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".

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31 March, 2009

NICHOLAS STERN'S "SCIENCE" DOESN'T STAND UP TO SCRUTINY

An email from David Whitehouse [dr_d_whitehouse@msn.com]

In an exclusive extract from his new book, Nicholas Stern argues that the time for debate on climate change is well and truly over.

"More recently, others have tried to argue that the warming has stopped because 1998 (a so-called El Nino year, with warmer surface temperature of oceans) was a little warmer on average than 2007 (a La Nina year, with cooler surface temperature of oceans). This confuses cycles with trends, peaks with troughs and sea temperatures with land temperatures. Further, it ignores that the last decade was the hottest since records began and that the trend is clearly upwards. But this is the kind of nonsense that some would try to peddle. There are many more half-baked attempts to try to naysay the science, but they always unravel on careful inspection. And the same has been true of more sophisticated attempts, such as those involving changing structures of humidity in the atmosphere."

The recent hiatus in the increase of global temperatures, now no longer contended by most scientists, is nothing to do with El Nino and La Nina, and despite the hiatus nobody denied that the last decade has been warmer than previous ones.

Frankly, if this is the level of scientific rigour in Nicholas Stern's forthcoming book then it is unimpressive and lacking in any basis of critical scientific thinking. It uses cherry picking data and arguments to support a pre-determined view. It pays lip service to the notions of scientific questioning. It could have been written by Cardinal Bellarmine [Who burnt Giordano Bruno and opposed Galileo].




CLEVER CHINESE STRATEGY: CHINA DEMANDS U.S. CLIMATE BILLIONS, BINDING TARGETS

They know it won't happen but it will take the heat off them to cut their emissions. They must be having a quiet laugh to themselves

Finding money to help poor countries pay for new energy technology that doesn't contribute to global warming is the most difficult task facing negotiators as United Nations climate change talks began today, said U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy.

Financing works "hand in glove" with establishing carbon dioxide-emissions cuts for developing countries, which will be responsible for most of the world's output of greenhouse gases in the coming decades, said Todd Stern, the chief U.S. climate negotiator. "The financing issue is extremely important in our judgment," he said. "What's vital in general is that the developing countries leapfrog the carbon intensity path, and for that they'll need help."

Delegates from 175 countries are struggling to close the gap between their positions on financing and other issues, including setting CO2 cutting goals, in Bonn this week. Obama's delegation is participating for the first time in climate talks and promises to work toward a "robust deal" when the talks wind up in Copenhagen at the end of the year. "This is a new start for the U.S. delegation and the start of a new hope to solve the problem of climate change," said Matthias Machnig, Germany's deputy environment minister, during a speech to the 2,600 delegates and participants at the start of talks today.

While Obama has pledged greater emissions cuts than his predecessor, George W. Bush, the reductions fall short of what's needed to tackle the problem, China's lead negotiator, Su Wei, said in an interview before the start of the 10-day talks in Bonn, Germany. "The U.S. has become more positive than the previous administration: I think they are going in the right direction," Su said in a telephone interview. "Still, we're waiting for very firm climate policy from the U.S., including very clear medium-term targets. All of the parties are waiting for that."

A global climate treaty to reduce CO2 emissions and replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol must focus on later targets, not just 2020 goals, said Stern. The U.S. favors slashing emissions of heat-trapping gases to 1990 levels by 2020.

SOURCE




America `can't wave magic wand' on climate change

Expectations of what can be achieved by the United States in fighting global warming are unrealistic, climate change negotiators from more than 170 countries have been told. Hopes raised by a new willingness in the White House to take action to control climate change must be balanced by a realisation that there are limits to what the US can do, they were told.

Todd Stern, President Obama's special envoy on climate change, moved to play down hopes as the US joined UN talks on global warming in Bonn. These are designed to smooth the path to a summit in Copenhagen in December when it is hoped that international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions can be reached. "The US is going to be powerfully and fervently engaged in this process," Mr Stern said shortly before the talks started. "That doesn't mean that anyone should be thinking that the US can ride in on a white horse and make it work, because it can't. What we can do is return to the table with energy and commitment, and commitment to science and pragmatism to getting a deal that will be doable. We are all going to have to do this together. We don't have a magic wand."

Under President Bush, the US was reluctant to join international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but attitudes in the White House have altered dramatically since the inauguration of Mr Obama.

The Bonn talks are the first session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change since Mr Obama took office, and expectations of US involvement have been high. Such was the relief at the willingness of the US to act on climate change that its delegation was welcomed with applause by negotiators from other countries. The clapping became even more enthusiastic when Mr Stern said: "We are glad to be back, we want to make up for lost time, and we are seized with the urgency of the task before us. The science is clear and the threat is real. The facts are outstripping the worst-case scenarios. The costs of inaction or inadequate actions are unacceptable." [Big talk]

However, hopes that the US would use the opening of the talks to announce measures to cut its own emissions were dashed. Michael Zammit Cutajar, one of the chief UN negotiators, said that in talks before the session it was intimated that Mr Obama's Administration needed more time. "My understanding is they need some more time to get up to speed," he said. The talks in Bonn continue until April 8 and a second session will be held in June, by which time, he said, it should be clearer how much farther the US will go.

Despite the widespread welcome for the US involvement, there remain concerns that it will refuse to make deep enough cuts in emissions. President Obama has already promised to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 per cent by 2050. While most delegates and scientists agree that the long-term target of 80 per cent matches requirements, they believe that the US needs to do better on the 2020 target if there is to be even a 50-50 chance of limiting temperature rises to 2C (3.6F).

SOURCE




CLIMATE COALITION FALLS APART AS EU LEADERS BACKTRACK

Stavros Dimas, the European commissioner for the environment, insisted that Europe was still a global leader on climate change after a stinging attack on the EU by the campaign group World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) at the European Business Summit in Brussels today (27 March). In a testy exchange, Dimas defended EU policy after WWF said that Europe had broken its promise to developing countries and weakened its own carbon reduction targets.

Stephan Singer, director of global energy policy at WWF's European policy office and a veteran climate change campaigner, said the campaign group was "deeply disappointed" in the EU. He accused EU leaders of breaking an international agreement reached in Bali in 2007, when rich countries promised to transfer funds to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change. Last week, EU leaders agreed that they would do their "fair share" for developing countries, but did not name an amount of money. Singer said this showed that the EU had "empty hands" and was "breaking the Bali mandate".

In an especially painful attack on EU policymakers, Singer said that the US goal to stabilise emissions at 1990 levels by 2020 "on paper could be a more aggressive target" than the EU's efforts.

Visibly irritated, Dimas accused WWF of "politicking" and said that the group was "undermining our ability to negotiate in Copenhagen." He said "everyone accepts that Europe is leading the fight against climate change", adding that "other countries have not even talked about what they are going to do". And he said that the EU would be pressing the US to make comparable emission-reduction targets, going further than a commitment to "stabilise" emissions.

More HERE




ECONOMISTS AND CLIMATE SCIENCE: A CRITIQUE

By David Henderson

In this paper I question the characteristic treatment of climate change issues by fellow-economists, as seen in recent articles, books and reports. The focus of the paper, however, is not on economics. My main theme is what I see as the uncritical and over-presumptive way in which these various sources have dealt with the scientific aspects of the subject.

Although I also refer to other illustrative cases, the chief specific targets of criticism are six recent and influential publications. Three of these are by leading and widely respected individual authors. They are:

* William Nordhaus's book, A Question of Balance (Nordhaus, 2008);

* Martin Weitzman's article entitled 'On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change' (Weitzman, 2009); and.

* Dieter Helm's article entitled 'Climate-Change Policy: Why Has So Little Been Achieved?' (Helm, 2008).

Alongside this trio I place two prominent large-scale officially-sponsored though independent reviews:

* The 700-page Stern Review, The Economics of Climate Change, by Nicholas (now Lord) Stern and others, commissioned by the British government and published in 2007; and

* The 600-page Garnaut Climate Change Review, authored by Ross Garnaut, commissioned by the state and territorial governments of Australia with the later participation of the Commonwealth government, and published in 2008.

Last on the list is the special chapter on climate change issues that formed part of the April 2008 issue of the IMF's twice-yearly flagship publication, World Economic Outlook.

It is an unusual procedure for an economist to criticise what fellow-economists have said, or failed to say, about a subject area which is neither his nor theirs. I therefore begin by setting the issues that I raise in the wider context of the current climate change debate.

More HERE




Hour of no power INCREASES emissions

By Bjorn Lomborg

This Saturday, the World Wildlife Fund wants everybody on the planet to switch off their lights for an hour in a "global election between Earth and global warming", where switching off the lights "is a vote for Earth".

In Australia, where Earth Hour started, it evidently enjoys strong support from politicians, celebrities, corporate backers and the public. The efforts this Saturday certainly will be well-intentioned. Many of us worry about global warming and would like to be part of the solution. Unfortunately, this event - as with many public proposals on climate change - is an entirely symbolic gesture that creates the mistaken impression that there are easy, quick fixes to climate change. One provincial British newspaper wrote this week: "Saving the planet could be as easy as switching off the lights in South Tyneside, green campaigners say."

It will take more than the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, population 152,000, to solve global warming. Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China's emissions for six short seconds. In economic terms, the environmental and humanitarian benefits from the efforts of the entire developed world would add up to just $21,000.

The campaign doesn't ask anybody to do anything difficult, such as coping without heating, air-conditioning, telephones, the internet, hot food or cold drinks. Conceivably, if you or I sat in our houses watching television, with the heater and computer running, we could claim we're part of an answer to global warming, so long as the lights are switched off. The symbolism is almost perverse.

In Australia last year, Earth Hour's organisers required participating businesses to pledge to reduce their emissions by 5 per cent during the following year. This year, that requirement has been dropped. "We decided we'd actually downplay (concrete cuts)this time," the chief executive of WWF Australia told The Sunday Age. There apparently has been no accounting of whether last year's sponsors lived up to their pledge. The Sunday Age reported last week: "An analysis of the key sponsors of Earth Hour reveals that most have reported increased emissions in their most recent figures."

And it gets worse: the event could cause higher overall pollution than if we just left our lights on. When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight. Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you're essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you'll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production.

No wonder that even committed climate campaigners are sceptical. Clive Hamilton, author of Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, told The Sunday Age last week that "we are well past the time for feel-good exercises aimed at raising awareness. It's like the band playing on as the Titanic sinks." He said there was a real danger that Earth Hour convinced people we were making progress on climate change when we were not. And it let business and government off the hook.

There is still no cheap replacement for the carbon that we burn. This is the reason many promises of drastic CO2 cuts remain just empty promises and why past global agreements to cut CO2 have gone unfulfilled. A meaningful solution to global warming needs to focus on research into and development of clean energy, instead of fixating on empty promises of carbon emission reductions.

It is vital to make solar and other new technology cheaper than fossil fuels quickly so we can turn off carbon energy sources for a lot longer than one hour and keep the planet running. Every country should agree to spend 0.05 per cent of its gross domestic product on low-carbon energy research and development. The total global cost would be 10 times greater than present spending, yet be 10 times less than the cost of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emission reductions. This response to global warming is a realistic, achievable one.

Fossil fuels literally gave us an enlightenment, by lighting our world and giving us protection from the fury of the elements. It is ironic that today's pure symbolism should hark back to a darker age.

SOURCE

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

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30 March, 2009

Earth hour roundup

Comments from various sources:

1). Al Gore certainly didn't shut the lights off

2). I could not help but chuckle at the irony of earth hour's method of getting their message across. By turning off lights around the world they showed people exactly what they want. They want to turn the light out on human civilization. The wish to stop progress, to pull back humans' desire to better our world. Instead of light that allows us to see truth clearly they choose darkness, to hide their true intentions.

3). I will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to electricity, and how insane they must think we are.

4). Earth Hour is a good demonstration of what will happen very soon if energy policy continues to be strangled by futile attempts to control the weather/climate using the harmless, essential, naturally occurring, aerial plant food gas CO2.

5). With reference to the absurd Dearth Hour, JunkScience.com is wondering how many stories we can collect of people injured falling over the cat/furniture in the enviro-induced darkness. Candle fires from unsafe lighting? Anything you or your readers may have heard about can be returned to this email address or preferably posted under this topic on the forum. (It's a self-register arrangement & you can post immediately following registration).

6). An email from Greenland with illustrative picture below: Does it sometimes seem like everything you read, see or do has the word “Green” attached to it? When you are living in Greenland you can't ignore it! But the Earth Hour made a difference here. See www.glar.gl. No more global warming.



7). Comment by Australian cartoonist ZEG:






Keep Your Lights on!

By Alan Caruba

Does it sometimes seem like everything you read, see or do has the word “Green” attached to it? We have a Green President and a Green Congress. More and more products and services tout themselves as Green. We are paying more and more with greenbacks—dollars—that are in danger of losing what value they once had.

Green was not always the great, amorphous dream of achieving oneness with Mother Earth. People still talk about being “Green with envy” or “Turning Green” just before a projectile vomit attack.

We have reached this nauseating time in our society as the result of a vast environmental movement, truly worldwide, that are masters of propaganda and possessed of the millions necessary to brainwash a lot of people into accepting an endless assault on all the advancements in science, engineering, and technology we accept as part of our everyday lives.

So, naturally, the World Wildlife Fund has come up with “Earth Hour”, an event in which at 8:30PM, Saturday night, in everyone’s respective time zone, people will be asked to turn off their lights and, presumably, the use of all electricity to increase awareness of “energy conservation.”

Two questions: What does this have to do with wildlife? And why should anyone bother? What need is there to “conserve energy?” One either uses it or does not. You can’t “conserve” it. You can use more or less of it, but you cannot save it up for later. Electricity is always “now.”

Is the Earth running out of coal? Hardly, the Chinese can’t build coal-fired plants fast enough to generate the electricity to grow their economy. In India, they’re launched on a huge program to build nuclear plants for the same reason. A nation without adequate electricity is strictly Third World.

Nor is the Earth running out of oil. The rumor is that there are vast amounts in the Arctic and both the U.S. and Russia are making nasty noises at one another to ensure that neither one or the other gains control of it. Brazil just struck oil way offshore of its beautiful beaches and you don’t hear them complaining about it.

The U.S., of course, has vast untapped reserves of oil offshore and an estimated 3 to 4.3 BILLION barrels of it in the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana. There’s oil under Utah as well. We’re not running out of oil in the United States. We just can’t drill for it thanks to Congress and the White House.

We can’t build coal-fired plants either because the Greens keep telling us that coal is “dirty.” The electricity it provides—just over half of all that’s used nationwide—isn’t dirty. Soon, though, they’re won’t be enough of it because our Green President thinks that solar and wind can provide it. It can’t and it won’t. Ever.

There’s just one way to “conserve” energy. Don’t use it. Don’t turn on the light. Don’t turn on the computer. Don’t turn on the television. Unplug your refrigerator, your heating and cooling system. Don’t wash and dry your clothes in a machine. Don’t use it.

Otherwise, the next moron that talks about conserving energy should be stuffed in a barrel and allowed to float over the Niagara Falls which, during Earth Hour, will not be lighted.

We will all be treated to the idiotic sight of a darkened Empire State Building and other similar structures around the world such as the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, Las Vegas strip, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the London Eye Ferris wheel, and the Pyramids of Egypt.

For a whole hour they will go dark to remind us to “conserve energy” that does not need conserving. It needs to be expanded into parts of the world where there is no electricity and, as a result, there is no economy which is another way of saying there is a lot of poverty, sickness, and early death.

SOURCE




The C of E (Church of the Environment) is still dribbling

Most of the Anglican episcopacy may not believe in God but they sure believe in Warmism. They are the Pharisees of today. Note the indented straw-man argument

We may all be damned -- in this world and the next -- by our environmental misdeeds and heedlessness, according to a stern warning from the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, last week.

Mankind is rebuffing the divine love of God and, by its refusal to face "doomsday" environmental damage, it is choking, drowning and starving God's creation, Williams said. He ties it all in to salvation season, when thoughts of Easter and forgiveness from sin loom large, saying

...to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as un-Christian and un-biblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin.

Would you agree? Even if we step up our conservation efforts one by one, are we responsible, even eternally, for our group/national actions? What would be "enough" to stay high and dry in heaven?

SOURCE




Climate sensitivity has been grossly overestimated due to a mix up between cause and effect

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

I’ve been receiving a steady stream of e-mails asking when our latest work on feedbacks in the climate system will be published. Since I’ve been trying to fit the material from three (previously rejected) papers into one unified paper, it has taken a bit longer than expected…but we are now very close to submission.

We’ve tentatively decided to submit to Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) rather than any of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) journals. This is because it appears that JGR editors are somewhat less concerned about a paper’s scientific conclusions supporting the policy goals of the IPCC — regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, JGR’s instructions to reviewers is to not reject a paper simply because the reviewer does not agree with the paper’s scientific conclusions. More on that later.

As those who have been following our work already know, our main conclusion is that climate sensitivity has been grossly overestimated due to a mix up between cause and effect when researchers have observed how global cloud cover varies with temperature.

To use my favorite example, when researchers have observed that global cloud cover decreases with warming, they have assumed that the warming caused the cloud cover to dissipate. This would be a positive feedback since such a response by clouds would let more sunlight in and enhance the warming.

But what they have ignored is the possibility that causation is actually working in the opposite direction: That the decrease in cloud cover caused the warming…not the other way around. And as shown by Spencer and Braswell (2008 J. Climate), this can mask the true existence of negative feedback.

All 20 of the IPCC climate models now have positive cloud feedbacks, which amplify the small about of warming from extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But if cloud feedbacks in the climate system are negative, then the climate system does not particularly care how much you drive your SUV. This is an issue of obvious importance to global warming research. Even the IPCC has admitted that cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty in predicting global warming.

Significantly, our new work provides a method for identifying which direction of causation is occurring (forcing or feedback), and for obtaining a more accurate estimate of feedback in the presence of clouds forcing a temperature change. The method involves a new way of analyzing graphs of time filtered satellite observations of the Earth (or even of climate model output).

Well…at least I thought it was new way of analyzing graphs. It turns out that we have simply rediscovered a method used in other physical sciences: phase space analysis. This methodology was first introduced by Willard Gibbs in 1901.

We found that by connecting successively plotted points in graphs of how the global average temperature varies over time versus how global average radiative balance varies over time, one sees two different kinds of structures emerge: linear striations, which are the result of feedback, and spirals which are the result of internal radiative forcing by clouds.

But such a methodology is not new. To quote from Wikipedia on the subject of ‘phase space’: “Often this succession of plotted points is analogous to the system’s state evolving over time. In the end, the phase diagram…can easily elucidate qualities of the system that might not be obvious otherwise.”

Using a simple climate model we show that these two features that show up in the graphs are a direct result of the two directions of causation: temperature causing clouds to change (revealed by ‘feedback stripes’), and clouds causing temperature to change (revealed by ‘radiative forcing spirals’).

The fact that others have found phase space analysis to be a useful methodology is a good thing. It should lend some credibility to our interpretation. Phase space analysis is what has helped us better understand chaos, along with its Lorenz attractor, strange attractor, etc.

And the fact that we find the exact same structures in the output of the IPCC climate models means that the modelers can not claim our interpretation has no physical basis.

And now we can also use some additional buzzwords in the new article…which seems to help from the standpoint of reviewers thinking you know what you are talking about. The new paper title is, “Phase Space Analysis of Forcing and Feedback in Models and Satellite Observations of Climate Variability”. It just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?

I am confident the work will get published…. eventually. But even if it didn’t, our original published paper on the issue has laid the groundwork… it would just take awhile before the research community understands the implications of that work.

What amazes me is the resistance there has been to ‘thinking out of the box’ when trying to estimate the sensitivity of the climate system. Especially when it has been considered to be ‘thinking in the box’ by other sciences for over a century now.

And it is truly unfortunate that the AMS, home of Lorenz’s first published work on chaos in 1963, has decided that political correctness is more important than the advancement of science.

