal-fired capacity. However, because those extra resources will have to be diverted from producing other goods and services of value to consumers, the building of wind farms will, other things being equal, reduce living standards. Accordingly, using estimates of changes in GDP as an indicator of the costs of shifting away from carbon-based energy sources is not only misleading, but shoddy economic practice. Garnaut is guilty of this practice, a misdemeanour made worse by the way in which his modellers "assume" in their models that the price signals embodied in ever-rising prices for coal-based electricity and liquid fuels for transport will bring forth, in a cargo-cult fashion, new technologies which have not yet been invented, let alone deployed, but which will suddenly enable the world to reach a new, green, nirvana, and take the place of the old and proscribed technologies.

Arnold Zellner, one of the giants in the development of econometric analysis, relates this amusing story in a long interview published in the International Journal of Forecasting:

"Steve Peck and I simulated the Federal Reserve- MIT-PENN econometric model of the US economy that had over 170 nonlinear equations. Our simulation experiments showed that the model had very strange properties that were unknown to the model builders. From these results we concluded that the model was not safe for use in analysing serious economic problems."

Further he commented:

"I do not know of a complicated model in any area of science that performs well in explanation and prediction, and have challenged many audiences to give me examples. So far, I have not heard about a single one. Certainly the large scale econometric models and complicated VARs [very awful regressions] have not been very successful in explanation and prediction."

We can conclude that the debate about decarbonisation, and the various emissions trajectories which could be mandated to achieve the required state of purity, cannot be illuminated by econometric models. We are concerned here with the most basic building blocks of Western civilisation. We are entirely dependent upon liquid hydro-carbons for our transport needs and upon electricity for our energy and communications requirements. If petrol supplies are curtailed, all economic activity is seriously affected. If electricity supplies are shut down as a result of storm damage, for example, then those affected find that their lives are completely disrupted.

Much more here

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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15 June, 2008

"The current state of global warming modeling has been rather poor"

New York City is home to some of the world's most attractive models; it is also home to some of the least attractive ones, presented yearly to the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The current state of global warming modeling has been rather poor, detracting both from research indicating anthropogenic influence and that which contraindicates it. The result is that the debate about climate control, an issue which effects major economic policy decisions, is monopolized by this distraction.

Microsoft Research ecologist Drew Purves acknowledges that this problem is one of the largest ones confronting global warming researchers. He and researchers at Princeton University and universities in Madrid, Spain are calling on the international research community to not throw out modeling or focus on the poor current models, but rather to develop new, better models. In particular, they point out a rather common sense start point -- as forests and other plant populations form the crux of the carbon balance, a better understanding of their effects and how to model them needs to be developed and needs to help form the foundation of future models.

Examining deforestation, forest populations and how they effect the carbon balance is both essential and possible with current technology, believes Purves. While atmospheric equations are important, it's illogical to leave out one of the most important carbon utilities on Earth, forests. Atmospheric dynamics are well known, but forests, with over 1 trillion trees, from 100,000 species, are still a mystery for lack of knowledge. What we do know is that these trees hold as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere, and additionally support two-thirds of the planet's biodiversity.

Purves and Princeton's Stephen Pacala published a paper "Predictive Models of Forest Dynamics", which explores a new branch of modeling dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), which simulates forests in the past, present, and future and their effects on climate. Purves states:

[DGVMs] have shown that forests could be a crucial part of the way the Earth's climate responds to man-made CO2 emissions, but insufficient understanding of forests, and insufficient data and computing power, have made their predictions highly uncertain. This kind of uncertainty helps climate skeptics, who erroneously conclude that because the Earth is a complex but poorly understood system, we should not change our behavior. However, we suggest that the convergence of recently developed mathematical models, improved data sources and new methods in computational data analysis could produce more realistic models. That would give us truly invaluable information to help manage the world's forests and understand their impact on our climate.

Indeed, climate change skeptics are quick to pounce on such models. However, Purves aptly points out that it is counterproductive to merely blast deficient models, rather it is favorable to acknowledge the deficiency and work towards remedying it.

Says Pacala, "Until now, one of the most important pieces of the climate change jigsaw has been missing. We argue that we can significantly further our understanding of forest dynamics if scientists work together to use new computational techniques and data sources - provided governments and others make more data available in useful forms. We feel that these discoveries could unlock the climate change mysteries of forests on a global scale in as little as five years."

The pair's paper appears in the journal Science. Also appearing in the journal is a joint study entitled "Animal vs Wind Dispersal and the Robustness of Tree Species to Deforestation," written by Daniel Montoya from the Universidad de Alcal  in Madrid and Purves in Cambridge, with Miguel A. Rodr¡guez of the Universidad de Alcal  and Miguel A. Zavala of Centro de Investigaci¢n Forestal, Instituto Nacional de Investigaci¢n y Tecnolog¡a Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA-CIFOR) in Madrid. Both papers are available here, from Microsoft.

The new study provides intriguing insight into forest growth and resiliency based on vast data sets collected from 90,000 tree plots in Spain. It found that three common species of tree that are wind pollinated are far more vulnerable to deforestation than others. Also it found that no animal seed disperser existed in the ecosystem anymore, leaving several animal dispersed species very vulnerable.