SOURCE




The coming nuclear renaissance

by Jeff Jacoby

THIRTY YEARS AGO this month, an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania inflamed public opposition to nuclear power. The mishap -- a loss of coolant that caused the reactor core to overheat -- caused no known deaths or diseases, and it exposed area residents to only a negligible amount of radiation. But it fueled an anti-nuclear frenzy that soon brought the expansion of the industry to a halt. Dozens of planned reactors were cancelled. In the years since Three Mile Island, not a single nuclear plant has been ordered and built in the United States.

Yet far from being washed up, atomic power seems poised for a renaissance. Consider:

* According to a new Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans favor nuclear energy -- a new high -- and 27 percent say they strongly favor it. The attitude is bipartisan, with majorities of both Republicans and Democrats supporting nuclear power.

* Other surveys have found even higher levels of support. According to a 2008 Zogby poll, 67 percent of Americans favor the construction of new nuclear facilities, and are much more likely to back a nuclear-powered electric plant over one fueled by natural gas, coal, or oil.

* In the recent presidential campaign, both candidates expressed support for nuclear power. John McCain made a point of praising the French, who derive nearly 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear plants. Though more measured, Barack Obama agreed that "we should explore nuclear power as part of the mix," as he put it in an early Iowa debate.

* While Obama has said little about nuclear power since becoming president, his energy secretary has been unequivocal. "The nuclear industry has to be part of our energy mix," physicist Steven Chu said during his confirmation hearings. "It's 20 percent of our [total] electricity production today, but it's 70 percent of the carbon-free electricity we produce."

* Accenture, the consulting giant, reports growing worldwide support for nuclear energy. In a survey it conducted of more than 10,000 people in 20 nations, 69 percent of respondents wanted their countries to begin or expand the use of nuclear power. Pro-nuclear sentiment was strongest in India (67 percent), China (62 percent), and the United States (57 percent).

* In recent months, Italy and Sweden have reversed anti-nuclear policies; both are now developing plans to construct new plants. Meanwhile, dozens of nuclear reactors are already under construction in other countries, including China, Russia, and Finland. "Among those contemplating building their first ones," reports The Economist, "are Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Belarus."

* In the last two years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received 17 applications for 26 nuclear reactors. Proposals for six additional reactors are pending.

There is no small irony in this turnabout. Nuclear power used to be the environmentalist's ultimate pariah, thanks to overblown claims about the dangers of reactor meltdowns and nuclear waste. But now the green movement has a new pariah -- fossil fuels and their carbon-dioxide emissions. To many environmentalists alarmed about global warming, nuclear power has an irresistible appeal: It releases no greenhouse gases. Indeed -- another irony -- nuclear power plants don't even release as much radiation as do coal-fired electric plants, since coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.

As a result, some of the world's most ardent Greens have come around to embracing nuclear power.

"Only nuclear power can now halt global warming," wrote James Lovelock, the father of the celebrated Gaia theory, which regards the Earth and life on the planet as one complex, interacting "organism," in 2004. In Wired magazine the following year, a much-discussed article -- "Nuclear Now!" -- made the case that only "clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming."

To be sure, the problems with nuclear energy have not vanished. To build a nuclear plant is an expensive undertaking, the disposal of spent fuel rods remains politically contentious, and at least some environmental activists will continue to do what they can to exacerbate fear of nuclear power's dangers.

But 30 years after Three Mile Island, the nuclear future looks brighter than it has in a long time. Right now, 104 commercial reactors generate 20 percent of America's electricity. As the war against the atom continues to wind down, expect to see those numbers go up.

SOURCE (See the original for links)




British eco-migrants flee to New Zealand

The 60s all over again. Way back then lots of Brits and Americans moved to NZ to escape "The Bomb". Mostly they eventually went back to Britain and the USA. The present lot of agonizers will likely do the same in time as the prophecies of doom fail. Amusing that they are moving to a country where the government in unusually unsympathetic to Warmism, though!

NEW ZEALAND is seeing its first influx of British eco-migrants, environmental refugees who have quit the UK because they fear the long-term impacts of climate change.

The country’s islands, renowned for their temperate climate, clean environment and low population, have often been put forward by greens as potential “lifeboats” for a world suffering serious warming.

Recently, James Lovelock, the scientist and creator of the Gaia theory, said in his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, that New Zealand could be one of the world’s last havens as climate change fundamentally changes the planet.

Such effects are expected to take years or decades to happen but some families are already trying to anticipate them. Among them are Lizzy and Mike Larmer-Cottle who have moved their family from London to Albany, half an hour north of Auckland on North Island, surrounded by rolling hills and beaches.

Britain’s recent climate of summer droughts and warm, wet winters was becoming alarming, said Lizzy. She added: “England was just having more and more flooding — if that continues, half of it is going to be underwater.”

The couple stress there were other factors too, such as lower traffic, less pollution and cheaper property. Before moving to New Zealand their sons Milo, 10, and Theo, 12, had, for example, never been able to ride their bikes on local roads.

They are, however, part of a rising tide of Britons heading for the New Zealand. Statistics NZ, which collects data for the country’s government, said more than 18,000 British residents moved there last year alone.

Among recent arrivals was John Zamick who also believes climate change will tip Britain into long-term environmental decline. The businessman, who now co-directs a biodiesel company in Nelson, a town on South Island, points to East Anglia, where rainfall is now so low it is classed as semi-arid, while its coasts are threatened by rising sea levels.

What such eco-migrants have in common is not so much a fear of Britain becoming warmer but that climate change could destabilise the global economy, causing shortages of food.

At the Copenhagen climate science conference earlier this month, scientists set out the latest research on how climate change could affect crops. This showed that, as heat and water shortages took hold, many equatorial regions in Africa and Asia would become unable to grow enough food, creating global shortages of staples like wheat and rice.

Zamick said New Zealand's low population density, agricultural independence and availability of farmland were all prime attractions, along with its English-speaking population.

Americans have also spotted New Zealand’s potential. Adam Fier and his wife Misbah Sadat moved their family from Maryland in the United States to New Zealand late last month. Fier, a computer security expert who used to work at Nasa, told the Washington Post the decision was made because of his two girls. “I am not going to predict how the climate might change and how it might affect New Zealand,” Fier said. “But quite honestly, I feel in 100 years, one of my daughters is still going to be alive and this planet is going to be a mess.”

Scientists agree that New Zealand is likely to be more resilient to any global warming than many other countries — but that could lead to problems with immigration. Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at Britain’s Met Office, said: “A lot of countries in temperate zones could come under pressure to take eco-migrants.”

Immigration specialists say climate is an increasingly important issue for Britons trying to emigrate. Liam Clifford, a director of the British-based GlobalVisas, described how clients increasingly wanted to move to “a temperate country that will escape extreme climate.”

James Hardy shared such views. He used to live in lush Buckinghamshire but became increasingly concerned at how he and his family might cope on such a crowded island if the global climate underwent sharp changes. Three years ago he moved to New Zealand with his wife and their three children. “New Zealand has land, New Zealand has wind, New Zealand has a far more sustainable climate,” he said.

SOURCE

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

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29 March, 2009

Joe Romm: Chief Warmist censor -- attacks Freeman Dyson

As usual with the Green/Left, Romm substitutes abuse for rational argument. He has to. It would in fact be amusing to see him debate the facts with Freeman Dyson. He wouldn't last 5 minutes. Dyson has forgotten more science than Romm ever knew -- making the whole attack rather amusing, on the whole: The midget attacks the mountain. Many critics of Warmism are in fact eminent scientists -- against whom mere propagandists like Romm and Al Gore make a sorry contrast. As far as I can see, Romm has NO scientific achievements to his credit. His life after graduating has been wholly political

A profile of Freeman Dyson has attracted the wrath of Joe Romm. Follow the bolded words below to see what passes for intelligent discourse on Climate Progress, Joe Romm’s allegedly “indispensable blog” (as Tom Friedman inexplicably put it several weeks back):

“Shame on the New York Times Magazine for publishing an extended, largely favorable profile of Freeman Dyson, a true climate crackpot …”

“Shame on them for printing his scientifically unjustifiable slanders of the country’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen …”

“And shame on the NYT’s top climate science reporter, Andy Revkin for promoting this piece on his blog with not a single criticism of Dyson’s numerous anti-scientific statements and smears . . . I call on Revkin to retract his absurdly indefensible assertion that, ‘On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right . . . (see full quote at end)’”

Romm betrays himself with the editing of Revkin’s sentence; more about that in a minute. But first… Romm aims his wrath at the New York Times for publishing a profile of Freeman Dyson in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, and, of course, at one of his favorite whipping boys, Andy Revkin, for writing about the profile dispassionately in his DotEarth blog.

In Joe Romm’s logic, anyone who disagrees with him is guilty of “smears” and “slander,” as opposed to simply offering an opinion, which, well, may be right or wrong. It’s not good enough for Romm to argue passionately against a point of view. For anyone with the chutzpah to advance an argument he disagrees with, Romm seems compelled to use taunts and epithets. He also frequently ties this tactic with the demand that a writer or publication “retract” what they’ve published. One gets the sense that honest debate is not Romm’s goal, but quite the opposite: the shutting down of free expression. And in my opinion, this makes him the entirely dispensable censor.

Romm reveals just how dispensable his blog really is with his editing of Revkin’s sentence — editing that was clearly intended to twist Andy’s original meaning to leave his readers with a false impression. Here is the full sentence, minus Romm’s excisions: “On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right or wrong, and pretty much admits that.”

Yes, Romm did direct his readers to Revkin’s blog to see the “full quote at end.” But how many will actually take the extra steps to do that? Not many. If Romm really was interested in truth he would have have included the six extra words in that sentence.

I suspect that something other than a pursuit of the truth and healthy debate is at work here. What might that be? Let’s string together the strong words from his post, one after the other: shame; slanders; shame; shame; smears; absurdly indefensible; loopy; famous crackpot camp; outlandish; crackpot; rant and rave; loopiness; slander-fest; uncivil, unjustified ravings; crackpots. (Did I catch them all?)

And then this: “Shame on the NYT, shame on the reporter, Nicholas Dawidoff, for publishing this crackpot’s crap for millions to read and possibly think is credible”

I believe psychologists have a word for Romm’s unseemly behavior: “projection.” (Or possibly ”transference“?)

SOURCE




Some scientists are cool to the warming idea

For some people the global warming debate has gone as cold as these late March days; there isn’t one anymore. But for two scientists scheduled to speak in Racine next week, it might as well be the heat of August. Willie Soon, a physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and David Legates, an associate professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, don’t buy into the prevailing hypothesis that all the carbon dioxide we’re adding to the atmosphere will in just a few decades warm the earth and cause drastic changes in the weather.

For the first 14 of his 19 years in science, Soon said he conducted research on the sun without thinking about the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, quietly publishing scientific papers that opposed mainstream thought on global warming. In the last five years, he said, his conscience drove him to start speaking out. His work has led him to the conclusion that solar radiation, the sun shining on the earth, is the driving force in what other scientists believe is global warming. He suggests that the waxing and waning of the sun’s power, as reflected in sunspot cycles, can account for changes in the global climate history.

Legates’ objection to human-caused global warming lies with the lack of warming in the last decade. That suggests that some other force is acting on the climate, he said. He is troubled by the computer models which don’t reflect the real world, and he said that some of those predictive models assume extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide because that’s the only way the model will produce a trend.

Soon and Legates also take issue with the current scientific system. No one will truly engage him in discussion of the science, Soon said; everything descends into personal attacks. “They’re not willing to criticize my work and point out the errors. That’s the problem. I don’t know what is wrong with my argument,” he said.

Legates said many scientists who don’t necessarily agree with human-caused warming remain silent because it keeps research money flowing and because most want quiet lives. Both suggested there is a problem of group-think in climate science. As the editor of a journal, Legates said, he could publish just about anything by picking the reviewers carefully. “You can’t simply can’t declare the debate’s over,” Legates said. “We’re not anywhere close to that point.”

“I think that skepticism is healthy in the scientific process,” said Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist for climatic research at the Gaylord Nelson Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think it would be very dangerous if everyone had the same view and didn’t question each other.”

Although not an expert in solar radiation, he said he does keep up on the field and everything he’s read discounts the sun as a force in global warming. Computer climate models are necessarily simplifications, and the large amounts of carbon dioxide used in them are not to find a trend but to account for all the other greenhouse gases, Vavrus said. As to recent ups and downs, he said, there is always natural variability in the climate system.

If one just reads the science in the reports from the International Panel on Climate Change, he said, it’s overwhelming. Likewise there are few naysayers at conferences because most scientists have come to the conclusion that carbon dioxide generated by humans is the major factor in global warming, he said.

What Soon describes as personal attacks are unfortunate, Vavrus said. “You know, I’d be interested in getting together with the two of them and having a beer and chatting about some of these things if we could keep it from getting personal, because I’m interested in their experiences in sticking their necks out and being such skeptics because I know it’s such a tough road for them.”

“On the other hand, scientists love to prove each other wrong,” he said. That is so ingrained in scientists that it serves as a check on pressures to conform, he said.

SOURCE




Indiana governor critical of new environmental laws

Gov. Mitch Daniels said in a Friday morning stop in Linton that he is proud that the state has stepped up and passed historic coal legislation that he says is good news for the economy in Greene, Sullivan and other southern Indiana communities. Daniels signed a bill into law Tuesday that allows the state's finance authority to negotiate long-term contracts to buy and sell synthetic natural gas from a planned southern Indiana coal-gasification plant.

The governor said the law will save Indiana's natural gas users billions of dollars by ensuring a steady supply of synthetic natural gas free of the price fluctuations of the natural gas market.... Much of the coal will come from the new Peabody Coal Company Bear Pit surface mine that will open later this year south of Dugger....

"These plants will deliver savings to rate payers over time because the long-term cost of coal will be less than the long term cost of natural gas. So what do you get -- a ton of jobs and we pay ourselves instead of someone else for the coal. It's essentially as clean as nuclear and wind power and all of these other things and it's savings to rate payers. It's a really good deal. I've been working on this for three years, so if I sound fired up, I am."

The governor urged Hoosiers to pay attention to a federal movement originating with the current administration in Washington D.C. of what is being suggested in the name of "climate controls" is what he called a "horrible threat to Greene County (and) to all of Indiana."

"The way it is being suggested is this carbon tax will be paid on your utility bills and would more than double utility bills in this state," Daniels said, and pointed out this would hurt the state's ability to attract new business and hinder jobs creation.

"What this is beginning to smell like is a plan that will tax the living day lights out of the Midwest so they can spend money on whatever (Speaker of the House) Nancy Pelosi has in mind in California," Daniels stressed. "I'm hoping that this whole climate change freight train is slowing down a little bit. They (the administration) is determined to do this thing. I've talked to (Senators) Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar about this and I think they are aware of the dangers."

The governor pointed out that jobs and the economy continue to be a concern. He noted that the state is among the leaders in the Midwest in creating new jobs, but are losing far too many other manufacturing jobs as the recession tightens.

More HERE




Texas education board's global warming standards irk Green Fascists

Must not question them! Textbook requirements question whether AGW exists but also push students to explore its implications

The State Board of Education on Friday adopted standards on the teaching of global warming that appear to both question its existence and prod students to explore its implications.

Language that instructed students to "analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming," which had been offered as an amendment and was adopted unanimously in an initial vote Thursday, led to outrage among environmental groups. "In a last-minute assault on science and sensibility, the board appears to be supporting its own ideological views rather than those of proven science," said Ramon Alvarez, a senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund.

The chairman of the state board, Don McLeroy, called the standards "perfectly good." "Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey," McLeroy said.

But the state board approved standards that engage some of the underlying causes and effects of global warming, including one that calls on students to "analyze the empirical relationship between the emissions of carbon dioxide, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the average global temperature trends over the past 150 years" and another to "describe the effect of pollution on global warming, glacial and ice cap melting, greenhouse effect, ozone layer, and aquatic viability."

The current standards, which were adopted about a decade ago, barely touch on climate change.

"Asking students to independently discover the relationship between ice melting and global warming is important," said James Canup, executive director of the Texas League of Conservation Voters. "But the main message coming out of there is that Texas is setting a bad standard by putting question marks next to global warming in the textbooks."

SOURCE




Alaska: Drowning in the snows of Kotzebue



It's March now, how March should be-blue and sunny, twenty to thirty below in the morning with daytime highs rising to zero. Winter is slipping into memory, but we still have the drifts around Kotzebue to remind us.

January brought a longer-than-usual stretch of 30 and 40 below weather. We got restless, on the verge of cabin fever. We thought we deserved a break. Then the storms came, blizzards after blizzard--so often that we might as well have painted our windows white. Not that the paint would have stayed on.

Kotzebue is supposed to be stormy, but this year was more like drowning-we'd get a blow, and if we were lucky have a day to come up for air and shovel out, and then get hit with it again.

Much more HERE




Australia: 'Extinct' possums back from the dead

There are MILLIONS of possums in Australia and New Zealand. "Brushtail" possums commonly live in the roof spaces of older houses in Brisbane, where they make a considerable racket. It is hard to imagine how noisy such small animals can be. They sound like a thundering herd of elephants when they run about on my ceiling at times. Visitors from South are often greatly alarmed by the noise they make there and look dubious when you tell them that it is "just possums". Most Brisbane people are used to them, however. Nonetheless possum removal experts do a good trade. The fact that the slightly different species described below is so rare almost certainly indicates that it has been out-competed by the more adaptable common "brushtail" species and was headed for extinction anyway.

Although they are only about the size of a small cat, Australia's possums (a different but related species to the American opossum) are remarkably fearless of humans, which is rather endearing and gives rise to the Australia expression of "Stir the possum". If you disturb them they will often snap back rather than run away. That fearlessness is probably bad for them in New Zealand, however. New Zealanders hate them and do all they can to kill them. The fact that there are probably more possums in New Zealand than there are people might have something to do with that. But I certainly enjoy it when I am having an evening meal on my verandah and a possum comes strolling past along the telecoms cable that runs above the street in front of my house. They are remarkably confident little animals and seem to do a high wire act with total ease

And I can vouch for the fact that Australia's "brushtail" possums are marsupials. I got quite a clear view of the marsupium of a female possum while sitting at my dinner table recently. There is a mulberry tree that abuts onto my verandah and possums often leap about in it quite unconcerned about the nearby human presence. It is always a great pleasure to see them there. And I live in an old inner-city area, not in any kind of rural setting. But Australian inner city areas tend to be pleasant, leafy places. I also see wild turkeys about the place a lot

A POSSUM population believed to have been wiped out by climate change is in fact clinging to survival, scientists say. Researchers say they have discovered three living brown lemuroid ringtail possums in the Daintree National Park, on Cape York, although the Daintree possums were believed to have been killed off during a heat wave in 2005.

No white lemuroid possums - which once accounted for 40 per cent of the lemuroid possum population in the area - have been located so far.

But Associate Professor Steve Williams of James Cook University said there was no reason to believe they wouldn't have survived alongside their brown relatives. "I don't think there is any reason to believe the white ones are harder hit than the brown ones," he said.

Lemuroid ringtail possums are found in just two locations, at the Carbine Tablelands in the Daintree and in the Atherton Tablelands, west of Cairns, though white lemuroids are extremely rare in the latter location.

Prof Williams said the Daintree possums had not been spotted since an extended heatwave in 2005, leading to the belief that they had been pushed to extinction by climate change. He said the species could not cope with extended periods of temperatures over 27 degrees.

"Over the last 50 years, the number of days where you get that temperature has been steadily increasing, to the point that in 2005 there were 27 consecutive days where the temperature went above that threshold," he said. "That seems to have really knocked them down."

Prof Williams said the species still hadn't been found in locations where they had been common and his research team would try to identify why they had survived in the current location.

He said the possums remained extremely vulnerable and another heatwave could wipe them out. "I don't think they are out of danger in any shape or form. It is very clear that these heatwaves are steadily increasing," he said. [And where is the evidence for that? It is just a creed he is uttering]

SOURCE

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

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28 March, 2009

PUBLIC OPINION: TIPPING POINT?

An email from Paul Stevens [pstevens2@gmail.com]:

I have been struck, recently, by what I think is a significant shift observable in the public media. I don't mean that suddenly all newspaper, television and internet outlets are suddenly printing anti-global warming pieces. Rather, it is in the comment sections under most internet blog and news items and in letters to the editors of hard copy news journals.

There now seems to be a preponderance of public comment that rejects the wilder claims of the AGW proponents and that recommend nuclear power as a clear and reasonable alternative to windmills and solar photovoltaic as primary generators of electricity. I would say this turnaround has occurred within the last year. It is now common to see more than five comments rejecting alternate energy solutions to every one supporting it. And an even higher ratio rejecting wild claims of doom for inevitable global warming for every one saying it is natural, or slight or something that can easily be accomodated in a world whose people are growing more prosperous.

This has been happening gradually for years, but in he last twelve months public opinon (as expressed in the available media) seems to have reached a tipping point. Maybe the climate change cheerleading squads are just tired, after hyping it for so long, with so little actual change. I wouldn't call this a rout just yet, as long as Obama feels he has to mouth platitudes about how the US will soon be leading the charge, but it is starting to take on the odour of one.




Hansen admits to guesswork about basic climate model inputs

On Mar. 11, Dr. James E. Hansen gave a talk at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen. It was titled "Air Pollutant Climate Forcings within the Big Climate Picture" It is available online here [PDF].

As Tom Nelson observes: "The stuff on pages 6-8 of the PDF really has to be seen to be believed. Hansen actually admits [Chart 9] that the IPCC aerosol estimate was "pretty much pulled out of a hat""

The commentary for Chart 8 is also a rather revealing admission:

"We do not have measurements of aerosols going back to the 1800s – we don’t even have global measurements today. Any measurements that exist incorporate both forcing and feedback. Aerosol effects on clouds are very uncertain"




FREEMAN DYSON: THE CIVIL HERETIC

[...] Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that "most consider me wrong about global warming." That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen ("inaction is inexcusable") only increases Dyson's resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson's physics - he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize - but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: "I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice."

Much more HERE




PRAVDA'S SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING

The erstwhile chief organ of the old Soviet leadership still has some ideas in common with the past. But this time they make more sense. Or they should to Leftists anyway

I think that the CO2-caused Global Warming theory is false and unproven junk science.

But let's suppose for a moment that the CO2 equals Global Warming equation is real. The wealthy elitists James Hansen, Al Gore, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and the other high-profile cheerleaders for CO2 reduction are asking the poor and middle classes to suffer the consequences of a radical shutdown of global commerce and energy production in order to 'save the planet' from Global Warming. They want to make serfs of the masses of working people, while a privileged elite will be permitted to continue living in high style with a much larger 'carbon footprint' than the un-entitled lower classes.

We should never let that happen. The only way that 'carbon rationing' should be allowed is by assigning the exact same carbon limit to all people everywhere. Al Gore, Barack Obama, a London cabbie, and a Kalahari Bushman should all be assigned exactly the same number of 'carbon credits', period. Let them trade their credits with each other, but everyone should be restricted to the same limited 'carbon credit' allowance. The long-term ultimate effect of this would be an economic leveling of society; essentially global Communism. Under such a system, no one would be able to accumulate an excess of personal property or wealth because they could never accumulate enough 'carbon credits' to do so.

When Hansen, Gore, Blair, and Obama give up their patrician incomes and lifestyles and restrict their own 'carbon footprint' to the level of the common labourer or office worker, I will begin to believe that they are sincere about preventing Global Warming. Their obvious unwillingness to do what they are asking the rest of us to do proves that they are not sincere. They want the common people to sacrifice their lives to prevent Global Warming, while the wealthy retain their high-carbon consuming and producing privileges.

We cannot permit a privileged elite to enjoy a 'high-carbon' lifestyle while the poor are restricted by law to a 'low-carbon' lifestyle. Any effort by any government to impose carbon rationing with preferential treatment to any class of people should be seen as sufficient reason for an all-out French-style revolution in which the majority population dispossess the elitists of their wealth, their positions of power, and their privilege. In a world that is constantly threatened by Global Warming, we cannot allow a greedy few to consume or produce in excess of the average 'carbon footprint' of the world's population as a whole.

Barack Obama keeps the temperature at 78 degrees Fahrenheit in the Oval Office while telling the rest of us to turn our thermostats down. James Hansen has received grants amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the Global Warming theory. Al Gore has invested heavily in the 'carbon trading' brokerage business. All of these men jet around the world, live in oversized houses, and ride in limousines. If the common people are to be required by law to reduce our 'carbon footprint', we need to demand that our leaders and the wealthy elite be restricted to exactly the same carbon allowance as everyone else.

We are not all together in the fight against Global Warming unless everyone is required to make the same sacrifices by sharing an equal 'carbon footprint' and an equal 'carbon ration', which should be assigned equally to every living person in the entire world. We need to hold the elitists' feet to the fire and require them to make exactly the same sacrifices as the rest of humanity.

Individual carbon limits and carbon rationing? Bring them on. Viva la Revolucion!

SOURCE




The Greatest Scam in History

Are you one of the victims of the "greatest scam in history"? I'm not referring to the scam conducted by Bernie Mad[e]off. I'm referring to what veteran meteorologist John Coleman calls the "greatest scam in history".

The victims of Mad[e]off's scam are typical of scam victims. They allowed their greed to override their common sense. They failed to consider the advice of the police that if some opportunity sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Victims of the global warming scam have done nothing to make themselves victims, particularly those who are unemployed through no actions they have taken.

Those who could have been employed constructing clean coal powered electric plants are unemployed because the perpetrators of the global warming scam have stopped construction of those plants. The need to supply equipment for such plants and goods and services to construction workers would have created more jobs.

According to the perpetrators of the global warming scam, there is supposed to be a total consensus that what they call "global warming" is a major threat to earth's future. Coleman is one of many meteorlogists who disagree with some or all of their claims. S. Fred Singer is another who questions such claims. The two of them together have over 100 years of experience studying weather. Coleman founded the Weather Channel. Singer was the first head of the National Weather Satellite Service.

The claim that the minor atmospheric gas carbon dioxide (CO2) can determine atmospheric temperature sounds so absurd that it is hard to understand how anyone with a logical scientific mind could believe it. Supposedly CO2 which comprises less than 400 parts per million of the atmosphere can cause higher temperatures by absorbing and reemitting low energy infrared radiation (IR) from earth's surface. They make this claim in spite of the fact that physicist R.W. Wood proved a century ago that trapping IR couldn't even cause heating in an enclosed greenhouse much less the atmosphere.

The equation they use to predict catastrophic warming contains a major flaw that NASA covered up until Ferenc Miskolczi left NASA and blew the whistle on them. The equation Arthur Milne developed in 1922 contains a serious flaw. Milne mistakenly solved the differential equation involved by assuming an infinitely thick atmosphere. NASA is a major player in the global warming scam. Some of its employees may have acted illegally.

Those who believe in global warming claim that a 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius) increase in what they call a global average temperature during the 20th Century indicates global warming. The fact is that even if the number they use had any mathematical value it would amount to only a 0.16 % change which would more likely be due to changes or deficiencies in equipment or changes in the area surrounding the equipment. Much of that equipment is in areas where maintenance is likely to be unavailable, but even the equipment in developed countries may be unreliable. There are documented problems with equipment and locations used to measure temperatures in the U.S.

Believers in global warming act more like religious fanatics than scientists. For them consensus is more important than facts. They call those who question their beliefs names like "contrarians" or "deniers" much like those who believed the earth was the center of the universe called Galileo and Copernicus "heretics'.

Those who question global warming have something else in common with Galileo and Copernicus. Galileo and Copernicus challenged the belief that the human inhabited earth must be the center of the universe the sun. Their persecutors believed the sun must revolve around the earth because the consensus view considered humans so important.

Those who claim humans are causing global warming believe humans are so powerful they can magically control earth's climate by manipulating a very minor atmospheric gas. They ignore the fact that earth's heat comes from the sun.

The so-called "deniers" believe that changes in the sun's output determine whether earth warms or cools. Some astrophysicists, who study the sun, believe that thousands of years of observation of the sun indicate the sun is about to enter a part of its cycle in which it will produce less heat as was the case in the 18th Century when Gen. George Washington's troops spent an extremely cold winter at Valley Forge.

The corrupt United Nations and other political organizations are pushing the scam. This is the same U.N. that was behind the oil for food scandals and scandals in UNESCO and UNICEF. The same U.N. that approved the U.S. invasion of Iraq to look for Weapons of Mass Destruction. There was more evidence for WMD in Iraq than there is for global warming caused by CO2.

Some financial interests, including the bankrupt Lehman Brothers, have been pushing the scam as means of increasing the value of a financial instrument they call "carbon credits". These carbon credits potentialty allow financial parasites to cut themselves in for a portion of the revenue of various companies. Carbon credits inflate the cost of goods and services and may force companies to lay off people who would otherwise not lose their jobs.

Supporters of the global warming scam claim they want to protect the environment, but they call CO2 a polutant even though it is essential to biological life. Plants need CO2 to produce the food we eat.

The scammers by emphasizing a non-threat to the environment divert attention from ways humans actually affect the environment such as the production of black soot in China's dirty coal electrical plants. Black soot mixing with snow in the Arctic converts sunlight into heat that melts the snow. Without the soot the snow would reflect the sunlight back into space.

SOURCE




U.N. CLIMATE PLAN WOULD SHIFT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO FORM NEW WORLD ECONOMY

A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes - all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discreetly worded United Nations "information note" on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an "effective framework" for dealing with global warming.

The 16-page note, obtained by FOX News, will be distributed to participants at a mammoth negotiating session that starts on March 29 in Bonn, Germany, the first of three sessions intended to hammer out the actual commitments involved in the new deal.

In the stultifying language that is normal for important U.N. conclaves, the negotiators are known as the "Ad Hoc Working Group On Further Commitments For Annex I Parties Under the Kyoto Protocol." Yet the consequences of their negotiations, if enacted, would be nothing short of world-changing.

Getting that deal done has become the United Nations' highest priority, and the Bonn meeting is seen as a critical step along the path to what the U.N. calls an "ambitious and effective international response to climate change," which is intended to culminate at the later gathering in Copenhagen.

Just how ambitious the U.N.'s goals are can be seen, but only dimly, in the note obtained by FOX News, which offers in sparse detail both positive and negative consequences of the tools that industrial nations will most likely use to enforce the greenhouse gas reduction targets.

The paper makes no effort to calculate the magnitude of the costs and disruption involved, but despite the discreet presentation, makes clear that they will reverberate across the entire global economic system.

Among the tools that are considered are the cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon emissions that has been espoused by the Obama administration; "carbon taxes" on imported fuels and energy-intensive goods and industries, including airline transportation; and lower subsidies for those same goods, as well as new or higher subsidies for goods that are considered "environmentally sound."

Other tools are referred to only vaguely, including "energy policy reform," which the report indicates could affect "large-scale transportation infrastructure such as roads, rail and airports." When it comes to the results of such reform, the note says only that it could have "positive consequences for alternative transportation providers and producers of alternative fuels."

In the same bland manner, the note informs negotiators without going into details that cap-and-trade schemes "may induce some industrial relocation" to "less regulated host countries." Cap-and-trade functions by creating decreasing numbers of pollution-emission permits to be traded by industrial users, and thus pay more for each unit of carbon-based pollution, a market-driven system that aims to drive manufacturers toward less polluting technologies.

The note adds only that industrial relocation "would involve negative consequences for the implementing country, which loses employment and investment." But at the same time it "would involve indeterminate consequences for the countries that would host the relocated industries."

There are also entirely new kinds of tariffs and trade protectionist barriers such as those termed in the note as "border carbon adjustment"- which, the note says, can impose "a levy on imported goods equal to that which would have been imposed had they been produced domestically" under more strict environmental regimes.

Another form of "adjustment" would require exporters to "buy [carbon] offsets at the border equal to that which the producer would have been forced to purchase had the good been produced domestically."

The impact of both schemes, the note says, "would be functionally equivalent to an increased tariff: decreased market share for covered foreign producers." (There is no definition in the report of who, exactly, is "foreign.") The note adds that "If they were implemented fairly, such schemes would leave trade and investment patterns unchanged." Nothing is said about the consequences if such fairness was not achieved.

Indeed, only rarely does the "information note" attempt to inform readers in dollar terms of the impact of "spillover effects" from the potential policy changes it discusses. In a brief mention of consumer subsidies for fossil fuels, the note remarks that such subsidies in advanced economies exceed $60 billion a year, while they exceed $90 billion a year in developing economies."

But calculations of the impact of tariffs, offsets, or other subsidies is rare. In a reference to the impact of declining oil exports, the report says that Saudi Arabia has determined the loss to its economy at between $100 billion and $200 billion by 2030, but said nothing about other oil exporters.

One reason for the lack of detail, the note indicates, is that impact would vary widely depending on the nature and scope of the policies adopted (and, although the note does not mention it, on the severity of the greenhouse reduction targets).

But even when it does hazard a guess at specific impacts, the report seems curiously hazy. A "climate change levy on aviation" for example, is described as having undetermined "negative impacts on exporters of goods that rely on air transport, such as cut flowers and premium perishable produce," as well as "tourism services." But no mention is made in the note of the impact on the aerospace industry, an industry that had revenues in 2008 of $208 billion in the U.S. alone, or the losses the levy would impose on airlines for ordinary passenger transportation. (Global commercial airline revenues in 2008 were about $530 billion, and were already forecast to drop to an estimated $467 billion this year.)

In other cases, as when discussing the "increased costs of traditional exports" under a new environmental regime, the report confines itself to terse description. Changes in standards and labeling for exported goods, for example, "may demand costly changes to the production process." If subsidies and tariffs affect exports, the note says, the "economic and social consequences of dampening their viability may, for some countries and sectors, be significant."

Much depends, of course, on the extent to which harsher or more lenient greenhouse gas reduction targets demand more or less drastic policies for their achievement.

And, precisely because the Bonn meeting is a stage for negotiating those targets, the note is silent. Instead it suggests that more bureaucratic work is needed "to deepen the understanding of the full nature and scale of such impacts."

But outside the Bonn process, other experts have been much more blunt about the draconian nature of the measures they deem necessary to make "effective" greenhouse gas reductions.

In an influential but highly controversial paper called "Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change," British economist Nicholas Lord Stern, formerly a high British Treasury official, has declared that industrial economies would need to cut their per capita carbon dioxide emissions by "at least 80% by 2050," while the biggest economies, like the U.S.'s, would have to make cuts of 90 percent.

Stern also calls for "immediate and binding" reduction targets for developed nations of 20 percent to 40 percent by 2020.

To meet Stern's 2050 goals, he says, among other things, "most of the world's electricity production will need to have been decarbonized."

By way of comparison, according to the U.S. Department Of Energy, roughly 72 percent of U.S. electrical power generation in 2007 was derived from burning fossil fuels, with just 6 percent coming from hydro-power and less than 3 percent from non-nuclear renewable and "other" sources. And even then, those "other" non-fossil sources included wood and biomass - which, when burned, are major emitters of carbon.

SOURCE

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

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27 March, 2009

A NON-EXPLANATION

The early Pliocene is a bit pesky for Warmists. As far as we can tell, it was much like today in terms of CO2 levels and solar activity. Yet it was much warmer and so sea levels were much higher. But nobody knows why. It is not explained by the "forcings" usually discussed today. Does not that imply that there is much about earth's temperature that we do not understand? If so, should we not be leery of models which claim to predict earth's temperature from a state of such imperfect knowledge? Surely so!

A recent paper does not help much. It claims to explain the phenomernon but the explanation is pathetic. It concludes that in the larger and warmer ocean of the early Pliocene the warm water stetched closer to the pole. Big surprise! In good Greenie fashion, it would seem to be confusing an effect of warming with the cause of it.

Popular summary of the finding below followed by journal abstract

The early Pliocene epoch from 5.3 to about 3 million years ago was much warmer than today. Despite this difference, the early Pliocene climate was very much like the preindustrial present in many important ways--including the amount of solar radiation Earth received, the concentration of atmospheric CO2, and a nearly identical geographic environment. However, there was no permanent ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, and global sea level was 25 meters higher. Why then was the world so different? Brierly et al. analyze new and published data about sea surface temperatures 4 million years ago that show that the meridional temperature gradient between the equator and the subtropics was much shallower than it is today, implying that the ocean tropical warm pool was much larger. An atmospheric general circulation model shows what major atmospheric circulation changes such a sea surface temperature field implies, with relevance for how climate warming may affect the future.

SOURCE

Greatly Expanded Tropical Warm Pool and Weakened Hadley Circulation in the Early Pliocene

By Chris M. Brierley et al.

The Pliocene warm interval has been difficult to explain. We reconstructed the latitudinal distribution of sea surface temperature around 4 million years ago, during the early Pliocene. Our reconstruction shows that the meridional temperature gradient between the equator and subtropics was greatly reduced, implying a vast poleward expansion of the ocean tropical warm pool. Corroborating evidence indicates that the Pacific temperature contrast between the equator and 32°N has evolved from 2°C 4 million years ago to 8°C today. The meridional warm pool expansion evidently had enormous impacts on the Pliocene climate, including a slowdown of the atmospheric Hadley circulation and El Niño–like conditions in the equatorial region. Ultimately, sustaining a climate state with weak tropical sea surface temperature gradients may require additional mechanisms of ocean heat uptake (such as enhanced ocean vertical mixing).

Science 27 March 2009. Vol. 323. no. 5922, pp. 1714 - 1718




OBAMA MAY DELAY SIGNING COPENHAGEN DEAL (INDEFINITELY?)

Barack Obama may be forced to delay signing up to a new international agreement on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year because of the scale of opposition in the US Congress, it emerged today. Senior figures in the Obama administration have been warning Labour counterparts that the president may need at least another six months to win domestic support for any proposal. Such a delay could derail the securing of a tough global agreement in time for countries and markets to adopt it before the Kyoto treaty runs out in 2012.

American officials would prefer to have the approval of Congress for any international agreement and fear that if the US signed up without it there would be a serious domestic backlash.

Stephen Byers, co-chairman of the International Climate Change Taskforce, said: "The Copenhagen climate change talks in December will come at a difficult moment. The timing couldn't really be worse for the Obama administration. It is vital that this is recognised by the international community. If need be, we should be prepared to give them more time - not to let them off the hook and escape their responsibilities, but ensure they are politically able to sign up to effective international action which reflects the scale of the challenge we face." Byers, a former cabinet minister who has close contacts with senior Democrats in the Obama team, added: "The practical reality is that a delay into 2010 will still leave time for a new international structure to be put in place for 2012 to follow from Kyoto. Such a delay would be a price worth paying to bring the United States into the global effort to tackle climate change."

The White House's new chief science adviser, John Holden, was a member of the climate change taskforce and Todd Stern, one of its advisers, is working with Hillary Clinton at the State Department and will lead negotiations for the US in Copenhagen. Stern has warned it will be a tall order to get congressional approval before Copenhagen.

Obama has committed the US to reducing its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, but scientists and European governments insist deeper cuts are needed. Obama has suggested that the US could compensate with swifter reductions in the years beyond 2020. His recent budget proposal calls for reducing US emissions roughly 80% by 2050 over 2005 levels.

The British government view, including that of the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, is that the Obama administration can and will strike a deal at Copenhagen, but officials in Washington fear America may be running out of time. They have even been looking at whether an agreement would be seen as an international treaty requiring a two-thirds majority in Congress, or whether it could be forced through as a presidential executive order. But the opposition within America is potentially substantial, and might be hardened if Obama looks like he is presenting Congress with a fait accompli.

There are thought to be as many as 15 Democratic senators who represent "rust-belt" states dependent on coal mining, steel production and heavy manufacturing, all big emitters of carbon. There have also been suggestions that the cost of any climate change legislation may be higher than the $646bn suggested by the Obama administration.