Montoya explains how this research could be applied to smarter conservation efforts, stating, "By applying various methods in computational data analysis to a large source of forest data, we have confirmed that, in Spain at least, plants with animal-dispersed seeds are less vulnerable to habitat loss, because animals provide trees with an intelligent dispersal mechanism, traveling and distributing seeds between areas of remaining forest. In contrast, a wind dispersal method is more susceptible to habitat loss, as seeds are more likely to fall in inhospitable environments. Using methods like this, conservationists can identify the species at most risk following deforestation, and use this knowledge to develop new strategies to mitigate the effects of widespread habitat loss and help to protect species diversity."

Microsoft's Purves says it's not just about the trees and animals either; he states, "It is imperative that we create the tools and science to accurately understand the reaction of ecosystems to climate change and other forces - not just for plants and animals, but for our children and succeeding generations."

Purves is the leader of the Computational Science Research at Microsoft Research Cambridge. His multidisciplinary team features ecologists, biologists, neuroscientists, mathematicians and computer scientists. Their goals is to develop novel theories, better models, and better computational resources to tackle societal challenges such as climate change, declining biodiversity, and gaining an understanding of how life functions on a most basic scale.

Source

Note also an October 2007 paper in New Scientist "Climate is too complex for accurate predictions"




All weather is due to global warming

That seems to be the message of the neo-Soviet Leftist site below

The evidence for the consequences of global warming is appearing with alarming frequency. This morning's headlines are filled with tales of deadly weather: "At least four people were killed and about 40 injured when a tornado tore through a Boy Scout camp in western Iowa on Wednesday night"; "two people are dead in northern Kansas after tornadoes cut a diagonal path across the state"; "[t]wo Maryland men with heart conditions died this week" from the East Coast heat wave. These eight deaths come on top of reports earlier this week that the heat wave "claimed the lives of 17 people" and the wave of deadly storms killed 11 more: "six in Michigan, two in Indiana and one each in Iowa and Connecticut," as well as one man in New York.

Tornadoes this year are being reported at record levels. States of emergency have been declared in Minnesota, California, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan because of floods and wildfires. Counties in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, South Dakota, and Wisconsin have been declared disaster areas due to the historic flooding that has breached dams, inundated towns, and caused major crop damage, sending commodity futures to new records. The floodwaters are continuing down the Mississippi River, with "crests of 10 feet or more above flood level" for "at least the next two weeks."

GLOBAL BOILING: This tragic, deadly, and destructive weather -- not to mention the droughts in Georgia, California, Kansas, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, North Dakota, and elsewhere across the country -- are consistent with the changes scientists predicted would come with global warming. Gov. Chet Culver (D-IA) called the three weeks of storms that gave rise to the floods in his state "historic in proportion," saying "very few people could anticipate or prepare for that type of event." Culver is, unfortunately, wrong.

As far back as 1995, analysis by the National Climatic Data Center showed that the United States "had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events." In 2007, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that it is "very likely" that man-made global warming will bring an "increase in frequency of hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation." The Nobel Prize-winning panel of thousands of scientists and government officials also found, "Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather, together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems." In 2002, scientists said that "increased precipitation, an expected outcome of climate change, may cause losses of US corn production to double over the next 30 years -- additional damage that could cost agriculture $3 billion per year." Scientists have also found that the "West will see devastating droughts as global warming reduces the amount of mountain snow and causes the snow that does fall to melt earlier in the year."

WAKE-UP CALL?: Of the Memorial Day storms that killed eight people and "led to about $160 million in claims," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) rose on the Senate floor on June 5 to say, "the storm may serve as a wake-up call to those of us who have become somewhat complacent about severe weather warnings." The next day, Grassley joined 37 of his colleagues to filibuster climate legislation, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. This week, conservatives filibustered two more bills to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and support renewable energy and energy efficiency. In response to "[T]he most destructive flood in Indiana history," estimated to have caused "$126 million in damages," Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) told reporters that President Bush "called 'simply to inquire about how Hoosiers were getting through this, and to ask me -- as I have asked local officials -- was his level of government doing all it can to support us here and to cooperate with us? I told him, 'So far, so good.'" At the beginning of the month, Bush said he would veto these climate and clean energy bills if they came to his desk, declaring, "I urge the Congress to be very careful about running up enormous costs for future generations of Americans."

'TURNING THE KNOB': Although the deadly weather has been front-page news all season, and news channels dedicate hours of coverage to "Extreme Weather," the media are strangely reluctant to discuss severe weather events in the context of climate change. Perhaps some of the reason is the virulent response from the right wing whenever a journalist or scientist dares to discuss how "the upsurge in the number and power of the deadly storms could be related to a warming climate." In a rare instance of good coverage, ABC's Good Morning America ran a segment on Monday about the East Coast heat wave that noted "90 records have been tied or broken" across the East and interviewed eminent climatologist Dr. Stephen Schneider. Schneider explained, "While this heat wave like all other heat waves is made by Mother Nature, we've been fooling around by turning the knob and making a little bit hotter." Schneider then pointed out that we are making the climate hotter through carbon dioxide and methane emissions. In response, the right-wing media outlet Newsbusters wrote that Schneider "Blames Greenhouse Gases for Current Heat Wave," saying, "[G]lobal warming activists have another way to frighten the public -- using steamy weather to suggest human greenhouse gas emissions are worsening a heat wave."

Source




Environmentalists Seize Green Moral High Ground Ignoring Science

By Dr. Tim Ball

The first qualification on my resume now is "Environmentalist". Actually, it is a title everyone can put after their name. We are all environmentalists to greater or lesser degrees. It is an outrage that certain people and groups have usurped this title and implied that only they care about the environment. While this series of articles has shown the role the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in manipulating climate science it has succeeded within the dominance of environmentalism over the western view of the world.

The message the IPCC pushed suited the environmentalists so it was able to hide its activities amid the usurped moral high ground. They could isolate those who dared to question the science as anti-environment or paid by the oil companies who were the cause of the major problem of climate change. While this was happening politicians were being convinced of the need for action, in most cases by the bureaucrats who were members of the IPCC representing their country. Politicians didn't understand the science and were easily bullied--besides they all wanted to be green.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that human CO2 was causing warming/climate change was never tested primarily due to the actions of the IPCC. Rather the organization was set up by Maurice Strong through the UN to perpetuate the unproven theory. The IPCC mandate was defined so that they only looked at human causes of climate change, but generally the media and the public believe they are looking at scientifically natural climate change in total. Rules guaranteed the message to the media They created the illusion that open, peer reviewed science was being practiced. They guaranteed the pre-eminence of the political message over the science by writing a rule to release the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) before the Science Report.

Another rule required the Science Report agree with the Summary. The final product achieved the result of deception in full daylight because as David Wojick, UN IPCC expert reviewer explained, Glaring omissions are only glaring to experts, so the "policymakers"-including the press and the public-who read the SPM will not realize they are being told only one side of a story. But the scientists who drafted the SPM know the truth, as revealed by the sometimes artful way they conceal it. What is systematically omitted from the SPM are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate the human interference theory. Instead of assessing these objections, the Summary confidently asserts just those findings that support its case. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.

Starting in 1990, the IPCC produced Reports each increasing the probability there was clear evidence of a human cause of initially global warming and then climate change. Claim after claim was discredited but this did not stop the process. By the release of the 2001 Report, a deadly combination of events were driving the misconceptions forward overriding any attempts to point out the errors, omissions, and deliberate misdirections. The media had bought into the unproven theory and amplified the hysteria; massive amounts of government funding were driving research in a singular but wrong direction; scientists who challenged were attacked and effectively marginalized; national environmental policies were introduced often by bureaucrats who were national representatives on the IPCC; Al Gore's movie based on the false information of the IPCC fooled people on a global scale; unnecessary and potentially destructive policies were promoted such as the Kyoto Protocol, as necessary to save the planet. It is not surprising climate hysteria took hold and reason went out the window.

The switch from global warming to climate change began about 2002 as natural events did not agree with what the computer models had predicted. However, the model predictions of future warming held sway while climate change allowed them to point to any event as proof. Warmer. colder, wetter, drier, more severe weather less severe, it didn't matter now it was all due to humans. Now they had established the practice of claiming natural events as unnatural so they could never appear wrong. This drew public attention away from the failure of the model predictions, but some experts doggedly maintained their focus. For example, Dr Donald Dubois noted, "If the major climate models that are having a major impact on public policy were documented and put in the public domain, other qualified professionals around the world would be interested in looking into the validity of these models. Right now, climate science is a black box that is highly questionable with unstated assumptions and model inputs." Or, as Dr. David Wojick explained, "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."

False assumptions guaranteed failure of the models, but manipulation and deception were achieved by what was left out. Exclusions, especially of solar activities achieved the objective of keeping the focus on CO2. The problem is CO2 is not causing global warming or climate change at all. Unfortunately, politics has not caught up with the science primarily due to the machinations of the IPCC and a few scientists, mostly government employees, who continue to blindly and religiously push CO2 as the problem.

What is wrong with the CO2 argument? Well most people have no understanding of climate science overall or the facts about CO2. The IPCC have also effectively made it the sole cause of climate change. AGW advocates and governments talk about reducing greenhouse gases, but they mean CO2. Few know it is less than 4% of all the greenhouse gases and the human portion is just a fraction of the 4%. Indeed, the amount we produce is within the error factor of the estimates of three natural sources.

CO2 EMISSIONS :

1. Respiration Humans, Animals, Phytoplankton 43.5 - 52 Gt C/ year

2. Ocean Outgassing (Tropical Areas) 90 - 100 Gt C/year

3. Volcanoes, Soil degassing 0.5 - 2 Gt C/ year

4. Soil Bacteria, Decomposition 50 - 60 Gt C/ year

5. Forest cutting, Forest fires 0.6 - 2.6 Gt C/year

Anthropogenic emissions (2005) 7.5 - 7.5 Gt C/year

TOTAL 192 to 224 Gt C/ year

The table shows the range of estimates of natural CO2 and human production in 2005 (Gt C/year is Gigatons of Carbon per year). Accuracy has not improved since. Notice the human contribution is within the error range of three (1, 2, & 4) of the natural sources. The total error range is almost 5 times the amount of total human production. If we play the carbon tax game we can reduce that by 50 percent to 3.75 Gt C/year net because we remove half of what we produce through agriculture and reforestation. In other words, if everyone left the planet but one scientist remained to measure the difference in atmospheric CO2 she would not be able to measure any difference.

Many problems exist with the AGW theory, but there is one that destroys it completely. The most fundamental assumption of the theory is that an increase in CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. In fact, every record for any time period and any duration shows that exactly the opposite happens - temperature increases before CO2. This assumption is still programmed into the computer models so they continue to show that a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase. They dare not change this because it will take the focus away from CO2.