On Tuesday, Obama recommited himself and America to the principle of a "cap and trade" scheme, but said he would try to introduce a regional scheme that would ensure energy prices did not rise uniformly across America.

Stern would prefer to see the US go to Copenhagen with congressional approval, telling a recent symposium: "The optimum would be [climate] legislation that is signed, sealed and delivered. It has been a long time now that countries have been looking for the United States to lead and take action. I think nothing would give a more powerful signal to other countries in the world than to see a significant, major, mandatory American plan."

SOURCE




OBAMA'S GREEN PLEDGE IN PERIL AS BLUE DOGS TAKE A BITE AT BUDGET

President Obama was huddled in talks yesterday with congressional Democrats over proposals that would pare his $3.6 trillion budget, raising question marks over how he would fund promises on healthcare, climate change and tax cuts.

Although the President was braced for ferocious opposition from Republicans, who warn that his spending plans will bankrupt America, he also faces growing hostility from a group of fiscally conservative Democrats alarmed by forecasts of a $9.3 trillion (£6.3 trillion) deficit over ten years.

Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, outlined a spending plan on Tuesday that would eventually cut annual deficits by two thirds but severely weaken the President's ability to extend health coverage to the uninsured or introduce measures designed to combat global warming.

While Mr Obama had sought a $634 billion "down-payment" for healthcare reform over the next decade, the Senate plan says that this must be paid for through savings elsewhere or tax increases at a later date.

Neither the Senate version - nor the slightly less severe proposal suggested yesterday by the House of Representatives Budget Committee - would include Mr Obama's scheme for a $15 billion a year "cap-and-trade" system on carbon use. This has encountered stiff resistance from Democrats in coalmining states such as the key electoral battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania, who say that 85 per cent of their energy comes from such fossil fuels and that it could have a devastating effect on a manufacturing sector already stricken by the recession.

Eric Cantor, a member of the Republican leadership in the House, claimed yesterday that Mr Obama's budget was "so far out of the mainstream" that even Democrats were reluctant to support it.

More HERE




CAP AND TRADE BEING CAPPED

It is gradually dawning on Washington that cap-and-trade legislation won't pass anytime soon--certainly not this year, and probably not next year either. One reason is public opinion: a Gallup survey released last week revealed that "for the first time in Gallup's 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent." Just four years ago, protecting the environment enjoyed a 17-point edge; today, the advantage goes to the economy, 51-42.

The second reason is regional politics. Support for environmental legislation is strongest on the coasts, weakest in the interior areas that depend more heavily on coal-fired power plants. The Midwest, which has already been hit hard by the collapse of manufacturing, would take a second blow. This matters because the Democratic Party is an uneasy coalition between the coasts and the interior, symbolized by bitter fight between Henry Waxman and John Dingell for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It is hard to imagine Midwestern Democrats voting for cap-and-trade in current economic circumstances, and perhaps not in any economic circumstances--that is, unless they receive credible assurances of dollar-for-dollar offsets against the higher costs their constituents would have to bear.

This reality creates two difficulties for the Obama administration. On the fiscal front, the administration is counting on $629 billion in revenues from cap-and-trade to pay for the Making Work Pay tax credit and its proposed spending on clear energy technology. Failure to pass cap-and-trade would force the administration to choose between cherished programs and an even higher budget deficit, already estimated by the CBO at $9.3 trillion over the next decade. On the diplomatic front, when the Copenhagen Climate Conference convenes this December, the administration faces the prospect of showing up empty-handed. Senior officials acknowledge the potential embarrassment for a president so clearly determined to assert American global leadership on energy and environmental issues but see no easy way out.

In the face of these inconvenient developments, the administration's options are limited. If the president remains committed to Making Work Pay and clean energy investment, he will probably have to agree to equivalent spending reductions elsewhere, because fiscal moderates within his own party will insist. Internationally, the president's team would be wise to prepare other key participants in the Copenhagen conference for the near-certainty that the stance of the United States on emissions reductions will be based mostly on good intentions rather than settled policy. The administration, quite simply, won't be close to meeting its own standards of success on environmental issues--and it is hard to erect credibility on a foundation of overpromising and underperforming.

SOURCE




BRITAIN'S GREEN ENERGY PLANS BLOWN APART

One by one, the energy giants that hoisted green flags and trumpeted their conversion to renewables are ducking and diving and hiding behind the curtains. Iberdrola, a big investor in wind farms in Spain and the owner of ScottishPower, is slashing its spending on renewables by 40 per cent. Shell said recently it would no longer invest in wind turbines, preferring to focus its efforts on new biofuel technology, while BP has opted out of the UK renewables market, deeming it to be a poor bet.

It is tempting to see the great push for renewable energy in Europe as a fair-weather phenomenon. The performance of Britain's turbines is a case in point - for much of January they were operating at about 10 per cent of capacity.

That should be no surprise, given that periods of severe cold (or heat) coincide with lack of wind, but it doesn't help when a utility is trying to deliver power into the grid, not to mention returns to its shareholders. These issues are critical, because we need to begin building more power capacity today if we are to avoid blackouts by 2015 when we are committed to closing old coal-fired power stations.

All of this is embarrassing for a Government that likes to portray itself as the champion of green causes. But it is pointless for Ed Miliband, the Minister for Energy and Climate Change, to berate utilities for not building stuff that is uneconomic and, anyway, cannot be relied upon to deliver the power we need at the flick of a switch.

More HERE




Australian interest in environment issues wanes as Facebook group urges Earth Hour power ON



An anti-Earth Hour group urging Australians to keep their lights blazing this weekend is a sign of waning interest in environmentalism, experts say. The global Earth Hour movement – founded in Australia in 2007 – is asking people to switch off their lights for one hour on Saturday night. But a Facebook group is urging people to "keep every light you own running during Earth Hour".

The group urges people to protest by switching lights on "if you think turning the lights out for an hour is completely ridiculous and will change nothing". "Or if you just think people who really believe global warming is a giant threat are dumb, join this group to keep every light you own running during Earth Hour."

Group member Alexander Woodhouse says: "The Earth Hour makes people feel like they've done their share and makes them sleep better... that's nice for them but it doesn't really help the earth." Another member wrote: "I don't believe the vast majority of those participating have given it enough thought to get to that point. ‘It's helping! I don't know how, but it's helping! I'm helping! I don't have to do anything else because I'm doing this now! Go me!'"

Australians have been losing interest in environmentalism for years, says social analyst David Chalke, who leads the annual AustraliaSCAN survey, a cultural change monitor established in 1992. "Absolutely the GFC (global financial crisis) has accelerated a decline in interest in environmentalism that was already going on,” Mr Chalke said. "Environmentalism has been in decline among the Australian public for the last five or six years. "The notion that we’re all becoming more environmentally concerned is not true. We get concerned occasionally when (global warming activist) Tim Flannery tells us we’re all going to die – but it’s not a genuine fundamental shift in values. "The impending recession has focussed people’s minds and priorities and clearly they are much more focussed of my job, my family, my house, rather than the more distant and esoteric idea of climate change. The attitude is: if the climate changes we’ll live with it."

Earth Hour will see lights go out in 82 countries and more than 2400 towns between 8.30pm and 9.30pm (local time) tomorrow night. Organisers hope one billion people will switch off. But practical measures – like demand for candles - suggest interest in the initiative has dipped this year. Last year, nearly 10,000 candles were ordered by a Caulfield candle business in Melbourne to cope with the demand during Earth Hour, but shop owner Roy Merrington said demand had dropped markedly, The Age reported. "I would like to think we would do the same (trade), but we will probably do half that," Mr Merrington said. "People's attention is elsewhere … the conversation about the health of the planet is on the back burner, because people are paranoid about money — and quite rightly."

More HERE

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

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26 March, 2009

St. Andrews University: Global Warming Loses in Formal Debate

AGW supporters could not argue facts, had to insult instead -- as usual

By Richard Courtney

I write to report on a debate that defeated the motion "This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis" during a meeting of the St Andrews University Debating Society. It is difficult to arrange a debate of anthropogenic (that is, man-made) global warming (AGW) because few proponents of AGW are willing to face such debate. They know from past experience that they always lose such debates because there is no evidence that AGW exists and much evidence that it does not.

However, on Wednesday 4 March 2009, the St Andrews University Debating Society held their debate of the motion, "This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis" in the Old Parliament Building, St Andrews. The debate was organized and presided over with exemplary efficiency and professionalism by the Speaker of the Society, Ms Jessica Siegel. It was conducted with all the pomp and ceremony that could be expected of an ancient society of so ancient and prestigious a university.

And the debate was lively, informative and entertaining. It got emotional at times. Some of the contributions from the floor were of exceptionally high quality. But, it was somewhat spoiled by the weakness of the proponents of the motion. (I have good reason to suspect this weakness is because stronger speakers could not be obtained to propose the motion. If so, then it is yet another example of leading proponents of AGW fearing to face their critics in open debate).

The proponents of the motion were Ross Finnie MSP, former Scottish Government Minister for Environment and Rural Development; Mike Robinson, Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and Chair of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland; Gregory Norminton, Novelist `Serious Things', Environmental Activist, Founder of `Alliance against Urban 4x4s'

The motion was opposed by myself, and Nils-Axel Morner, Leader of the Maldives International Sea-Level Project who was awarded the `Golden Contrite of Merits' by Algarve University, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Former advisor to then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and now an Investigator of Scientific Frauds.

Each speaker was given a strict maximum of 7 minutes to speak. The speakers would alternate between proponents and opponents of the motion until all 6 had spoken. No speaker was allowed to speak more than once except to raise a point of information, order, or etc.

The proponents had clearly not prepared. They were not co-ordinated in their presentations, they each lacked any significant knowledge of the science of AGW, and they each assumed that AGW is a fact. None of them made a substantial presentation of arguments supporting the motion, and they all (including the politician!) lacked adequate skills at public speaking. The opponents of the motion were a sharp contrast to that. They each have significant expertise in their subject, and they had agreed the case they were to put and how they were to put it. Also, they are all very competent public speakers and their very different styles made their presentation much better than the sum of its parts.

Finnie spoke first. He argued that AGW is a fact because the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) that says the IPCC is "90% certain" that AGW exists. From this he claimed there is a "crisis" because governments are failing to give the matter sufficient importance. It is necessary for governments to decide a treaty that would follow-on from the Kyoto Ptotocol that intends to constrain emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but ends in 2012. The decision needs to be made at a meeting later this year.

I replied by outlining the case for the opposition. My speech is copied here. It asserts that governments do need to have policies on climate change but empirical evidence denies the existence of AGW and so there is no need to constrain fossil fuel emissions. Indeed, the harm caused by the emission constraints would be greater than any harm that AGW could induce if it were to exist.

Robinson's response was very angry. He seemed to think attacking the opposition speakers would provide a victory for the motion. Almost his entire speech was attempted defamation of the opposition speakers. Within seconds of starting to speak he had accused them of being "like supporters of the Nazis in 1930s Germany" (my family lost everything in the blitz so I did not take kindly to that). The speakers on the opposition side "could not get anything published in peer-reviewed journals" (Morner and I each shouted out that we have and we do). And much of the same. He said people and governments must act to stop global warming (but he did not say how they should act) because - according to him - if a person had an elevated temperature of 2 degrees then he would die so we cannot let the Earth get 2 degrees hotter in case that kills the Earth.

Morner then gave a witty, entertaining and informative lecture on sea level change. The major potential threat from AGW is severe sea-level change. He interacted with the audience and selected one individual to jape with (his skill at this selection was later demonstrated when that individual stood and gave a speech that won the prize - of a Society neck-tie - for best speech from the floor). Morner presented data that showed sea level is not rising as a result of AGW at a detectable rate anywhere.

Norminton then spoke to conclude the case for the proponents of the motion. Like Finnie he seemed to be extremely nervous: both were shaking during their presentations. Norminton's hand was shaking so much he put it into his pocket. (I know others interpret this to be nervousness, but I think it was extreme anger: Norminton had not expected any opposition to the motion, and the assertion of clear evidence that AGW does not exist was - to him - an outrage too hard to accept.) Also, like Finnie, he did not address the motion. He said he was not a scientist so he had to accept the word of scientists about global warming and scientists agree that global warming is real and man-made. He said, the speakers on the opposition side were "not scientists". Lord Monckton interjected that "Courtney and Morner are". And Norminton replied, "So was Mengele." Monckton raised a Point of Order demanding withdrawal of the remark. Norminton lacked the wit to withdraw and move on, so he refused to withdraw. Monckton persisted pressing the Point of Order and Norminton continued to refuse to withdraw. Only moments before Morner had made himself the lecturer the students would most like to have, and support for Norminton drained away as he insisted that Morner was akin to a murderer operating in a Nazi concentration camp. Norminton continued by saying the threat of global warming was real, and it was killing polar bears, but it is not clear that anybody was listening to him.

Monckton then summated the case for the opposition. He had not prepared a speech but took notes of the proponents' speeches with a view to refuting arguments of the proponents that Morner and myself had not covered, and by defending the opposition case against rebuttals of its arguments. This was a deliberate use by our side of Monckton's debating skills. But he had a problem because the proponents of the motion had not made a case and they had not addressed any of our arguments. Instead, they had made personal attacks on the opposition speakers, and they had asserted - with no evidence or argument - that the IPCC is right. So, Monckton's summarizing speech consisted of evidence that the proponents of the motion had merely provided errors of logic and fact but they had not a case. He pointed out that polar bears had quadrupled their number in recent decades and this was not a sign that their species is threatened. And he cited and named each of the logical fallacies utilized by the proponents of the motion.

The debate then opened to the floor. Four persons each spoke well. One gave a balanced presentation and the other three spoke in favour of the motion. But by then the debate had been settled. Prior to the debate the opponents of the motion had expected to lose the vote because the students have been exposed to a lifetime (i.e. their short lifetime) of pro-AGW propaganda. We consoled ourselves with the certainty that we would win the arguments because opponents of AGW have all the facts on our side. But in the event we won both. The motion was defeated when put to the vote.

SOURCE




El Nino study challenges global warming intensity link

Research showing an El Nino event in 1918 was far stronger than previously thought is challenging the notion climate change is making El Nino episodes more intense, a U.S. scientist said on Tuesday. El Nino causes global climate chaos such as droughts and floods. The events of 1982/83 and 1997/98 were the strongest of the 20th Century, causing loss of life and economic havoc through lost crops and damage to infrastructure.

But Ben Giese of Texas A&M University said complex computer modelling showed the 1918 El Nino event was almost as strong and occurred before there was much global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels or widespread deforestation. The outcome of the research was valuable for several reasons, Giese told Reuters from Perth in Western Australia. "It questions the notion that El Ninos have been getting stronger because of global warming," he said ahead of a presentation of his team's research at a major climate change conference in Perth.

The 1918 event also co-incided with one of India's worst droughts of the 20th century. "We know that El Ninos and drought in India are often related to each other," he said.

El Nino is an abnormal warming of the surface waters in the eastern Pacific off South America that causes the normally rainy weather in the western Pacific to shift further to the east. This causes drought in parts of Australia, Southeast Asia and India as well as flooding in Chile and Peru, colder and wetter winters in the southern United States and fewer Atlantic hurricanes.

The droughts in Australia of 1982-83 and 1997-98 rank among the worst in the nation's modern history. Drought also occurred in eastern Australia from 1918-20.

Giese said his team ran a complex ocean computer model that, for the first time, used the results of a separate atmospheric model produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The result was a simulation of ocean temperatures, currents and other measures from 1908 to 1958. For 1918, the simulation produced a strong abnormal surface warming in the central Pacific and weaker warming nearer the South American coast.

There were very few measurements of the tropical Pacific during 1918, the last year of World War One, and ship-based measurements along the South American coast suggested only a weak El Nino. This, Giese said, reinforced the point that there is limited data about El Ninos prior to the 1950s and that computer models were one way to get a clearer picture of the past.

"We cannot rely on what El Nino looks like today to try to understand what El Nino patterns looked like in the past." "It makes it a challenge to talk about El Nino and global warming because we simply don't have a detailed record," he added.

SOURCE

An interesting question and answer below about the study above:

Q. Out of curiosity, as this study uses computer models, what makes its conclusion any more reliable than those by the alarmists which use such models? As we contend that much of the AGW theory is based on unproven computer models, I want to make sure we're not using computer models to refute conclusions ascertained FROM computer models. What makes Giese's models or methodology more reliable than those employed by studies supporting AGW?

A. The Giese computer studies examined real-world events to compare them. What was compared? We have heard it said, “the 1998 El Nino event was particularly severe. This event wouldn’t have been so bad if we didn’t have AGW. We haven’t seen any El Nino events like this in the past.”

Giese compared the 1998 El Nino event with the 1918 El Nino event, and examined changes that occurred because of the warming effects of the El Nino’s. The studies showed, that all other things being equal, and even removing supposed differences that arose because of AGW, the there is no basis to say, “the El Nino of 1998 was made worse by AGW.”

So in the Giese study, computers were used to analyze data – not to make projections. On the other hand, the Generalized Circulation Models GCM used by the IPCC to make projections of future climate use information they know or assume to be “forcing” the climate, they order these forcing, and they project what the future climate will be like. In doing so, the modelers add their own bias about the potential effects of AGW, which pretty much turn out to outstrip everything else (so they claim) – thus, this is not an objective use of computer modeling.

In the one case – we have somebody’s bias included for what the computer studies purports to show (or predict); and in the other case, we don’t.




New Report Predicts "New Global Ice Age"

MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of Unit Economics' new report "The New Global Ice Age," to their collection of Energy/Environment market reports. For more information, visit here.

Abstract of Unit Economics' Report: "New Global Ice Age"

"At first glance, a research piece predicting significantly colder weather seems rather bold. In reality, we're very confident about this report. That's because we are not so much predicting colder weather, but are instead observing it. More important, we're attempting to coax our readers to view recent weather data and trends with a neutral perspective -- unbiased by the constant barrage of misinformation about global warming. We assure you, based on the accuracy of climatologists' long-term (and short-term!) forecasts, you would not even hire them!

"For example, in 1923 a Chicago Tribune headline proclaimed: 'Scientist says arctic ice will wipe out Canada.' By 1952, the New York Times declared 'Melting glaciers are the trump card of global warming.' In 1974, Time Magazine ran a feature article predicting 'Another Ice Age,' echoed in a Newsweek article the following year. Clearly, the recent history of climate prediction inspires little confidence -- despite its shrillness. Why, then, accept the global warming thesis at face value? Merely because it is so pervasive?

"Unfettered by the Gore-Tex straitjacket of global warming dogma, one might ask some obvious questions. Why, in 2008, did Toronto, the Midwest United States, India, China, the United Kingdom and several areas of Europe all break summer rainfall records? Why was South Africa converted into a 'winter wonderland' this past September? Why did Alaska record its coldest summer this year -- cold enough for ice packs and glaciers to grow for the first time in measured history? Why has sea ice achieved record levels in recent months? Lastly, why did a rare October snow fall on London, on the 29th, as British Parliament debated -- appropriately enough -- a climate bill? If you don't believe that 2008 has been particularly wet and cold, you've most likely contracted typhoid or you haven't been paying attention.

"The reality is that there are forces at work, already affecting the weather for the past two years, that will make the next twelve years significantly cooler than anything we have seen in past decades. This report explores these forces and provides a roadmap of what to expect as the new ice age unfolds."

SOURCE




People still being sacrificed to climate god

Back in 1500, we learn from a Princeton professor, the Aztecs figured the climate debate was over, and that if you wanted rain or sunshine, it was simple enough what you had to do - sacrifice 20,000 lives a year to the right gods. In 2009, it's an equally sure thing in the minds of some that carbon in the air is going to fry us unless we put the welfare of millions on the line, and here is the latest on President Obama's plan - it could cost industry $2 trillion over eight years.

That hefty sum to be paid out to a cap-and-trade carbon tax would snatch money from consumers far more than rising oil prices did, hinder economic growth and in still other ways generate human misery, and all in the name of what? Computer models that can't get anything right, that's what.