Now the social and economic damage of soaring energy and food prices, which are a direct result of policies based on IPCC reports are emerging and the evidence continues to show CO2 is not the problem. Those responsible are already making excuses or deserting the sinking ship. For example New Scientist reports on Tim Palmer, a leading climate modeler at the European Centre for Medium - Range Weather Forecasts in Reading England; "I don't want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain." Why is he saying this now? Where we was he when politicians were being misled by the IPCC? But his concern and explanation show he doesn't understand the science of climate change. "...he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC's predictions of how the global change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork. They fear that if the IPCC's predictions turn out to be wrong, it will provoke a crisis in confidence that undermines the whole climate change debate. The crisis in confidence about the climate debate is good news--it is the certainty of people like Palmer and the IPCC that have created the crisis and will create the loss of credibility. The larger problem is the loss of credibility for science on all issues especially the environment.

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge explains what is happening. "Basically, the problem is that the research community has gone so far along the path of frightening the life out of the man in the street that to recant publicly even part of the story would massively damage the reputation and political clout of science in general. And so, like corpuscles in the blood, researchers all over the world now rush in overwhelming numbers to repel infection by any idea that threatens the carefully cultivated belief in climatic disaster."

We now know how a small group through the IPCC created a completely false picture supposedly based on science. Some have described what the IPCC achieved is similar to Lysenkoism. The Skeptics Dictionary explains, Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. Lysenko's version of genetics dominated and seriously diverted Soviet science from 1948 to 1965 when it was finally rejected. Certainly the concept that human CO2 was causing warming and climate change was based on a unproven theory used by people with an ideology. They used instruments of state to dominate the science. They also attacked and abused anyone who dared to pursue proper science.

Some see all the symptoms of what Irving Janis defines as Groupthink in the behavior of the IPCC group. Groupthink is a condition that can develop in groups that are extremely task-oriented and goal-driven. Interestingly, Maurice Strong identified the group and their purpose in 1990: "What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?...In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?" There is no doubt climate science was used and abused to achieve this political agenda. The eight features of Groupthink Janis identified appear to have direct application to the group that control the IPCC. Several of them are also part of the group Professor Wegman's report to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on the hockey stick identifies many of the features of Groupthink. It certainly is in line with the definition of a cabal discussed in Part 7 of this series.

The small group who have controlled the IPCC are unlikely to change their tune. This is partly because of the eighth symptom of "Self-appointed Mindguards" who protect the group from assault by troublesome ideas. The work of William Connolley in defending the group is well documented. Similarly, Gavin Schmidt and others at the web site Realclimate function as self-appointed Mindguards

There is also the problem Leo Tolstoi identified some 100 years ago. "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

A measure of the degree of disconnect of the current IPCC leadership was provided in a speech at Cambridge University on May 14, 2008 by Vice Chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate, Professor Mohan Munasinghe. In the midst of starvation, food riots, wildly escalating energy costs and serious disruption to world economies all precipitated by the policies designed to deal with the false belief CO2 is a problem we get this from the Vice Chair of IPCC. "Climate change will lead to a "fortress world" in which the rich lock themselves away in gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in shattered environments, unless governments act quickly to curb greenhouse gas emissions. " How can he be so wrong? The events he predicts are already happening. The people are already suffering but the cause is policy implemented because of the IPCC Reports. Groupthink is mostly about fooling yourself, but it is easier when you believe you are among the few who care about the environment.

Source




Global Warming My Ass

Well, I was going to take down the Christmas lights today. But now I may as well plug `em in. When I woke up and looked out the bedroom window this morning, my reaction was enough to propel both of my kids out of their beds. "Dad, what's the matter?" asked Rusty, reacting to the string of epithets flowing from my room. "Did you have that dream again, where you were a sex slave for Condoleeza Rice?"

"No. Look out the window." He looked. "Whoa! Wouldn't it be cool if we had a snow day?" he said, eyes widening.

Tomorrow's the last day of school at John Colter Elementary. The kids are on the verge of three straight months of "snow days." But instead of bundling up swimsuits and beach towels for a pool party, I'm digging out recently-stored snow boots and winter coats. I can't see out the front window because the birch tree in the front yard is humped over by the weight of the snow, touching the ground.

The tomato and pepper plants in our backyard garden surely will not survive this, will they? I can see deer on the hill behind our house, scratching their heads and double-checking the date on their complimentary Field & Stream calendars.

But who do I complain to? What can I do? How am I supposed to get my revenge for this cruel joke? I mean, I've done my time, man. I trudged through seven long months of this winter wonderland bullshit. I've already made the switch from whiskey to gin. I've already gotten two sunburns this year. Criminy. Like the rest of Missoula, I'll just continue with my day, trying to avoid the inevitable string of fender benders resulting from carefree drivers who fail to remember how slick the roads get when the snow meets the oil on the asphalt.

I know the white stuff will be gone by tomorrow, or even later today. But I still feel like throwing a tantrum, because it just isn't fair. I should be playing golf. I can't throw horse shoes when the pits are full of snow. It makes me livid to have to crank on the heat: I've earned a lower power bill after writing a half dozen $300+ checks to those ruthless criminals at Northwestern Energy. Maybe the Republicans are right. Maybe this whole global warming thing is a fairy tale.

Source




Global Warming: Man Made or Natural Cycle?

Over the last hundred years the Earth has been warming. This warming is believed to lead to many issues such as drought, weather extremes and famine. The man made global warming theory states that man made CO2 is causing Earth to warm at an alarming rate; thus, the warming will continue. While some scientists believe CO2 is the culprit, other scientists believe the world's warming and cooling happens in cycles due to various factors. Some of these scientists believe that Earth is starting a cooling trend after a long warming trend. Therefore, the trillion dollar question is global warming caused by CO2 or is this Earth's natural cycle?