Scientists feed tons of data into these simulating computers, and - given the doomsday theory animating the enterprise - it shouldn't surprise anyone that catastrophic warming is a calculation that then emerges. The problem is that all kinds of stuff is left out because there is a lot we do not know. "Over the past 10 years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling," physicist William Happer recently told the Senate. "This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models," he said, referring to the conclusions of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on=2 0Climate Change.

Happer does not deny that the earth is warming, that increased amounts of carbon dioxide are being pumped into the atmosphere, that there is in fact something you can call a greenhouse effect or that the leveling temperatures of the past decade are still high. He doubts, however, that there's a scientific consensus on a disastrous outcome or that carbon dioxide is the villain it's made out to be.

A professor at Princeton, Happer said "90 percent of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor," and that the issue is whether the carbon dioxide will "substantially increase water's contribution" to causing something awful. The evidence is that it won't, said Happer, pointing out that "the current warming period began about 1800, at the end of the little ice age," when there wasn't a big increase in carbon dioxide.

It wasn't fossil fuels that did the warming deed - a good deed, by the way - and a war against these energy-producing, societal benefactors would therefore be as futile in controlling climate as slicing open bodies and ripping out hearts.

But what if skeptics like Happer are wrong? If there is a possibility of error, some argue, we should err on the side of safety, and that might be true if a carbon tax was not itself a peril and if it was not clear by now that we are putting global-warming garbage into computers, getting garbage out of them and that some are then treating that garbage like a god.

SOURCE




Global Warming Alarmists Propose Limiting Population ... to the Point of Extinction

In a statistical study entitled "Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals," published in Global Environmental Change by Murtaugh and Shlax of Oregon State University, and again published here , the authors propose that the potential savings from reduced reproduction rates among humans are some 20 times more effective than the savings wrought by life style changes.

It is clear that the authors follow the Liberal mantra of the ends justify the means. If we can reduce carbon emissions by reducing the number of children, then we should do it, they gloat. It appears that carbon reductions trump even "life" itself. They summarize:

Much attention has been paid to the ways that people's home energy use, travel, food choices and other routine activities affect their emissions of carbon dioxide and, ultimately, their contributions to global warming. However, the reproductive choices of an individual are rarely incorporated into calculations of his personal impact on the environment. Here we estimate the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual causes when he or she chooses to have children. The summed emissions of a person's descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person's reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-to-day activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment.

The following very compelling video analysis explains the study in some detail:



By the authors' desires, if we would limit every couple to having only one child, we would solve the Global Warming problem for every one. Again, humanity itself is the cause of all the woe, and the best thing for us to do is just stop procreating -- or just drop dead. Living human beings are bad for the planet.

Indeed, the authors purposely fail to mention that their proposal puts humanity on a fast-tack extinction curve, as reproduction rates fall below population replacement rates. Surely, as statisticians they know this well. Within a few generations, there wouldn't be any one around to measure, least wise care, about carbon emissions. We would all be dead.

But golly, we would save the planet! Just goes to show you, Liberals are all about death and destruction. They absolutely live for it!

I've got a thought, why not have liberals first show us how it's done.. Go ahead liberals -- take the lead in this thing. Limit your own population first, and the rest of us might, "maybe," consider what you have to say.

SOURCE




California to reduce carbon emissions by... banning black cars?!?

Henry Ford would be horrified!

In a move that will likely get California's consumers in a huff, impending legislation may soon restrict the paint color options for Golden State residents looking for their next new vehicle. The specific colors that are currently on the chopping block are all dark hues, with the worst offender seemingly the most innocuous color you could think of: Black. What could California possibly have against these colors, you ask? Apparently, the California Air Resources Board figures that the climate control systems of dark colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings - especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours. Anyone living in a hot, sunny climate will tell you that this assumption is accurate, of course. In fact, legislation already exists for buildings that has proven successful at reducing the energy consumption of skyscrapers.

So, what's the crux of the problem... can't paint suppliers just come up with new, less heat-absorbent dark paints? According to Ward's, suppliers have reportedly been testing their pigments and processes to see if it's possible to meet CARB's proposed mandate of 20% solar reflectivity by 2016 with a phase-in period starting in 2012, and things aren't looking good. Apparently, when the proper pigments and chemicals are added to black paint, the resulting color is currently being referred to as "mud-puddle brown." That doesn't sound very attractive, now does it? Windshields, backlights and sunroofs are also slated to get reflective coatings starting in 2012.

When we first heard of this issue, an internal debate immediately began as to whether this might be an elaborate early April Fool's joke, but it isn't. Read through CARB's complete Cool Cars Standards and Test Procedures here (PDF link) for more

SOURCE

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

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25 March, 2009

SOLAR CLIMATE EFFECTS

An email from David Whitehouse [dr_d_whitehouse@msn.com]

The recently completed Space Climate Symposium held in Finland came to some rather interesting conclusions regarding the solar contribution to 20th century climate change. Averaged over the entire globe the consensus (for what it's worth) was that solar variability contributed only 10-20% of the temperature variations observed, although some said it was 50%. But many agreed that solar variability can have a very strong regional effect - in fact stronger than any anthropogenic signal, especially over North America, Europe and Siberia. That's a substantial area of the northern hemisphere and, as we know, the recent warming spell has been somewhat stronger in the northern hemisphere and that's where the vast majority of the temperature sensors are.

If the sun is the dominant climate driving force over such a large swathe of northern hemisphere land then what can we expect now that it is showing signs of changing from an active state to a quiet one. There are two possibilities. One is that the weakened solar forcing will allow the greenhouse gas anthropogenic effect to be revealed and temperatures will rise. The other is that the quiet sun will have an effect that remains greater than the anthropogenic effect and hence, global cooling will be seen, which is the post 2000 case. Logically, if the sun can swamp anthropogenic effects like this, has the recent warming been that unusual or man made?




What Gives the Alarmists Nightmares?

Would you believe it's the Nano, a $2000 car produced in India? From the Green, Inc. blog at the NYTimes.com:

People across India have been saving money for months with the goal of purchasing the car, made by Tata Motors, a branch of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, and which will be priced at about $2,000. For many, it would represent a leap, overnight, from the indignity of two-wheeled motor scooters to the relative luxury of four wheels and a roof.

For millions the car has become emblematic of their aspirations, as Vishal Bhatia, a Green Inc. reader in Mumbai, suggested in his comment the last time I posted about the Nano: “I’m buying it because it gives a sense of freedom,” Mr. Bhatia wrote, “freedom to go to someplace in uncrumpled clothes, with my deodorant still being able to mask my body odor. But above all to see the look in my family’s eyes when they see it in person.”

Environmentalists, however, have decried the Nano and its low-cost imitators as an impending disaster. Certainly, the seemingly guaranteed success of the Nano may create more traffic and strain on India’s already rickety urban infrastructure.

And although the car may emit fewer greenhouse gases than some two-wheelers, its launch still has troubled officials leading efforts on global climate protection. Last year, the Nobel Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri, who is head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was quoted as saying he was “having nightmares” about the car.

Unbelievable. These guys actually have nightmares about broadening prosperity — and the economic freedom that brings it about.

SOURCE




A Loose Cannon in the EPA

Jon Cannon wants to suck the air out of the economy, and unless he is held up by the Senate, they may be giving tacit approval to his radical agenda. Cannon, newly nominated Deputy EPA Administrator, has risen from the ranks of academia, and is poised to assume the number two position in the Environmental Protection Agency.

However, the praise that might normally be bestowed upon one nominated for an influential office must be tempered as his radical environmental views become known. And in the end, the Senate must look long and hard at the consequences that are sure to follow his tenure and decide if the nation is willing—or able—to pay the cost.

Presently at the University of Virginia, Jon Cannon is a Blaine T. Phillips Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law. He is no stranger to government, or the EPA for that matter. From 1992 through 1998, he served in the agency as an administrator and then general counsel. It was in 1998 that Mr. Cannon wrote a legal opinion arguing that the Clean Air Act permitted regulation of greenhouse gases. This opinion was relied upon by the plaintiffs in Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 was in fact an “air pollutant” and therefore must be regulated by the EPA—largely agreeing with what Cannon had argued, in expanding the definition of “air pollutant” to include more than just emissions that “enter” the air, and including CO2, a naturally-occurring gas.

In a 2007 article discussing the case (and his indirect involvement), Professor Cannon makes a statement which should alarm the ears of any citizen concerned about government expansion. He states: “Environmentalism is associated with certain values—values that emphasize acting collectively for the common good and fitting harmoniously into the natural and social environment. Environmentalists generally favor regulation to prevent or correct the widespread harms they see in the world.”

Such a view of government is alarming. Phrases such as “acting collectively for the common good” is reminiscent of regimes which, while mouthing such words, acted in the interests of only the top few, or in some misguided manner to service a utopian agenda.

Viewing regulation as a solution to human problems—especially contrived ones such as “man-made” climate change—is not only to reject the basic tenets of liberty upon which this nation was founded, but presupposes that the government is 'purer' and 'less harmful,' as it supposedly possesses the moral authority to impose such regulations.

Mr. Cannon's support of heavy environmental regulations clearly bodes ill for the private sector. His view of carbon gas as a pollutant that must be regulated by the environment is extremely disturbing, and will severely harm American industry should he be confirmed. During a recession, increasing the regulatory burden on the very building blocks of our economy is unwise, at best. Most likely, it will prove destructive to carbon-emitting industries, namely, energy producers: coal, oil, shale oil, and natural gas.

Additionally, the drastic measures sure to be mandated would be done so without a solid backing of evidence. If the Democrats complained about the Bush Administration's supposed “rush to war” based on “faulty intelligence,” wait until they see the Obama Administration's “rush to regulate” based on “faulty science.” And sadly, the cost will be very high. Unleashing Mr. Cannon will blow a hole through much of the progress Western industry has made in the past hundred years.

Even worse than the radical action he wishes to take on behalf of the environment, however, is the underlying principle behind it—government can solve the errors perpetrated by the human race simply through increased regulation. That is antithetical to the ideals of personal liberty enshrined in our Constitution, and the Senate must take appropriate action to ensure that he is held fully accountable for this dangerous ideology. The nation demands it. And before all the wind is taken out of the sails of the economy, the Senate must pause to reconsider the radical environmentalist agenda.

SOURCE




CHICAGO'S CAP AND TRADE FIASCO

Mayor Richard Daley promised long ago that his administration would start fighting global warming by buying 20 percent of its electricity from wind farms and other sources of green energy. But more than two years after the deadline he set, the city continues to get nearly all of its power from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

Daley administration officials contend they have kept the mayor's promise by buying carbon credits, a controversial way of offsetting pollution by paying money to producers of green energy. The credits are supposed to lower the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere.

But most of the credits Chicago has bought over the last two years didn't reduce carbon emissions at all, energy experts and the city's own broker on the deal said.

As a result, taxpayers paid the full bill for the city's normal electricity usage, then the city paid again—more than half a million dollars in all—for credits with questionable environmental benefits. Buying carbon credits fights global warming only if they help finance new sources of renewable energy, such as new wind turbines, energy experts said. Yet 87 percent of the credits Chicago has purchased sent money to a wood-burning power plant that has been operating for nearly two decades.

More HERE




GREEN BURDEN WILL HURT POORER AMERICANS

What one hand giveth, the other taketh away. The federal stimulus bill will reportedly net the average American $13 a week. Today, Michigan’s two major utilities announced that federal green emissions mandates will in part necessitate an 11 percent electric rate hike this year — or approximately $10 a month to the average Michigander.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the bills that are coming due on the “greening of America. Michigan sports the nation’s highest unemployment rate at 10.6 percent and can ill-afford higher utility costs. But as a state controlled by hip Obamawannabe, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, and her union allies, Michigan bears watching as a harbinger for what awaits the U.S. Like Obama, Granholm has ordered a fundamental restructuring of Michigan’s energy infrastructure, putting all new state coal plants on hold and demanding a 45 percent cut in coal generation in 20 years . . . allegedly to be filled by government-mandated wind power.

Meanwhile, Democratic Washington is trying to force through a cap-and-trade law that will discriminate against coal-heavy manufacturing states like Michigan. Utility executives predict electricity rates may climb another 40 percent as a result.

Finally, in anticipation of these costs, the state utilities lobbied for — and have received — a gutting of the state’s electric deregulation law, so that they can get a guaranteed return on the enormous investment of, say, a low-carbon nuclear plant. Translation for ratepayers of a re-monopolized environment: More rate hikes ahead.

SOURCE




THE SIZE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA'S CLIMATE TAX

When President Obama released his budget plan three weeks ago, it included a whopping $1.6 trillion in new taxes. The plan contained $989 billion in various tax increases and a $646 billion cap and trade tax. As we previously noted, if enacted, this would be the largest tax increase in American history.

But it turns out the Administration’s budget did not reveal the entire truth. A top White House aide told Senate staffers that cap and trade tax would be much higher than the initially reported $646 billion. In fact, Jason Furman, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, told Senate staffers the tax would cost American taxpayers between $1.3 trillion and $1.9 trillion.

A $1.6 trillion tax raise is huge—but a tax increase of $2.3 trillion or $2.9 trillion is astonishing. To put that in perspective, that is a tax increase of $7,500 to $9,500 per American. Let’s hope the cost of the President’s budget does not continue to escalate.

SOURCE

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

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24 March, 2009

The incredible shrinking polar bear?

Commentary follows the article below

Polar bears are shrinking, along with the ice on which they live – and are turning to cannibalism – as global warming increasingly stops them getting enough to eat. Scientists say the animals are now only two-thirds as big as they were 30 years ago as melting ice makes it harder for them to catch seals, and that they have begun to hunt each other instead.

The news comes as Arctic nations agreed at a special summit in Norway last week to draw up an action plan to try to save the highly endangered species.

The bears subsist almost entirely on seals, and depend on the polar ice to hunt them. As the seals swim too fast in open water, the bears have to lie in wait for them to surface for air through holes and cracks in the ice. But the best place to do this is near land, as the seals congregate in shallow waters, and every year the ice is receding further out to sea as global warming takes hold.

Even worse, the ice is melting earlier each year – cutting down the amount of seals the bears can catch in the spring, which the bears use as a vital fattening-up time to see them through a long summer fast.

New research presented at last week's summit – the most important meeting on the fate of the polar bear for more than three decades – shows that female bears now weigh an average of 230kg, a full 65kg less than in 1980, and are 220cm long, 35cm less than before.

Their health has suffered as their weight has fallen, impairing their ability to reproduce and have cubs that survive. "The chain of events starts with a drop in body condition that subsequently leads to a drop in reproduction, which leads to a drop in survival," Dr Andrew Derocher, chair of the international Polar Bear Specialist Group, told delegates.

Other scientists report that, in their desperation, the bears are turning on each other. Dr Steven Amstrup, a specialist on the animals at the US Geological Survey, says they are "clearly deliberately hunting other bears, for example by attacking females in their denning areas".

Two years ago a giant US government study predicted that global warming would kill off two-thirds of the world's polar bears by 2050. But this is now thought to be over-optimistic: the melting is accelerating so fast that many scientists believe the Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free in summer by 2030.

SOURCE

Some emailed comments on the above by Mitchell Taylor [mktaylor23@xplornet.com], manager of wildlife research for the Nunavut government

If the bears actually do weigh 65 kg less now then they did in 1980, and they weigh 230 kg now, then they must have weighed 295 kg in 1980. 65/295 = 0.22. A 22% decline is not a 1/3 (33%) decline. I don't know where these weight data come from. A 230 kg female is a 500 lb bear. This would be a fat female in good condition. I think the journalist got his information mixed up. He does not seem particularly quantitative.

Temporal declines in body mass have been identified in some populations (SB, WH, SH, BB, perhaps more). Demographic impacts have been identified in only two populations (SB and WH). These declines have been associated with reductions in sea ice. Please excuse my oversimplification, but climate generally warmed during the last two decades of the previous century. That general warming trend was followed by regional arctic warming period from natural (not CO2) causes. It is not surprising that some polar bear populations would be impacted from a 30 year warming trend. What is surprising is that most of the populations appear to remain abundant and productive. This suggests adaptation to climate fluctuations, and some potential to mitigate state changes to prolonged warmer conditions.

The IPCC CO2 climate models predict that AGW will occur first and most at arctic latitudes. Thus the recent arctic warming period has been important in providing evidence that CO2 greenhouse effects are causing global warming. From what I have been able to read, the last 10 years of arctic warming had nothing to do with CO2 greenhouse effects. There was an unusual influx of warm north Pacific surface water, strong anomalous offshore winds in the west that pushed the pack ice into the East Greenland current and transported much of the multi-year ice out of the polar basin. The open water generated a water vapor greenhouse effect. The warming and transition to mainly annual ice contributed to albedo effect, earlier break-up and later freeze-up. None of this had anything to do with CO2. The CO2 climate models did not predict the warming mechanism that occurred, and do not predict this magnitude of arctic warming for another 20 or 30 years.

Intra-specific predation has always been a part of polar bear ecology. Science and TEK are consistent on that. Females with cubs and sub-adults avoid areas where large males congregate, especially in summer retreat areas. Occasionally a big male kills and eats a sub-adult or a cub, and rarely an adult female. Sub-adults usually present no danger to adult females, and females do not attack each other in my experience. The Alaskan's have not seen much of this behavior because their population mostly summers on the pack ice. Alaskan researchers recently observed a few incidents of intra-specific attacks and cannibalism in their area, and have generalized these anecdotal observations to all polar bears as yet more proof that global warming is killing polar bears.

When the PBSG meets in Copenhagen in June, I do not know if there will be any polar bear biologist at that meeting who is not entirely convinced that polar bears are declining due to AGW. I saw a recent announcement that the recent Tromso, Norway meeting of nations signatory to the International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears resulted in an independent agreement to reduce anthropogenic impacts on polar bear sea ice habitat. Arctic sea ice has recovered to approximately historical levels this winter, but the arctic pack ice still has less mass because there is almost no multi-year ice.

I don’t understand climate forcings well enough to advise if the summer conditions that caused the recent arctic warming period will continue or abate. I think the only thing that will uncouple polar bears from AGW is a return to historical arctic sea ice conditions. The AGW and Environmentalist propaganda has been quite effective in this area. My polar bear colleagues believe AGW is occurring and apparently do not feel a responsibility to examine that belief.

Most polar bear populations are not protected. Most polar bear populations are hunted in at least part of their range. The only jurisdiction that “protects” polar bears is Norway (Barents Sea population). There is a prohibition on harvesting in the Russian Sector (western Chukchi, Laptev-Kara, and eastern Barents Sea), but there are unquantified reports of widespread “poaching” (subsistence harvest by indigenous people) and illegal hunting in Russia. The harvest in most other populations is well-managed to retain approximately constant numbers. These harvested populations are obviously managed at less than carrying capacity because they are productive and sustain the harvest. Populations at carrying capacity by definition produce only enough recruits to maintain their numbers, so any harvest would cause a population at “K” to decline.

The response of demographic rates to density has 2 parameters that describe the relationship (a line in the simplest case). One of these is the maximum rate (birth or survival), and the other is carrying capacity (x intercept). The slope is max rate over carrying capacity. Environmental changes can reduce carrying capacity, but environmental changes can also reduce demographic rates. In the case of polar bears there is no evidence that sea ice decline has affected carrying capacity. The only evidence is that the decline in sea ice has reduced survival and recruitment in some populations. So of course everyone talks about a decline in carrying capacity ....

Climate does change naturally, and historically the range of polar bears and their numbers must also be dynamic. The IPCC climate models predict a 30% reduction of sea ice (annual coverage) at CO2 greenhouse effect saturation. I have managed to alienate most of my colleagues by pointing out that a loss of 30% of sea ice would not cause polar bears to go extinct. Arctic warming does not appear to be caused by CO2, and even if the CO2 models were entirely correct polar bears would not be threatened with extinction.

Obviously the discussion is about something else.