Carbon dioxide is the gas that is responsible for global warming under the man made global warming theory. CO2 is also a part of everyday life. Therefore, this gas should not be confused with smog, which creates a low level ozone layer that can be harmful to humans. CO2 is less than 2% of the world's atmosphere. Meanwhile 93% of all CO2 is stored in the world's oceans; the rest is stored the biosphere in things like plants. Oceans move CO2 into the atmosphere and then remove it as continual cycle. Warmer waters, like tropical waters, store less CO2 than colder arctic or deep waters. As CO2 increases in the Earth's atmosphere, the oceans work harder to remove it. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased 30% since the pre-industrial era. The ocean has also increased its absorption of CO2 from roughly 2.0 Pg of CO2 in the 1980s to 2.4 Pg in the 1990s. Along with the oceans increased CO2 absorption, plants and trees also take in more CO2. This extra absorption of CO2 increases crop yields and plant growth.

The question arises if man is increasing the CO2 significantly or if the oceans are naturally warming and releasing more CO2 as a part of a cycle? Unfortunately, most graphs shown in news articles only go back 120 years, starting in the 1880s. One glance at these graphs and a person could easily deduce that man and industrialization has caused global warming. Many seem to forget that the last ice age was over 100,000 years ago, so looking at the last 120 years for temperature change seems inadequate. Archeologists have found cities under the oceans, such as the one in India that is 9500 years old. This indicates that the Earth must have been warming for some time, possibly including many warming and cooling cycles. Going back 2000 years paints a better picture than the 120 year "hockey stick" graph. In the Middle Ages the temperature deviation was the same as today. This period did not have industry that created man made CO2.

Another interesting fact is that even though man made CO2 has exponentially increasing from 1950 to today, temperature from 1940 to 1980 decreased. Scientists back in the 1970s believed that pollution was causing global cooling. The real problem is that any model based off a lower point, like 1880s temperature, would make the model appear that the earth is on fire. Instead of using incomplete models, models need to include a couple of temperature cycles to fully understand how the Earth behaves.

At least 70-80% of the Earth's warming effect comes from water vapor and clouds not CO2. CO2 traps about 10-20% of the world's heat. Other contributors to warming include high altitude cirrus clouds and sunspots. Cirrus clouds block radiant heat from escaping the Earth's atmosphere. Sunspots have been known throughout history to have an effect on the Earth's temperature. From 1645 to 1715 there were very few sunspots recorded. This also was a period referred to as the little ice age. Over the last 60 years, our sun has been very active with a record number of sun spots recorded. This could also be the reason that ice caps on Mars are melting and other planets in our solar system are experiencing warming, like Jupiter.

By studying models that are more inclusive, scientists are now worried about the warming trend reversing. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is growing at a record pace. The media seems to focus on just the Wilkins ice sheet, which is only 0.01% of Antarctica's ice cover. The rest of the ice cover is returning 60% faster than last year at 4.0 square km. Even Greenland is seeing a 15 year high in ice levels between Canada and itself. In the US this spring has been much cooler than normal for most of the country. These events are leading more and more scientists to believe the Earth is in for a cooling trend. If global cooling occurs, agricultural life could change as we know it. This could lead to a worldwide food shortage and a displacement of millions of people.

Currently, the United States Congress is debating a potential five trillion dollar energy policy. This policy will place carbon caps on corporations. This will raise cost of energy significantly. Money raised from these caps would be redistributed to more expensive renewable energy projects. The poor will suffer the most as they will have to contend with rising food prices, rising gas prices and now rising energy costs. With so many factors causing global warming, the anti- CO2 movement seems very reckless and will cause many people to suffer.

Fighting emissions from cars and factories is a very noble cause. Pollution can cause all sorts of problems like asthma. To say the world is warming because of humans is a very bold claim. Lots of factors go into warming the Earth. To focus on just one, CO2 is very na‹ve. It can also be very dangerous as it sacrifices our economic stability and standard of living. Doubling the price of gasoline over the last few years has caused food costs to shoot up; fishermen and truckers to be put out of business; and many low income people to suffer. Now, Congress is debating to do the same thing to electricity prices.

Source




Geologist: 'Earth has had massive changes in temperature unrelated to carbon dioxide'

Comment from Australia

The booming Northern Territory economy is at risk of being "destroyed" by government policy responses to climate change, an academic has said. There will be winners and losers under the system and reducing carbon dioxide emissions is expected to cost industry a lot of money.

But University of Adelaide mining geology professor Ian Plimer says all the expense will be for nothing, as climate change cannot be stopped -- and it isn't even caused by human-created carbon dioxide. "There is no relationship between carbon dioxide produced by industry and climate change," he said.

Professor Plimer said the scientific community had not reached any kind of consensus that carbon dioxide causes global warming. "There's no such thing as surety in science -- 32,000 North American scientists signed a document saying humans don't create global warming whereas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only has 2500 scientists saying it does."

Professor Plimer said other factors influenced climate change, such as volcanic eruptions, variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun and the sun's own heat-producing cycle -- none of which had anything to do with human activity. "There's a huge body of evidence showing no correlation between carbon dioxide and global warming," he said.

"Through the geological record we can look back in time and show the Earth has had massive changes in temperature unrelated to carbon dioxide." "Why make massive economic decisions when the science is extraordinarily uncertain?"

Professor Plimer said a misallocation of capital due to government greenhouse gas policies had the ability to destroy industry. "We've had a hint as to what rising energy costs do to food and fuel costs," he said. "If we want to restructure the economy on ambiguous information then we have a suicide wish and will totally destroy the economy. "In Darwin, you'd better look for a cave to live in -- because that's going to be your economy."

Professor Plimer said the only reason the climate change ""scare scenario" had become so popular was because of widespread scientific ignorance.

But Environment Centre NT spokesman Justin Tutty said Professor Plimer was at odds with the "overwhelming" weight of consensus led by the IPCC. "The IPCC's solid analysis has led business and industry groups, such as the Business Council of Australia, to realise the costs of policies to cut emissions are more acceptable than the economic costs of inaction," he said. "Now that the NT Government has come to the table, committing to develop a climate change policy, we hope real progress can be made to reduce the carbon burden of the Territory's future economy."

Mr Tutty said the document Professor Plimer cited had been roundly discredited for "having a very loose methodology". "It's a bit of a stretch to compare an unvetted online petition with a forum of experts appointed by the world's governments," he said.

But Professor Plimer said a lot of the signatories had been senior scientists. "I know many of them personally," he said. His comments come after the Territory Government released a discussion paper on climate change issues last week.

Source

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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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14 June, 2008

WHAT AM I MISSING HERE?

I am no chemist so maybe I am missing something here but, as far as I know, CO2 absorption into water is greatest in COLD water. So it should be global COOLING that causes an increase in ocean acidity. So is all the panic about ocean acidification -- as in the paper below -- an acknowledgment that it is cooling, not warming, that threatens us? Journal abstract follows. -- JR

Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive "Acidified" Water onto the Continental Shelf

Richard A. Feely et al.

The absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) into the ocean lowers the pH of the waters. This so-called ocean acidification could have important consequences for marine ecosystems. To better understand the extent of this ocean acidification in coastal waters, we conducted hydrographic surveys along the continental shelf of western North America from central Canada to northern Mexico. We observed seawater that is undersaturated with respect to aragonite upwelling onto large portions of the continental shelf, reaching depths of ~40 to 120 meters along most transect lines and all the way to the surface on one transect off northern California. Although seasonal upwelling of the undersaturated waters onto the shelf is a natural phenomenon in this region, the ocean uptake of anthropogenic CO2 has increased the areal extent of the affected area.

Science 13 June 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5882, pp. 1490 - 1492




Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas

By meteorologist John Coleman

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

"The future of our civilization lies in the balance": That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda-driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet. Here is my rebuttal.

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.

Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.

Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?

The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really? We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.

Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.

The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.

All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not. Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide: It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.

Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and voila! we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.

May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars.

Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.

Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.

So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.

So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.

To start with, global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis.

From YK2 to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.

So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.

I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.Ds. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel.

In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken.

There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position from Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.

In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.

I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.

The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy.

The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughput the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.

So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.

So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.

I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it. If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.

My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.

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An amusing admission

The article excerpted below appeared under the heading: "Why Are So Many TV Meteorologists and Weathercasters Climate 'Skeptics'?". That they might have a better-than-average understanding of the science involved is not one of the explanations canvassed

All three staff meteorologists at KLTV, the ABC affiliate broadcasting to the Tyler-Longview-Jacksonville area of Northeast Texas, joined forces last November to deliver an on-air rebuttal of the idea that humans are changing the earth's climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, representing the work of hundreds of scientists from 130 countries, had declared eight months earlier that warming of the atmosphere was "unequivocal" and that greenhouse gases from human activities were "very likely" the cause of most of the warming since the mid-20th century.

The three KLTV weathercasters - appearing in a Nov. 8 story by a station news reporter - let it be known, however, that they were unconvinced. Meteorologist Grant Dade: "Is the Earth warming? Yes, I think it is. But is man causing that? No. It's a simple climate cycle our climate goes through over thousands of years."

One of his KLTV colleagues said Earth "will not be warming anymore" in 20 to 30 years. The station's third weathercaster suggested that increased attention to man-made climate change was being driven by scientists who want "grant money."

Such skeptical pronouncements are not confined to broadcast meteorologists working in smaller media markets. Indeed, they appear to many to be fairly common among TV meteorologists and weathercasters, more the rule than the exception. John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel and now a weathercaster for San Diego's independent KUSI, argues forcefully (pdf) that manmade global warming is "the greatest scam in history" - a quote that was included in the KLTV story, with no countering viewpoints offered.

Active in a recent Heartland Institute "skeptic's conference" on climate change in New York City, Coleman is one of the most highly visible weathercasters championing the views of climate skeptics. Neil Frank, the 25-year director of the National Hurricane Center, recently retired after 21 years as chief meteorologist at Houston's CBS affiliate, KHOU, where he sometimes made skeptical remarks about anthropogenic climate change. Frank in 2006 told The Washington Post that it is "a hoax" and that greenhouse emissions actually may help what he called "a carbon dioxide-starved world."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in May that despite some broadcast meteorologists' belief that long term climate change is not their area of expertise, Minneapolis forecasters are still speaking out on the issue and "most of them are landing on the side of the skeptics."

At a time when most climate scientists - as reflected in the IPCC's 2007 reports - express growing certainty that Earth is warming, that humans are largely responsible, and that consequences may be severe, why do so many television weathercasters appear to think otherwise?