Atmospheric physicist declares: 'The global warming hypothesis is dead, scientifically'

Ed Berry is making some noise about climate change, and he's singing a different tune than former Vice President Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth." Berry, 73, an accomplished atmospheric physicist who recently moved to the Flathead Valley from Sacramento, Calif., was among about 700 scientists who attended the International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 7-10.

Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the group has decidedly different views on climate change than Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC consensus asserts that the influence of human-produced greenhouse gases will cause a warming trend with dire environmental consequences.

The prevailing conclusion at the New York conference, according to Berry, is that "the global warming hypothesis is dead, scientifically." The conference, he noted, was attended by high-profile scientists and figures such as former NASA astronaut and U.S. Sen. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, whom Berry has known since he was an undergraduate at Caltech University. "It seems every few years we run into each other," he said. "We were good friends from Caltech all the way through."

Berry noted that the attendance of 700 scientists at the conference "is just a drop in the bucket" of the growing ranks of scientists who disagree with IPCC conclusions. "There's a big list of scientists that in just the last year have changed their minds," Berry said. "The momentum is in our direction."

But politics, he said, are still thoroughly dominated by global warming alarmists and major media that advance their views. "Clearly, Al Gore is good at what he does," Berry conceded, adding that it is now up to scientists with different views to make them known.

Since moving to the Flathead, Berry has been publicly engaged on the topic, writing letters to the editor and speaking to groups, using a lengthy PowerPoint presentation that is basically an outline for a book he is writing. "What I'm after is making it comprehensive but simple because I'm aiming at the general public rather than scientists," he said of the book.

Berry insists that the models used to support the warming theory produce faulty predictions because they cannot account for all of the dynamics influencing the atmosphere. They cannot account for ever-changing greenhouse gases, radiation, solar energy and ocean currents. One of the greatest omissions from climate modeling, Berry said, is they do not account for the incredibly dynamic influences of cloud cover, a subject he knows well.

After Caltech, Berry went on to earn a master's degree in physics from Dartmouth College, and then a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Nevada. His doctoral thesis involved measuring and predicting the formation of the smallest water molecules into raindrops. He was the chief scientist and manager of the airborne research facility at Nevada's Desert Research Institute, where he developed instrumentation technology for aircraft in monitoring the atmosphere. He recalls one aircraft radar innovation in 1972 that produced the largest radar image of a hurricane up to that time.

Berry also managed for a period the National Science Foundation's weather modification program, which involved cloud-seeding research. He was involved with a research project that for the first time identified how cities, filled with heat-radiating concrete and asphalt, actually modify the weather.

For Berry, studying the atmosphere wouldn't be complete without actually getting into it. He started as a glider pilot and later became a powered airplane pilot. He got involved in competitive sailing with his wife, eventually winning major national and North American regattas.

Throughout his educational and work experience, Berry says he is most grateful for the pre-eminent scientists who taught him how to approach problem solving, going all the way back to learning under the renowned Linus Pauling at Caltech. "It isn't the things you learn," Berry said. "It's how you learn to think."

Berry has deep concerns about the political direction for climate-change policies, particularly a cap-and-trade system that is likely to come from Washington, D.C. It is a system that will produce a bureaucracy and it will essentially amount to a tax on energy production and consumption. It was a major topic at the conference in New York, where economists projected the economic impacts. "People have different numbers, but they are all big," Berry said of those impacts. "It's going to affect the cost of energy significantly," he adds, in a regressive fashion impacting low-income energy consumers the most.

SOURCE




Lord Monckton Spring Cleans Global Warming Hysteria

Friday morning in New York City witnessed a burst of snowfall welcoming the vernal equinox and G. Gordon Liddy welcoming Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, to his radio show to discuss global warming hysteria.

Following a wonderfully droll refresher on archaic royal manners, Monckton shredded Al Gore’s “consensus” claims and offered Liddy a history lesson in previous – and significantly warmer -- warming periods. And then explained how a combination of “very powerful naked vested interests” drives the warming alarmist misinformation campaign.

Here’s his formula: Combine media “world to end” sensationalist marketing ploys with “rent-seeking” scientists and the political left’s need to appear to be relevant and concerned. Add teachers wanting to appeal to the idealism of students – for them the Al Gore message of apocalyptic imminent doom is magnetically attractive -- and U.N world government wannabes and -- voila!

Monckton repeated verbatim the magnificent 428-word cap-and-trade dragon beheading sentence he befuddled the clowns in the House Ways and Means subcommittee with earlier this month, and that alone is well worth your listening time. Interacting later with Liddy and his callers, Monckton discussed global cooling, expanding polar bear populations and the ironic plight of fellow Brit Pen Hadow’s recent North Pole expedition -- stranded to the brink of starvation on the very arctic ice they travelled to prove was gone.

And, as always, his Lordship was as charming and entertaining as he was enlightening. Hear the entire segment here.

Thomas Lifson adds: Give yourself a treat and listen. It is obvious why Al Gore is scared to death of debating Lord Monckton. He is eloquent, witty, and effortlessly eloquent. Gore is ponderous at best, and would sound like a dummy paired with him.

SOURCE




DeSmog accidentally vindicates The Skeptics Handbook

DeSmogBlog could’ve flattened The Skeptics Handbook in just one sentence. All they had to do was point to empirical evidence that more CO2 forces temperatures up. They can’t and everything else is bluster and bluff

The question of evidence is on the front page; the book is built around it, and billions of dollars hinges upon it, on this topic, “nothing else matters…”. Yet Jeremy Jacquot’s sole attempt at evidence only shows he doesn’t know what evidence is. Even a bright junior high spark could prove him wrong with a 20 year old encyclopedia. Jacquot uses 3000 words to NOT answer that question, he confuses himself, resorts to cut-n-pasting from the site that does his thinking for him, and makes at least 9 errors of logic and reason. Jacquot complains that I’ve rehashed and repeated old arguments, which only makes it all the more embarrassing that he still hasn’t got any good answers.

But the part I like best was the way he jumps through the hoops just as I predicted. The Skeptics Handbook says when you poke a believer they will bark ‘Santer’, ‘Sherwood’, and ‘amplification’ and he does, right on cue. Yap Yap Yap. DeSmogBlog lives up to it’s name and adds de smog to de science of Global Warming

Much more HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




CASH SHORTAGE: EU CLIMATE POLICY FACES BANKRUPTCY

At the end of their two-day summit in Brussels last week, European leaders pledged to pay a “fair share” to developing nations to help them fight global warming and adapt to its consequences. Yet they failed to deliver the one thing that environmentalists most desired: money.

The omission of a specific contribution, as well as unresolved questions about how the EU would pay for it, has become the latest stumbling block along the path to a global climate deal that world leaders will try to negotiate at Copenhagen in December. “The risk is that with the delay, the negotiations will not make significant progress. The developing nations are only willing to take further steps when there is money on the table,” said Joris den Blanken, a policy analyst at Greenpeace. The money issue, Mr den Blanken said, had overshadowed other elements of the meeting’s final communiqué that environmentalists should applaud – including a commitment to create a global carbon trading market.

The EU and other wealthy nations committed to providing financing to developing nations at a United Nations summit in Bali in 2007. The money would be used to invest in new technology to reduce emissions, as well as to improve seawalls and other infrastructure to prepare for the effects of a warmer planet.

In a draft paper prepared this year, the European Commission estimated that the EU could contribute some €30bn a year, beginning in 2020. But that figure was deleted from the final communique, and the commission instead concluded that it was incumbent on developing nations to first detail the level of emissions cuts they were prepared to make.

Member states have not yet agreed on the size of their contribution – let alone how to finance it – either through a market-based system or emissions taxes or some combination. Yet most agree that it would be foolish for the EU to reveal its hand first in what is likely to be a complex global negotiation with the US, India, China and Brazil.

“It is important that the United States, Japan and other major contributors signal what will be their position,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, the Commission president.

Nonetheless, the EU will be on the spot again in June, after heads of state promised that they would discuss the matter in greater detail at their next council meeting. If they are not able to table an offer then, environmental groups fear the process could drag dangerously close to Copenhagen because of the disruption of the June European elections and then the summer holidays.

Rebecca Harms, the Green party MEP, said the EU was squandering the credibility it had built up after closing a landmark climate deal in December to reduce emissions 20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. “The Europeans, in my view, have become the new hesitant and shy partner in the international climate negotiations,” Ms Harms said.

SOURCE

NOTE from Benny Peiser: EU leaders have postponed until their June a decision about transferring €30 billion of taxpayers’ money to China and India. How likely do you think is it that they will come to an agreement anytime soon about utopian wealth transfer to the rest of the world? Exactly!




Bachmann: I Want People "Armed And Dangerous" Against Energy Tax



Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): Foreign corespondent on enemy lines, helping to keep the folks back home armed and dangerous.

Bachmann appeared over the weekend on the First Team radio show with John Hinderaker and Brian Ward, speaking about the horrible stuff that the Democrats are doing: "I'm a foreign correspondent on enemy lines and I try to let everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefarious activities that are taking place in Washington."

Bachmann also spoke out against the cap-and-trade proposals currently making their way through Washington, and how she'll be distributing information against it at an upcoming event in the district. "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back," said Bachmann. "Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing. And the people - we the people - are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country."

SOURCE

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

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23 March, 2009

The latest alarmist concerns about sea level rise

Comment received by email from S.Fred Singer [singer@sepp.org], referring particularly to the recent Warmist conference in Copenhagen:

Apparently the IPCC-4 (2007) estimate for sea level rise by the year 2100 are now considered to be not catastrophic enough. As reported by the BBC, the preferred estimate seems to be 200 cm, about five times the median IPCC value and ten times the observed rate of rise over the last few centuries. The only justification given, in a paper published in Science, is a more rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets from Greenland and Antarctic - all this in spite of the fact that no such events occurred during the Medieval Warm Period about 1000 years ago.

One member of this group, Shad O'Neel from the US Geological Survey, warns that even 18 cm/century might turn out to be catastrophic. He's apparently unaware of the fact that 18 cm/century is the ongoing rate of rise -- which implies no additional rise in sea level. In other words, the human influence is essentially zero.

Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth has received much criticism, and so has James Hansen, for implying that a rise of 20ft (6m) was possible in the near future. Their fond hopes have been dashed by recent publications on the "collapse" of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Apparently, it will slowly melt away in a few millennia - unless a new ice age intervenes. (But we have known this for more than a decade.)

Andrew Revkin (NYT) reports on two new papers in the journal Nature focusing on the WAIS. The paper by David Pollard at Penn State and Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst provides an estimated time frame for the loss of ice that its authors say should be of some comfort. (If the entire WAIS melted, sea levels worldwide would rise more than 15 feet.)

They ran a five-million-year computer simulation, using data on past actual climate and ocean conditions gleaned from seabed samples (the subject of the other paper) to validate the resulting patterns. The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process at its fastest takes thousands of years. Overall, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn't go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said in an interview, a far cry from what was thought possible a couple of decades ago.




The Maldives

The Maldives are a very low-lying set of Islands in the Indian ocean so sea-level rise worries those who live there. The following excerpt from the NYT seems to go along with the scare

The Maldives, a strand of coral atolls south of India, is just about the most tenuous country on Earth. No patch of land in the island chain, where the population has risen from 200,000 to 400,000 in the last 25 years, is more than six feet or so above sea level. Even modest projections for a rise in sea level from global warming would increase flooding from storm surges. A higher rise could render hundreds of islands uninhabitable.

That’s why the country has paid particularly close attention, since the early days of discussion of the issue, to scientists who warn of a growing human influence on climate and sea levels. On Sunday, the new president of the island nation, Mohamed Nasheed, prodded the world to get serious about cutting emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by pledging, in a short piece in England’s Observer newspaper, to make the Maldives the first carbon-neutral country within a decade.

The announcement was made in the Maldives, but synchronized with the London premiere of “ The Age of Stupid,” a new film on global warming and oil that is a mix of documentary, dramatization and animation. (I haven’t seen it yet, but the description reminds me of the work of Randy Olson, particularly his mock documentary “ Sizzle.”) Officials in the Maldives made the decision after soliciting a report on how to cut fossil fuel use and otherwise trim the country’s climate footprint from Chris Goodall and Mark Lynas, British environmentalists and authors of books on energy and climate.

The proposal recommended a mix of wind turbines, rooftop photovoltaic panels and a backup power plant that burns coconut husks (coconut is a substantial export), among other steps. The estimated cost: about $1.1 billion over 10 years. But the new energy options could pay off in the long run by greatly reducing the country’s reliance on imported oil, the report concluded.

SOURCE

And there is some scientific basis for the scare. See the following paper:

Sea-level rise at tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean islands

By John A. Church et al.

Abstract

Historical and projected sea-levels for islands in the tropical Pacific and Indian oceans are a subject of considerable interest and some controversy. The large variability (e.g. El Niño) signals and the shortness of many of the individual tide-gauge records contribute to uncertainty of historical rates of sea-level rise. Here, we determine rates of sea-level rise from tide gauges in the region. We also examine sea-level data from the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimeter and from a reconstruction of sea level in order to put the sparse (in space and time) tide-gauge data into context. For 1993 to 2001, all the data show large rates of sea-level rise over the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean (approaching 30 mm yr? 1) and sea-level falls in the eastern Pacific and western Indian Ocean (approaching ? 10 mm yr? 1). Over the region 40°S to 40°N, 30°E to 120°W, the average rise is about 4 mm yr? 1. For 1950 to 2001, the average sea-level rise (relative to land) from the six longest tide-gauge records is 1.4 mm yr? 1. After correcting for glacial isostatic adjustment and atmospheric pressure effects, this rate is 2.0 mm yr? 1, close to estimates of the global average and regional average rate of rise. The long tide-gauge records in the equatorial Pacific indicate that the variance of monthly averaged sea-level after 1970 is about twice that before 1970. We find no evidence for the fall in sea level at the Maldives as postulated by Mörner et al. (2004). Our best estimate of relative sea-level rise at Funafuti, Tuvalu is 2 ± 1 mm yr? 1 over the period 1950 to 2001. The analysis clearly indicates that sea-level in this region is rising. We expect that the continued and increasing rate of sea-level rise and any resulting increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme sea-level events will cause serious problems for the inhabitants of some of these islands during the 21st century.

SOURCE

But the Church et al. paper has been rejected by Nils Axel Morner [morner@pog.nu], who is probably the world's leading expert on sea levels and who has published work showing no cause for alarm in the Maldives. His comments by email:

The paper by Church et al. represent desk-work at the computers. Tide gauges have to be treated with care. There are pitfalls both with respect to stability (compaction, etc) and cyclic patterns (disqualifying regressionline approaches).

Our Maldives story is based on multiple criteria: off-shore, on-shore, lagoonal, back-shore, swamp environment. Detailed morphology (in different environmental settings) is combined with stratigraphy and biological index + numerous C14-dates.

Furthermore:

(1) Church was invited to speak in Copenhagen. Why? – because he said what they wanted to hear: a rise. Though field observations tell a totally different story

(2) The tree on the shore marking no rise in at least 50 years (Viligili Island, the Maldives) was by hand pulled down "by a group of Australian scientists" according to local obserations (2003). See: The Greatest Lie Ever Told (2007)

(3) I was the one (not Church or any other) who was awarded by the sea level community The Golden Condrite of Merit "for his irreverence and contribution to our understanding of sea-level change" This gives some sort of quality guarantee.

(4) So, why was I not invited to Copenhagen. Of course - because I would have told a story they didn't want to hear.




More Greenie misanthropy

The OPT is the descendant of the old ZPG movement and still features dinosaurs like Paul Ehrlich

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society. Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron. The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure. “Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

Population growth is one of the most politically sensitive environmental problems. The issues it raises, including religion, culture and immigration policy, have proved too toxic for most green groups. However, Porritt is winning scientific backing. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, will use the OPT conference, to be held at the Royal Statistical Society, to warn that population growth could help derail attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Rapley, who formerly ran the British Antarctic Survey, said humanity was emitting the equivalent of 50 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. “We have to cut this by 80%, and population growth is going to make that much harder,” he said.

Such views on population have split the green movement. George Monbiot, a prominent writer on green issues, has criticised population campaigners, arguing that “relentless” economic growth is a greater threat. Many experts believe that, since Europeans and Americans have such a lopsided impact on the environment, the world would benefit more from reducing their populations than by making cuts in developing countries. This is part of the thinking behind the OPT’s call for Britain to cut population to 30m — roughly what it was in late Victorian times.

Britain’s population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction. Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said: “You can’t have sustainability with an increase in population.” The Tory leader, David Cameron, has also suggested Britain needs a “coherent strategy” on population growth.

Despite these comments, however, government and Conservative spokesmen this weekend both distanced themselves from any population policy. ”

SOURCE




British wave power project hits the rocks

Mechanical setbacks on a key project have come at the same time as the collapse of one of its backers

A pioneering 8m pound British green energy project has been halted because of a series of setbacks, including malfunctioning of the innovative equipment designed to turn wave energy into electricity and the financial collapse of one of the scheme’s backers. Pelamis Wave Power, based in Edinburgh, said its equipment had been towed back to shore in Portugal after it broke down. It will not be repaired immediately. Pelamis’s wave-energy converters are considered to be the most advanced of their kind, and the future of the technology is now in doubt.

If the problems persist they could threaten a similar deal between Pelamis and Eon, the energy group. The partnership was the first instance of a big utility ordering a wave-energy converter for installation in British waters. The equipment was to be tested off Scotland next year.

Energy analysts say the difficulties over the Portuguese project, named Agucadoura, call into the question the viability of this type of wave power. The technical problems were compounded by the collapse of Babcock & Brown, the Australian company that has a 77% stake in the project and which went into administration last week. “We are in limbo,” said Max Carcas at Pelamis. “We are progressing and sorting out some problems on a cash-manage-ment basis. But we can’t get the equipment back in the sea on our own.” Carcas was confident the project would continue but could not say when.

Agucadoura was launched amid a lot of hype last summer as a joint venture between Pelamis, Energias de Portugal (EDP), Efacec, the Portuguese electrical engineering company, and Babcock & Brown. The official unveiling in September was attended by the Portuguese economy minister. The venture was hailed as “the world’s first commercial wave-power project” and began transmitting electricity to the national grid.

Named after the sea snake Pelamis, each machine is 140 metres long, 3.5 metres wide and is partially submerged in the sea. The sections are linked by flexible joints and each section contains a hydraulic pump. The wave motion drives the pumps, which in turn work hydraulic motors that generate an electric current.

In the first phase, three Pelamis wave-energy converters were towed three miles out to sea with the aim of generating 2.25MW of power. If successful, a second phase was planned in which energy generation would rise to 21MW from a further 25 machines – enough to provide electricity for 15,000 Portuguese homes.

Even before the launch, though, the installation was plagued by problems. The date had to be set back after part of the structure sprang a leak. In November, after two months of generating electricity, the three converter units developed further problems and the apparatus had to be disconnected from the grid and towed back to shore. Then came the news about Babcock & Brown.

Anthony Kennaway at Babcock & Brown, said: “Our business is winding down over the next two years. Agucadoura is one of the assets that we hope to sell. “This is early-stage technology and you would expect the machines to be in and out of the water. It would be deeply disappointing if people start writing it off at this stage.”

The problems in Portugal cast a shadow over plans to repeat the experiment in trials at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney. Last month Eon announced that it had ordered a more advanced P2 machine from Pelamis which, at 180 metres long, is about 40 metres longer than the Pelamis units in Portugal. It will be built at Pelamis’s Leith Docks facility in Edinburgh.

Both companies claim that the deal will go ahead. A spokesman for Eon said: “We still expect to be the first utility company to test a full-size wave-powered generating plant in UK waters. But we have to bear in mind that this technology is in its early stages. It’s where wind power was a decade ago.”

The failure of the Portuguese project highlights the problems engineers have in attempting to harness the power of the sea to create renewable energy. It could also put a question mark over the future of wave energy in the EU’s plan to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Ian Fells of Newcastle University, who has his own energy consultancy, said: “Wave power is very immature and very expensive compared with other renewable resources because you have to overengineer it to cope with extremes of weather. “We have to get these things in perspective. Throughout the world wave power generates about 10MW of electricity. You would need something like 10,000 wave power units to replace one nuclear power station.”