"It does seem that a larger proportion of broadcast meteorologists are climate change skeptics than is the case with meteorologists as a whole, but we really don't know what either percentage really is, and if it is true, we certainly don't know why," said Ronald McPherson, executive director emeritus of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). If some large percentage of broadcast weathercasters are indeed skeptics, McPherson said in a phone interview that he suspects there are probably multiple reasons....

Last September, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, two prominent broadcast meteorologists and AMS leaders published a guest editorial (pdf), "Communicating Global Climate Change to the Public and Clients." In it, they criticized some of their fellow weathercasters who have been speaking out skeptically about anthropogenic global warming: "Increasing numbers of broadcast meteorologists, to whom the public looks for information and guidance on climate change and global warming, are not offering scientific information but rather, all too often, nonscientific personal opinions in the media, including personal blogs. Alarmingly, many weathercasters and certified broadcast meteorologists dismiss, in most cases without any solid scientific arguments, the conclusions of the National Research Council (NRC), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other peer-reviewed research."

The editorial's two co-authors were Bob Ryan, AMS past president and chief meteorologist for Washington, D.C.'s NBC-owned WRC, and John Toohey-Morales, AMS commissioner on professional affairs and chief meteorologist of NBC Telemundo's WSCV in Miami. In a phone interview with the Yale Forum, Ryan said he thinks many "naysayers" about the idea of manmade climate change among broadcast weather forecasters "are coming from a perspective of the policy first - or they're against it because they think it will hurt the economy, so how can I set out to punch holes in the theory - rather than scientifically testing a theory." In certain cases, skeptical weathercasters are "putting their own personal views - sometimes even fundamentalist religious beliefs - first, and then looking at climate change from the standpoint of preconceived things they believe in," he said...

At Penn State University, one of the nation's leading academic institutions educating students for careers as broadcast meteorologists, senior meteorology lecturer Paul Knight said in a phone interview that lectures address subjects including the IPCC and long-range climate projections. The disagreements between television weathercasters and climate scientists involve "a jurisdictional war," and "there's nobody free of sin in this matter," Knight said. "I'm seeing a row here, but it's not a bad row."

On one side, there seems to be "a disdain in the orthodox scientific research community for those who are not smart enough to get a Ph.D. or do research, and instead go into the fluff of television and just forecast the weather," he said.

On the other side, "there's a certain amount of disdain from television meteorologists who are predicting the weather for those who pontificate about what their [climate] models show," he added.

Knight summed up his own view of climate change this way: "There's no question that warming is going on. To say it's a hoax is to deny the data. To say it's all human-caused is foolish, too."Common sense suggests that both factors are in play, he added. "Then the question is, to what degree? How do we differentiate? The more that folks are willing to admit that, we'll get to a good policy decision and there will be less polarization."

One prominent weathercaster still undecided about the biggest question about climate change - substantially human-caused or not? - is Gene Norman of KHOU in Houston, who said he looks forward to the Denver conference as an opportunity to learn more about the subject. Norman, who replaced Frank recently as chief meteorologist at KHOU, was chair of the AMS Board of Broadcast Meteorology last year, overseeing the AMS certification process among other duties. Immediately before joining the Houston station, he was chief meteorologist at Atlanta's WGCL, and before that he had spent eight years with NASA developing weather-monitoring technology for the space shuttle.

"My bottom line [about climate change] is I think something is happening," he said. "Is it human activity? I don't know. I need to get better educated." Norman, like others, said a good part of the skepticism among weathercasters stems from the reactions their questions have elicited in the past. "Quite a few on television around the country are skeptical only because they feel they have asked questions and raised issues and been told to be quiet, this is the truth," he said.

Skepticism is reinforced "because we know things change that don't necessarily have to do with global warming. We know certain sensors have been moved, which has become a politicized issue," Norman said."It's difficult to communicate about climate to the public," he said. "To purely say it's human beings causing all this trouble, a lot of us wonder. We just wonder.

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Global Drying

The world's agriculture and water crisis is only going to get worse. As China and India grow, their populations are demanding more and wider varieties of food stuffs, competition for arable land is intensifying and freshwater withdrawals of agriculture are soaring. Food prices are rising, in large part because agriculture suppliers can barely keep up with today's demand. So what is the world doing? Reorienting land away from food production and toward plants cultivated for energy needs.

This could be the single most destructive set of policy mistakes made in a generation. From time immemorial, mankind has struggled to produce enough food. Wars have been fought over arable land. Whole populations have been forced to migrate, and untold millions of human beings have died because circumstances, climate, war or political ineptitude have deprived them of what the German language describes as "Lebensmittel," or a "means for survival." This problem hasn't disappeared; our world today needs to feed some six billion people. According to some projections, that number will rise to nine billion by 2050.

So why introduce a new competitor for this scarce resource? The blame falls squarely on global warming advocates. Politicians, business, academia are all struggling to come to grips with it. But why? The impact of global warming will be felt in decades at worst, and no one at this stage can predict with any degree of reliability what its consequences might be. Does it make sense to reduce the use of fossil energy? Yes, for many reasons. Are we right in dealing carefully and responsibly with what is left of the oil? And will biofuels really solve our problems?

If there's one certainty, it is this: The production of biofuels has stimulated a massive, and destructive, reorientation of the world's agriculture markets. The U.S. Department of Energy calculates that every 10,000 liters of water produces as little as five liters of ethanol, or one to two liters of biodiesel. Biofuels are economical nonsense, ecologically useless and ethically indefensible. This year, the U.S. will use around 130 million tons of corn for biofuels. This corn was not available as human food, nor as fodder to animals. Is this the right strategy, for a product that won't satisfy even a small percentage of our energy needs?