SOURCE




Michael Steele: ‘We Are Not Warming’

The Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, has weighed in on climate change.

In a March 6 radio appearance that is only now percolating through the blogosphere, Mr. Steele apparently fielded a skeptic’s question about global warming. As transcribed by The Huffington Post, a liberal site, Mr. Steele thanked the questioner and replied this way:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.

Mr. Steele -– the originator of the “drill baby drill” slogan that dominated last year’s Republican National Convention — appears to be aligning himself with Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, also a Republican, who has denounced the idea of a global warming catastrophe as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” and said that many of the Obama administration’s early moves amounted to “environmental thuggery.”

Representative John Boehner, the House minority leader, has described cap-and-trade as a “carbon tax that increases taxes on all Americans who drive a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch.”

Many other Republicans argue that climate change is real and needs to be addressed. Sen. John McCain, the presidential nominee last year, is one of the original architects of a Congressional cap-and-trade bill, though he forcefully opposes the Obama administration’s plan to auction off emissions allowances to polluters (Mr. McCain would prefer to give the initial allowances away free).

Jon Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, also favors a cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon emissions, as mentioned in this New York Times profile. So does Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

In Washington, however, many say it is not Republicans, but the coal-state Democrats in the Senate, who will decide the fate of any cap-and-trade bill.

SOURCE




That global warming sure is pesky

Camelback ski resort in PA has longest season

Today, Monday, March 23, 2009, Camelback Mountain Resort is proud to announce that it has matched the record for its longest season in history. Camelback is excited to set a new mark tomorrow, and invites all skiers and riders to celebrate this historic milestone on Wednesday with some sensational pricing. In recognition of this notable "Hump Day" and the 124th day of the season, Camelback will offer a special $12.40 lift ticket.

Officially, Camelback anticipates drawing a new line in the snow on Saturday, April 4, 2009 - which Camelback expects to be its 130th day of operation for the 2008-2009 season. This record-setting accomplishment will also be observed with noteworthy specials throughout the resort, highlighted by an incredible $9.99 lift ticket.

"This is a great time for Camelback," comments Arthur Berry, President of Camelback Mountain Resort. Berry continues, "Obviously, we are proud of the internal accomplishment and it's a great tribute to our snowmaking team - many of whom have been doing it since I started skiing here in high school." Berry concludes, "Perhaps more significant this year, an extended ski season positively impacts the regional economy, driving tourism and providing jobs."

For some historical perspective on this feat, consider that when Camelback first opened its doors, The Beatles had just released "I Want to Hold Your Hand," at age 23, Jack Nicklaus won his first of six Masters Championships, and Dr. King delivered his famous, "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Furthermore, the last time that skiers and riders enjoyed this much time on the snow at Camelback; Bill Clinton had just been sworn in and the "Storm of the Century"- the Blizzard of '93 - had just hammered the east coast with record snowfalls from Alabama to Canada.

SOURCE

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

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22 March, 2009

CLIMATE PROTECTIONISM

Canada's Minister of State for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear, became the centre of a media kerfuffle this week over whether being an Evangelical Christian - and whether or not he believed in evolution - made him a threat to Canadian science policy. In fact, the story, which started as an ambush by The Globe and Mail, seemed to have been engineered by those with a fundamentalist faith in government funding.

Coincidentally, however, evidence that shining scientific credentials can accompany outright policy lunacy was appearing south of the border in a much more substantive issue. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, speaking before a House science panel, suggested that trade duties might be imposed as a "weapon" to protect U.S. manufacturing from the United States' own climate policies!

Under the perverse logic of global warming policy - which is being doggedly pursued despite the disappearance of global warming - economic self-mutilation inevitably leads to demands that others self-mutilate too. "If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon," said Mr. Chu, "then we will be at a disadvantage ... [and] we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost."

President Obama is threatening a cap-and-trade - or more appropriately cap-and-tax - system that will force manufacturers to buy allowances to emit carbon dioxide. But this obviously puts U.S. manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage if other countries refuse to shackle their own manufacturers. So shackles would have to be applied to those countries' exports at the U.S. border.

The term "weapon" is entirely appropriate because such a policy would not "level the playing field," as Mr. Chu seems to imagine, but bomb it. Carbon tariffs have been lurking like Somali pirates on the policy horizon for quite a while, and "carbon equivalency fees" for imports were part of the climate change bill introduced by President Obama last week in Congress.

Protectionist sentiments are already an enormous threat to world trade, as a report from the World Bank this week confirmed. William Watson noted in this space yesterday that the bank held out hopes that the protectionist urge might be constrained by such factors as more closely interlinked supply chains, the increased power of exporters and 50 years of experience with increasingly open markets promoted by the GATT and the WTO. Unfortunately, since economics is filled with counterintuitive notions, and the vast majority of people - including politicians - aren't economists, this view may be over-optimistic.

What makes the present situation more dangerous is that global warming policy threatens the world with Smoot-Hawley - the disastrous U.S. anti-trade policy that deepened and lengthened the Depression - on steroids. The disaster that would be unleashed by Mr. Chu and the Obama administration's anti-growth policies was adumbrated on Monday when one of China's "climate envoys" asserted that carbon-intensive tariffs could lead to a trade war. Li Gao noted that such a tariff, which would be illegal under the WTO, threatened "disaster." Mr. Chu's remarks were followed by an even stronger reiteration from China's top climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, who said that carbon duties were "an excuse to impose trade restrictions."

But then - typical of the Alice-in-Climateland quality of this whole issue - Mr. Xie called upon the U.S. Congress to pass Mr. Obama's climate change bill! China does in fact like some parts of this vast UN-led policy fandango, specifically the bits about Western nations funding Chinese "clean development" and shipping off billions of dollars to China to buy hot air credits. (Mr. Xie meanwhile took a passing shot at Canada's lack of "progress" in the policy self-immolation stakes, noting "there is just talk but no action." Way to go, Stephen Harper!)

There is already considerable concern among the United States' trading partners, including Mexico, over U.S. Protectionism. No trading partner is historically more important than Canada, which is worried about "Buy American" policies. But carbon tariffs, which would require a nightmarish amount of paperwork for manufacturers but myriad man-years of employment for bureaucrats, take protectionism to a whole new level.

Such uncreative destruction is certainly not in any way opposed to the fundamental objectives of the radical environmentalists who push man-made global warming theory as the rationale for "de-development." The EU too is considering carbon tariffs, although this week its legislators were having second thoughts about shipping off billions in clean development funds to the Third World while its own unemployment rates were soaring. Inevitably, protectionism has its industry cheerleaders. Instead of standing up to pointless climate policies, some companies seek to take advantage of them. Those that can't simply say "Well, just as long as my competitors are crippled too." Bomb that playing field!

China wants importers to foot the bill if carbon tariffs are introduced, on the basis that it is consumers who are "to blame" for the industrial emissions of CO2. But apart from the craziness of making job- and wealth-creation blameworthy, the price will inevitably have to be paid by consumers of Chinese goods, thus reducing both demand for Chinese exports, and the welfare of consumers.

Like so many of President Obama's other choices for his cabinet, Mr. Chu is turning out to be a disaster, both for his quasi-religious belief in global warming pseudo-science and for his Do-It-Yourself economics. Meanwhile he doesn't seem to know much about energy beyond his own research cul-de-sac of solar, wind and biofuels. And we Canadians getting heated about whether our science minister believes in Adam and Eve.

SOURCE




MIT Scientists find new natural changes that influence global temperature

"What baffles the team is that this data contradicts theories stating humans are the primary source of increase in greenhouse gas." Note that the original university press release was careful not to note the adverse implications for conventional global warming theory

A team of MIT scientists recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels -the first increase in ten years. What baffles the team is that this data contradicts theories stating humans are the primary source of increase in greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. Since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, however, it is probable that this may be part of a natural cycle - and not the direct result of man's contributions.

MIT's Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, state that this imbalance has resulted in several million metric tons of additional methane in the atmosphere. Methane is produced by wetlands, rice paddies, cattle, and the gas and coal industries, and is destroyed by reaction with the hydroxyl free radical (OH), often referred to as the atmosphere's "cleanser."

Methane accounts for roughly one-fifth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, though its effect is 25x greater than that of carbon dioxide. Its impact on global warming comes from the reflection of the sun's light back to the Earth. Methane is broken down in the atmosphere by the free radical hydroxyl (OH), a naturally occuring process. This atmospheric cleanser has been shown to adjust itself up and down periodically, and is believed to account for the lack of increases in methane levels in Earth's atmosphere over the past ten years despite notable simultaneous increases by man.

Prinn has said, "The next step will be to study [these changes] using a very high-resolution atmospheric circulation model and additional measurements from other networks. The key thing is to better determine the relative roles of increased methane emission versus [an increase] in the rate of removal. Apparently we have a mix of the two, but we want to know how much of each [is responsible for the overall increase]."

The primary concern now is that while the collected data in 2007 reflects a simultaneous world-wide increase in emissions, how relevant are any of the data findings at this late date?

One thing does seem very clear, however; science is only beginning to get a focus on the big picture of global warming. Findings like these tell us it's too early to know for sure if man's impact is affecting things at "alarming rates." We may simply be going through another natural cycle of warmer and colder times - one that's been observed through a scientific analysis of the Earth to be naturally occurring for hundreds of thousands of years.

SOURCE




Feinstein: Don't Spoil Our Desert With Solar Panels

NOTHING suits the Greenies -- unless it is the total destruction of modern civilization. Something will be found to be wrong with every proposal for energy generation

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said development of solar and wind facilities in California's Mojave Desert would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public. California's Mojave Desert may seem ideally suited for solar energy production, but concern over what several proposed projects might do to the aesthetics of the region and its tortoise population is setting up a potential clash between conservationists and companies seeking to develop renewable energy.

Nineteen companies have submitted applications to build solar or wind facilities on a parcel of 500,000 desert acres, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Friday such development would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public.

Feinstein said Friday she intends to push legislation that would turn the land into a national monument, which would allow for existing uses to continue while preventing future development.

The Wildlands Conservancy orchestrated the government's purchase of the land between 1999-2004. It negotiated a discount sale from the real estate arm of the former Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad and then contributed $40 million to help pay for the purchase. David Myers, the conservancy's executive director, said the solar projects would do great harm to the region's desert tortoise population. "It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem," said David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy.

Feinstein said the lands in question were donated or purchased with the intent that they would be protected forever. But the Bureau of Land Management considers the land now open to all types of development, except mining. That policy led the state to consider large swaths of the land for future renewable energy production. "This is unacceptable," Feinstein said in a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. "I urge you to direct the BLM to suspend any further consideration of leases to develop former railroad lands for renewable energy or for any other purpose."

In a speech last year, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained about environmental concerns slowing down the approval of solar plants in California. "If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it," Schwarzenegger said at Yale University.

But Karen Douglas, chairman of the California Energy Commission, said Feinstein's proposal could be a "win-win" for energy and conservation. The governor's office said Douglas was speaking on the administration's behalf. "The opportunity we see in the Feinstein bill is to jump-start our own efforts to find the best sites for development and to come up with a broader conservation plan that mitigates the impact of the development," Douglas said.

Douglas said that if the national monument lines were drawn without consideration of renewable energy then a conflict was likely, but it's early enough in the planning process that she's confident the state will be able to get more solar and wind projects up and running without hurting the environment. "We think we can do both," Douglas said. "We think this is an opportunity to accelerate both."

Greg Miller of the Bureau of Land Management said there are 14 solar energy and five wind energy projects that have submitted applications seeking to develop on what's referred to as the former Catellus lands. None of the projects are close to being approved, he said. The land lies in the southeast corner of California, between the existing Mojave National Preserve on the north and Joshua Tree National Park on the south. "They all have to go through a rigorous environmental analysis now," Miller said. "It will be at best close to two years out before we get some of these grants approved."

Feinstein's spokesman, Gil Duran, said the senator looks forward to working with the governor and the Interior Department on the issue. "There's plenty of room in America's deserts for the bold expansion of renewable energy projects," Duran said.

SOURCE




The recent EU "Summit" (The "European Council")

What we do know from the very early "summits" is that the contemporary media often paints a very different picture from what actually goes on. This emerges from documents released under the 30-year rule, when it becomes quite obvious that many of these occasions are simply coup de theatre.

What makes them doubly unreliable is that, in the hothouse atmosphere of the Council, there is group psychology at play, where the "colleagues" lose contact with reality – even more so than usual – and agree to things which have no basis in the real world.

It is rather appropriate, therefore, that two years down the line from the 2007 Spring Council, we are seeing exactly what happens to the agreements made. At what was Blair's last EU meeting, the "colleagues" indulged in a frenzy of greenery, outbidding each other in their enthusiasm to save the planet. To do so, they adopting, amongst other things, a "binding target" of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020.

Cue BBC world affairs correspondent Nick Childs who, at the time, burbled, "there is an air of real achievement in Brussels."

Now fast-forward to the present and you have, off-stage, The Guardian retailing that "green" power companies are heading for "crisis". Britain, we are told, should no longer rely on them to meet its energy security and climate change obligations.

Thus we get John Constable, head of policy at the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), saying, "There is a serious problem … I warned a year ago that the industry was being set up for a fall and now it has happened. There has been too much hype and the government was always far too unrealistic about what could be achieved."

Then David MacKay, a Cambridge University professor and author of a new book, Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, chips in. "It may well be that renewables has been overhyped and there is a backlash against it," he says. "There is a big, big problem compared with a year ago. I know a number of people who are unable to get investment for the kind of new technology we need for a low-carbon future."

Needless to say, there is a strong measure of self-serving in this doom-laden fare. The renewables industry is after even more financial aid. But, with the parlous state of the public finances, and the recession biting deep, the chances of Mr Brown coming up with anything are extremely slender.

By the same measure, when we see out of the current meeting a "pledge" to make avaible an additional €75 billion "to finance loans by the International Monetary Fund and to double a credit line for its stricken eastern economies," you can take it with a pinch of salt.

Closer to reality was a refusal to commit funding to aid developing countries to help them cut "greenhouse gas emissions". Member states are to discuss the issue again in June but are unlikely to decide even then.

That is the land of the European Council. Nothing is real, nothing is permanent. Agreements made one year are unstitched the next year, or the year after. The only reality is the press release on the day. Tomorrow is another day, another reality.

SOURCE




Kids Are Being Taught That Carbon Kills Polar Bears

California’s KQED has a story about elementary school children being taught that manmade “Mr. Carbon” is giving the earth a global warming “fever” and killing “lovable” polar bears. Of course, the San Francisco-based PBS station thinks that’s just swell. It’s not – it’s outrageous.

Cool The Earth, the group behind this blatant indoctrination program, is the brainchild of two Marin County parents who say they were inspired by watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. That’s probably all you need to know, but bear with me – it gets better.

According to their website, “Cool The Earth is a ready-to-run program that educates K-8 students and their families about global warming and inspires them to take simple actions to reduce their carbon emissions.” Here’s how they describe the program’s kick-off assembly:

The Cool the Earth program launches with an all-school assembly in which an original, age-appropriate play is performed by teachers, parents and students. Characters such as Koda the polar bear, Earth and Mother Nature act out scenarios about how human activities are contributing to raising levels of carbon dioxide and giving the earth a global warming “fever.” By the end of the play, all the kids are excited to get rid of the villain, Mr. Carbon, and save the lovable Koda. The tone of the play is positive and helps kids feel empowered to take action.

I can just imagine the boos and hisses when the evil caped Mr. Carbon creeps onto the stage and the applause and cheers when the cuddly and lovable Koda is saved from his villainous intent.

And speaking of dubious intentions, program co-founder Carleen Cullen makes no attempt to conceal hers:

“Cool the Earth plants the seeds of environmental change into the minds of the people who can have the biggest impact on the planet: children. If anyone can inspire their parents to make changes, it’s their children.”

Planting seeds into children’s minds? In other words -- brain washing.

And the site’s Climate 101 page, which incorrectly identifies carbon dioxide as “the most prevalent greenhouse gas,” reveals the fallacious weed they want those seeds to sprout:

An overwhelming body of scientific evidence paints a clear picture: climate change is happening; it is caused in large part by human activity and it will have many serious and potentially damaging effects in the decades ahead. Scientists have confirmed that the greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other manmade sources—rather than natural variations in climate—are a primary cause

It’s broken record time again, folks. As global temperatures continue to cool, alarmists are picking up both the tempo and intensity of their disinformation campaign. And public schools are a high value target. Please monitor the “science” being fed to your kids in school. And be prepared to remove any green mush that finds itself between their ears. Sit your kids down to watch and discuss the fabulous video AT’s Gregory Young features today.

And should your 7-year-old return home from school one day, upset that your “carbon footprint” is killing poor Koda the polar bear, explain to the little tyke that what he or she saw in school wasn’t real, but only make-believe.

Just like manmade global warming itself.

SOURCE




Australia: Some sense about crocs coming?

The people-hating Greenies will go hysterical, of course. Even with 80,000 of them, crocs will still be "endangered"



TOURISTS could soon be allowed to hunt crocodiles with the Northern Territory Government renewing a push to allow safaris to help cull the predators. The government is expected to increase the crocodile cull in the rural area, following the death of 11-year-old Briony Anne Goodsell in Lambells Lagoon, reports the Northern Territory News.

Tourism Minister Chris Burns said he still supported calls for crocodile safari hunting. This has renewed calls for crocodile safaris to help with the cull. "When I was Environment Minister, I was front and centre, lobbying Canberra to have very limited croc safaris," he said. "I'm still a supporter of that."

The previous federal government knocked back several applications for the Territory to set up a croc safari.

Dr Burns suggested a new application could be made to the Rudd Government as part of the latest review of crocodile management. Environment Minister Alison Anderson said the government remained in favour of croc safari hunting "particularly as an enterprise opportunity for traditional owners". She promised to pursue the issue with Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett.

Mr Garrett's office said no proposal had been lodged for a crocodile safari. But spokesman Ben Pratt said the minister would consider an application under the legislation if one was lodged.

Ms Anderson said crocodile safaris would not solve the problem of increasing interactions between humans and crocodiles in the rural area. "Management in these more densely populated areas requires a range of strategies, including monitoring, removal and community awareness." She said those strategies would be set out in the updated Crocodile Management Plan, to be released soon.

The previous federal government stopped international hunters from shooting crocodiles in 2005 by banning export of trophies – skin and skulls. However, the death of Briony Anne Goodsell's has prompted the NT Government to implement tighter controls of the crocodile population, recently estimated to be the highest in Australia at more than 80,000.

SOURCE

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

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21 March, 2009

THE IPCC'S FAILURE AT PREDICTING TEMPERATURE CHANGE DURING THE FIRST DECADE

By email from Syun Akasofu [sakasofu@iarc.uaf.edu], International Arctic Research Center. University of Alaska Fairbanks

The global average temperature stopped increasing after 2000 against the IPCC's prediction of continued rapid increase. It is a plain fact and does not require any pretext. Their failure stems from the fact that the IPCC emphasized the greenhouse effect of CO2 by slighting the natural causes of temperature changes.

The changes of the global average temperature during the last century and the first decade of the present century can mostly be explained by two natural causes, a linear increase which began in about 1800 and the multi-decadal oscillation superposed on the linear increase. There is not much need for introducing the CO2 effect in the temperature changes. The linear increase is the recovery (warming) from the Little Ice Age (LIA), which the earth experienced from about 1400 to 1800.

The halting of the temperature rise during the first decade of the present century can naturally be explained by the fact that the linear increase has been overwhelmed by the superposed multi-decadal oscillation which peaked in about 2000.*

This situation is very similar to the multi-decadal temperature decrease from 1940 to 1975 after the rise from 1910 to 1940 (in spite of the fact that CO2 increased rapidly after 1946); it was predicted at that time that a new Big Ice Age was on its way.