The biofuel madness is contributing to water shortages that are already endemic. Stretches of the Rio Grande, which partly separates the U.S. from Mexico, have dried up in regular intervals since 2001. China's Yellow River ran dry in 1972, in 1996 and in 1997. Worse yet, we are overusing ground water in large parts of the world. Water levels are sinking rapidly both in China as well as in India's Punjab state. Great aquifers, whether in the Sahara or in the southwestern U.S., are being depleted rapidly. This is water that dates from thousands of years ago. Like oil, once gone, it is lost forever.

Increasing agricultural productivity is only part of the solution. The real juggernaut is to encourage the responsible use of water. And the only way to do that is to introduce competitive pricing. Water is being wasted and misused because few people are even aware of its worth. Today, 94% of available water is used by agriculture - and because there are no cost consequences for the farmer, almost all of that water is underused or misused. The same is true for water used in industry and for household purposes. If the cost of infrastructure is not covered, the degradation of municipal water distribution will continue. Water for basic needs should of course remain free. But there is no need whatsoever to subsidize water to wash a car, fill a swimming pool or maintain a golf course.

The biofuel craze, egged on by global warming activists, has helped fuel a huge agricultural crisis. But this crisis can at least be partially mitigated through better and more efficient use of the resources that we already have. Right now, the urgent issue is water, not global warming, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer.

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Survey: 74 percent of Congressional Republicans are climate "deniers"

A National Journal survey of members of Congress found that 74 percent of Congressional Republicans do not believe that global warming is caused by humans. The poll asked 39 Democrats and 39 Republicans if they thought that "it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution". The answers are anonymous, except for party affilliation. Only 26 percent of Republicans answered yes, with the rest answering no. Among Democrats, 95 percent answered yes. The survey's results include some choice anonymous quotes from the deniers:

"Reasonable people have doubts. For every Al Gore, there is an intelligent scientist armed with legitimate facts to debunk him."

"In the '70s, the `consensus of scientists' was that we were beginning global cooling. Now it is global warming. Excuse me if I am skeptical of this newest form of secular religion. Perhaps we should pause and take a breath before we drink the new Kool-Aid!"

"If there's one thing poll after poll indicates, it's that the science is not settled on this issue."

"What has been proven is that a well-targeted pop-culture campaign can trump even the best of science. The bad news is, a very few will get very rich, and the rest of us will foot the bill with mythical creations like cap and trade. The impact of such programs on the environment: Zero. The cost to the American public: Huge. The grin on Al Gore's very wealthy face: Priceless!"

The survey quotes both Democrats who responded no.

"[Evidence is conflicting on whether] warming is man-made, but there shouldn't be any doubt that a man-made solution is needed. The trend won't reverse on its own."

"This global-warming debate is a farce."

Of the ten Republicans who responded yes, the National Journal quotes one of them:

"Put it this way: Is there anyone who reasonably believes that the emissions caused by man have no effect on the environment? It doesn't take a degree in science to accept the concept that the actions of billions of people driving millions of cars do indeed impact the world around us."

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America's Native Criminal Class

Locking up energy, driving up prices and destroying jobs to "save the planet"

There is no distinctly native American criminal class, Mark Twain observed - except Congress. A century later, government power and intrusiveness have increased exponentially - and special interests have adapted by employing lobbyists who can navigate Washington, explain technology to tech-challenged members and staffs, persuade legislators that provisions are vital (or disastrous), and give clients "a seat at the table" where subsidies, mandates, taxes, preferences and penalties are meted out.

The system is both the cause and result of far too many congressmen becoming members of what commentator Charles Krauthammer calls an "ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class" that has arrogated unto itself the right to rule American citizens.

Even legislators who don't keep wads of thank-you cash in their freezers have committed misfeasance and malfeasance, by handling vital energy, environmental and economic matters in ways that would likely be prosecuted if done by businessmen. Lawmakers, eco-activists and companies routinely engage in social experimentation and central planning akin to previous Great Leaps Forward - and refuse to acknowledge the damage their actions inflict on workers, families, minorities and other businesses.

Today, in the name of protecting the environment, politicians have locked up enough oil, gas, coal and uranium to power the United States literally for centuries. Representatives of six of the nation's eight biggest petroleum-guzzling states routinely vote to ban drilling off our coasts and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Interior Department estimates that these lands could hold more than the proven oil reserves of Iran or Iraq: 139 billion barrels that could be obtained with today's technology.

This energy belongs to all Americans. But politicians keep it off limits, and force us to consume oil that the rest of the world desperately needs. Food and fuel prices soar, poor families get pummeled, and we are compelled to send trillions of dollars to corrupt dictators, and give up jobs, tax revenues, royalties and security that developing US resources would generate.

Drilling bans also increase the risk of more spills from tankers carrying oil to replace what politicians have put off limits. In sixty years of offshore oil operations, only the 1969 Santa Barbara blowout resulted in significant oil reaching shore. Offshore oil platforms rarely pollute; they create magnificent artificial reefs. As a scuba diver, I've seen them firsthand, including the beauty where that blowout occurred.

So when Senator Maria Cantwell and colleagues oppose drilling - and then demand that President Bush tell OPEC countries to produce more oil - they are telling the world's poorest people: Drop dead. We don't care if you need oil and soaring prices are killing you. We refuse to do our part. We a