The IPCC seems to imply that the halting is a temporary one. However, they cannot give the reason. Several recent trends, including the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the halting of sea level increase, and the cooling of the Arctic Ocean, indicate that the halting is likely to be due to the multi-decadal change.

The high temperatures predicted by the IPCC in 2100 (+2~6øC) are simply an extension of the observed increase from 1975 to 2000, which was caused mainly by the multi-decadal oscillation. The Global Climate Models (GCMs) are programmed to reproduce the observed increase from 1975 to 2000 in terms of the CO2 effect and to extend the reproduced curve to 2100.

It is advised that the IPCC recognize at least the failure of their prediction even during the first decade of the present century; a prediction is supposed to become less accurate for the longer future.

* The linear increase has a rate of ~ +0.5øC/100 years, while the multi-decadal oscillation has an amplitude of ~0.2øC and period of ~ 50-60 years, thus the change in 10 years is about ~ -0.07øC from the peak, while the linear change is about ~ +0.05øC.




Climate Change and Adaptation: How the Past Can Inform the Future

By Climatologist and Paloeclimate researcher Dr. Diane Douglas. Below is the abstract of a major new paper she authored that will be presented at a UNESCO conference in Ghent, Belgium on March 20, 2009. She says that natural mechanisms drive climate change and CO2 shenanigans will be futile

Global warming is one of the most important and dangerous issues facing man today. Many scientists and politicians have focused on anthropogenic causes of this change and the need to reduce CO2 emissions to limit or slow the process. Major climate changes, however, have occurred throughout earth's history. The shifting of continental plates, rise of mountains, and cyclical changes in earth's orbit around the sun are primary forcing mechanisms driving climate change. The complex coupling between the atmosphere, ocean, clouds, ice sheets, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the exchange of carbon within living organisms also affect climate. Over the past two million years, earth's climate has been punctuated by glacial and interglacial periods-periods when earth's temperature ranged from 8oC cooler to 4oC warmer than present. Hominids adapted their settlements and subsistence practices to these changes. Modern humans evolved around 40,000 years ago, during the last ice age, and at the end of the last ice age migrated to new lands and new continents. People developed new technologies and adaptive strategies in response to sea level rise and a more productive environment. Today we face climate change of a similar magnitude to the last interglacial.

This paper shows how natural forcing mechanisms may drive earth into an interglacial as warm as the last interglacial, regardless of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Sea level may rise 15 - 20 feet, and in some regions storms will increase in frequency and strength, and in others deserts will expand. Many significant heritage resources are threatened by these changes, and those that cannot be saved should be thoroughly documented to share with future generations. Others may be saved through hazard mitigation measures-but the key lies in engaging the public and governments, which requires convincing them that climate change is inevitable and planning for change is essential.

SOURCE




Jackboot Hansen rejects democracy

He seems to be aiming for a modern version of Hitler's street-fighting "Sturm Abteilung". Does anybody now believe that Hansen is anything but a political activist? His claim to scientific detachment is now non-existent

Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said. James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.

Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: "The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

"The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I'm not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we're running out of time."

Hansen said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent, an application that energy and the climate change minister Ed Miliband recently delayed. "I think that peaceful actions that attempt to draw society's attention to the issue are not inappropriate," Hansen said.

He added that a scientific meeting in Copenhagen last week had made clear the "urgency of the science and the inaction taken by governments". Officials will gather in Bonn later this month to continue talks on a new global climate treaty, which campaigners have called to be signed at a UN meeting in Copenhagen in December. Hansen warned that the new treaty is "guaranteed to fail" to bring down emissions.

Hansen said: "What's being talked about for Copenhagen is a strenghening of Kyoto [protocol] approach, a cap and trade with offsets and escape hatches which will be gauranteed to fail in terms of getting the required rapid reduction in emissions. They talk about goals which sound impressive, but when you see the actions are such that it will be impossible to reach those goals, then I can understand the informed public getting frustrated."

He said he was growing "concerned" over the stance taken by the new US adminstration on global warming. "It's not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately i think that will be another case of greenwash. It's going to take stronger action than that."

SOURCE




Hysteria breeds contentment

If you weren't there, you probably didn't hear much about this week's second International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by the Heartland Institute and cosponsored by 60 organizations, with scientists, economists and policy experts in New York to confront the subject of global warming. So you wouldn't have heard that global warming is as uncertain as those who would fix it.

You probably have heard, however, about the predicted global warming-related calamities, including rising seas, tropical disease epidemics, species extinction, increasing hurricanes, devastating forest fires and declining agriculture. California's greenery and agriculture "could all be gone by the end of this century" as a result of melting of snowpack on our western mountains, according to U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Columbia University's Earth Institute recently warned, "The United States could suffer the effects of abrupt climate changes within decades." "Experts" tell us a "tipping point" is near, beyond which we won't be able to control the warming.

One would think that after two decades, the dire predictions would get old. The New York Times, for example, has averaged 21 stories per year on the subject since 1989; that peaked at 62 in 1997. The persistent publicity may be why so many Americans believe they know about the "problem." According to ABC News, 58 percent feel moderately well-informed about global warming, up about 15 points from earlier polls. Between 70 percent and 80 percent of those polled believe the world is warming. In a 2007 Associated Press- Stanford University poll, 79 percent thought it would be a somewhat serious or very serious problem for the world.

Numerous environmental organizations have reorganized themselves around this perceived danger. The Natural Resources Defense Council calls global warming "the biggest environmental issue of our time;" the World Wildlife Fund declares, "The common denominator in everything we do is climate change."

Given the "tipping point" of climate is upon us, activists propose surprisingly timid remedies. The National Wildlife Federation suggests: "Change the filter in your furnace;" "Change to fluorescent light bulbs" and, "Check your car's tire pressure." The Sierra Club's first recommendation? "A well-tuned car with properly inflated tires burns less gasoline - cutting pollution and saving you money at the pump. If you have two cars, drive the one with better gas mileage whenever possible." It's like going into modern battle with a slingshot. Why the gap between the calamitous warnings and the recommended response? Is it a lack of belief or a lack of commitment?

Citizens apparently don't really buy it. Despite warnings since before 1990, poll responses and lifestyle responses don't match. Since 1990, Americans have built bigger houses (by 20 percent), bought second homes and use 28 percent more residential energy. Over half of occupied houses in 2007 had six rooms or more; 60 percent of households had two people or less. Even fluorescent bulbs can't overcome such energy "inefficiencies."

As for greenhouse gases, people are emitting more carbon dioxide in travel, for both work and pleasure. Airline passenger and freight tonnage has about doubled since 1990. Cruise ship voyages reached record numbers in 2007 in some places. Nearly 1,000 restaurants in this country now have fly-in (not drive-in) customers.

U.S. gasoline use is up 24 percent since 1990 and total carbon dioxide emissions up by a similar amount. World emissions are up over 30 percent even though 180 countries, in signing the Kyoto Treaty, agreed to reduce emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels (which had already prompted predictions of catastrophe). Making matt ers worse, a report at the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2009 meeting, was that carbon dioxide concentrations rose about three times as fast since 2000 as in the 1990s.

There are 25 percent more registered vehicles in the United States than licensed drivers, and each vehicle runs an average of 12,000 miles per year. Large new stadiums, shopping centers and amusement parks are going up. "Global warming" alarmists should be alarmed enough to demand double the Kyoto reductions, now! The predictions of impending devastation ought to galvanize governments worldwide to prevent it. But it has not. Why?

Because "The surgery was a success, but the patient died." The "crisis" was created but the "solutions" fail. Where is the urgency for averting global warming? Lost in the more urgent of global challenges, as it should be.

Overuse of pesticides causes pests to become immune to them. Continual gloomy predictions affect people that way. Americans have differing perceptions, understanding and feelings about global warming. But on one point they agree: The problem is not serious. They have been immunized.

SOURCE




Receding Glacier Park Ice Not Due to Global Warming

I recently received a letter from reader Jane Rectenwald in Missoula, Montana asking a good question: What do the melting glaciers in Glacier Park indicate about global warming? Rectenwald had heard me speaking on a local radio station after she read quite a long article in a recent issue of the Missoulian showing pictures of the glaciers.

I'm glad she asked the question. Receding glaciers in Glacier National Park are not necessarily evidence of a global warming crisis-or of anything other than natural fluctuations. Glaciers advance and recede for many reasons, of which temperature change is just one.

The alpine glacier atop East Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro, for example, is shrinking, yet scientific measurements show the mountain has been cooling for decades, and the temperature virtually never rises above freezing. So why are Kilimanjaro's glaciers melting? There are two main factors. Recent deforestation at the base of the mountain means wind updrafts are drier than they have been in the past, resulting in less mountaintop snowfall to sustain the glacier.

Moreover, even though temperatures have been cooling for several decades, they rose dramatically as the Earth emerged from the Little Ice Age 100 to 200 years ago. Kilimanjaro temperatures are still much warmer than during the Little Ice Age, and the large mountaintop glacier has yet to find its equilibrium since the Little Ice Age ended. Kilimanjaro's glacier has been receding since the 1800s, long before humans were emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide.

Something very similar is happening at Glacier National Park. The National Climatic Data Center has an official weather station very close to the park, at Kalispell, Montana. The accompanying figure shows the temperature history for Kalispell, dating back to 1896. Typical of the trend throughout the United States, temperatures peaked in the 1930s (before humans were emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide) and have been in a long-term cooling trend since then. As the figure shows, temperatures today are below the 100-year average.

Regional land use changes may be affecting the glaciers at Glacier National Park. Almost certainly the "rebound effect" is occurring as the glaciers move toward a new equilibrium in our post-Little Ice Age era.

Patrick Michaels, Ph.D., a professor of climate science at the University of Virginia and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, uses the following example to describe how this rebound effect can occur with temperatures in a modest long-term decline:

If you take an ice cube out of a freezer at 0 degrees and put it in a refrigerator at 40 degrees, the ice cube will begin to melt. If you then turn the refrigerator down to 34 degrees and check the ice cube an hour later, it will have melted still further, even though the refrigerator temperature has declined. The declining size of the ice cube in the last hour is not an indication that temperatures rose during that hour, but simply reflects that the lower temperature of the last hour was still warmer than the temperature that existed when the ice cube formed.

Similarly, even though temperatures in the Glacier National Park region have been modestly cooling since human activities began emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide (approximately 1940), temperatures are still warmer than they were during the prolonged Little Ice Age (approximately 1300-1875), when the Glacier National Park glaciers formed.

Thus, like the ice cube in our example, the glaciers continue to recede in response to the natural rapid warming of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though regional temperatures have cooled during the past several decades.

SOURCE




GREEN BIGOTRY: OBAMA REJECTS CHEAP RENEWABLE ENERGY (BECAUSE IT'S FROM BRAZIL)

US ethanol supporters have praised President Barack Obama for resisting pressure from Brazilian President Luiz In cio Lula da Silva to eliminate the tariff on Brazilian ethanol imports.

The 0.54/gallon ($0.14/litre) tariff, which could be challenged at the World Trade Organisation by major ethanol exporter Brazil, was among the topics discussed during Lula and Obama's first meeting, on 14 March.

Lula said that he did not understand why there were tariffs on clean fuels when the US and Europe are expressing concern about climate change and carbon emissions. "I never expect an immediate answer," he said. "This is a process. As time goes by, Brazil is proving that biofuel is an extraordinary alternative and slowly other countries will join the biofuel effort."

Obama acknowledged that "the issue of Brazilian ethanol coming into the US has been a source of tension between the two countries. It's not going to change overnight, but I do think that as we continue to build exchanges of ideas, commerce, trade around the issue of biodiesel, that over time this source of tension can get resolved."

Ethanol supporters were encouraged by Obama's comments.

More HERE

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

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20 March, 2009

A clanger from the Green/Left "New Scientist" magazine

An email from Mike O'Ceirin [mioc@australianbyte.com]

I recently happened across an article on the New Scientist Web Site the title is "Climate myths: We can't trust computer models"

The article was written by one Fred Pearce who seems to be one of the leading lights in the AGW debate. You can find some information on him here - which gives quite a lot of detail about his journalism, but nothing about his educational background.

I have done a web search and even looked for such information. For instance he wrote a book called "Confessions of an Eco-Sinner" on Amazon Books the best I can find is he is a "Veteran Science Journalist". Despite any apparent expertise in the field he has this to say about computer models:

"Even though the climate is chaotic to some extent, it can be predicted long in advance.... The validity of models can be tested against climate history. If they can predict the past (which the best models are pretty good at) they are probably on the right track for predicting the future - and indeed have successfully done so."

The article also trots out the usual arguments and then the clanger:

"Finally, the claim is sometimes made that if computer models were any good, people would be using them to predict the stock market. Well, they are! A lot of trading in the financial markets is already carried out by computers. Many base their decisions on fairly simple algorithms designed to exploit tiny profit margins, but others rely on more sophisticated long-term models.

Major financial institutions are investing huge amounts in automated trading systems, the proportion of trading carried out by computers is growing rapidly and a few individuals have made a fortune from them. The smart money is being bet on computer models.

Of course, in some ways financial markets are much trickier to model than the climate, depending as they do on human behaviour. What's more, trading based on computer models alters the nature of the very thing you're trying to predict."

Now this article was written in 2007 when there were many who had faith in such modelling. Now stating as evidence that General Climate Models must be valid because computer modelling of stock markets have worked so well is now obviously ridiculous. Then it was just a logical fallacy.

Pearce sets himself up as an expert on this when he obviously is not and he has been caught out by the fact that it is foolish to believe computers can foretell the future. Further to this, his extreme ignorance is shown by saying "financial markets are much trickier to model than the climate". It shows the author to lack an understanding of the complexity in the creation of a GCM and the weather.

There is also a link to prove GCMs have already predicted the future. It is J Hansen's 1988 prediction that is referenced. I thought that prediction failed!




Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics

By Gerhard Gerlich & Ralf D. Tscheuschner

Abstract:

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Int. J. Modern Physics B23:275-364,2009 (DOI: 10.1142/S021797920904984X)




You've Got to Have Heartland

The chief source of hysteria over possible man-made global warming has been the United Nations and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The panel's own climate models project that if man's emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call "the fingerprint." Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude, producing a "hotspot" near the top of the troposphere, about 6 miles above the earth's surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling.

All scientists, both the alarmist warm-mongers and the pacifist cooler heads, agree that this temperature pattern would result if man were causing global warming, reflecting the pattern of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that would prevail in the atmosphere. Warming due to solar variations or other natural causes would not leave such a fingerprint pattern. Higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now enable us to settle the man-made global warming debate definitively.

The observed result is just the opposite of the modeled global warming fingerprint pattern. The data from weather balloons shows no increasing warming with altitude, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot. The satellite data confirms this result, no increasing temperature with altitude, no hotspot, no fingerprint.

Top Scientists

This was the most important point made by the brilliant scientists from around the world who attended the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by the Heartland Institute in New York City last week. Those scientists included, among many others who deserve to be household names: S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first director of the National Weather Satellite Service: Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formerly a professor of dynamic meteorology and director of the Center for Earth and Planetary Physics at Harvard; Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA's Aqua satellite; Patrick Michaels, research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and past president of the American Association of State Climatologists; David Douglass, professor of physics at the University of Rochester, and winner of numerous prestigious Science awards, and Syun-ichi Akasofu, professor of physics and former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, winner of awards from the Royal Astronomy Society of London, Japan Academy of Sciences, American Geophysical Union, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

There is no collection of scientists in the world smarter and better than these and the others who spoke at and attended the conference. Several argued further that the entire temperature pattern of the 20th century follows normal climate variations, rather than CO2 emissions. Temperatures in the U.S., which has the most thorough and consistent temperature record and historically the most CO2 emissions, were stable until 1920, increased some in the 1920s, and then soared to produce the hottest decade of the century during the 1930s. The climate then cooled during most of the period from 1940 until about 1977, except for a brief spike from about 1949 to 1953. Temperatures climbed upward from 1977 until 1998, except for a sharp downturn from about 1988 until about 1995. Temperatures are down over the past decade.

Yet CO2 increased continuously throughout the century, which should have produced a trend of consistent temperature increases if it were causing global warming. Several presenters at the conference argued that the more complex actual temperature variations were fully explained by natural, long-term temperature patterns. The temperature increases until 1940 reflected mostly the continuing recovery from the Little Ice Age, which ran roughly from the early 1400s to the late 1800s. The pattern since then is consistent with the variations of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a 20 to 30 year up and down variation in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean produced by deep sea ocean currents.

Global Cooling

Moreover, several presenters argued that due to these natural variations we have already entered a period of long-term cooling that will last at least another 20 years, and maybe more. Indeed, satellite measured temperatures show that the global atmosphere has cooled over the last 10 years, with the decline in temperatures accelerating over the last two years. As Lord Christopher Monckton, who also spoke at the conference, has said, "Global warming stopped 10 years ago. It hasn't gotten warmer since 1998….In fact in the last 7 years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about…one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period…of global cooling."

What portends longer-term cooling is that Pacific temperatures have now turned cold, which is likely to continue for another 15-20 years given past trends. Moreover, we have now experienced an extended period of minimal sun spot activity. If that continues, we may suffer an even longer cooling period, perhaps even a return to the Little Ice Age, as has happened in the past when sunspots declined for an extended period.

Just a couple of days ago, a separate, independent, peer reviewed study appeared in Geophysical Research Letters from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It concluded as well that the temperature variations of the 20th century were all explained by natural causes rather than human CO2 emissions. The study also concluded that the warming period of the late 20th century is over and an extended cooling period lasting another 20 years or so has begun.

Climate Science

Several other presenters at the Heartland conference went on to explain in detail why the models used by the UN to predict global warming and associated catastrophes are so wrong. As one explained, slight exaggerations in each of several variables when multiplied together add up to huge final errors. Another explained that the models assume that heat resulting from increased CO2 reduces clouds, further increasing temperatures, but satellite data now show that the clouds sharply reduce heat produced by CO2, resulting in a strong negative feedback, which leaves increased CO2 too weak to produce significant global warming. Other variables expected to produce strong positive feedback effects increasing global warming resulting from CO2 were shown to have little or no effect, or even a negative effect.

Other well-known facts further support the careful, logical, soft-spoken scientists at the Heartland conference, whose presentations should soon be available on video at www.heartland.org. Global temperatures were warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, a span of several hundred years around 1000 A.D. Even higher temperatures prevailed during a period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum, which ran roughly from 8,000 years ago (6000 B.C.) to 4,000 years ago (2000 B.C.). In fact, temperatures were higher than today during most of the period from 9000 B.C. to the birth of Christ.

More HERE




Global Warming: The Backlash Begins

Environmentalists and their allies in the Administration were stunned by the news last week that skepticism about the effects of global warming is growing. With complete domination of both the mainstream media and the political institutions by true believers in global warming, the news from Gallup that 44 percent of Americans believe that global warming has been exaggerated must have come as a shock. Yet last week’s news contained two good examples of why this should be, and why the debate that Al Gore claims is over may only just be starting.

One of the main reasons Americans are expressing such distrust about what they are told on the subject is that the science is often patently exaggerated. An example came last week from a conference held in Copenhagen where there were widely-reported claims that global warming could destroy 85 percent of the Amazon rainforest. Vicky Pope of the Met Office, the UK’s version of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told the conference, “The impacts of climate change on the Amazon are much worse than we thought. As temperatures rise quickly over the coming century the damage to the forest won't be obvious straight away, but we could be storing up trouble for the future.”

Yet this claim was immediately challenged by other scientists. Dr Yadvinder Malhi, an Oxford University expert on the subject of the Amazon and climate change, said in an email, “I must say I find it frustrating that the gloomiest take on news gets such a big profile. This is based on one model, and that model has flaws…If that conclusion was based on solid empirical science then so be it, but when such a story goes out on a pure model study (not yet peer-reviewed) with significant imperfections, it may do a lot of damage in the real world.” Indeed, the Met Office’s model has been criticized before, with a 2007 study from the University of Arizona finding that the mechanism on which the Met Office predictions were based was actually not present in the short-term.

What appears to have happened is that scientists have abandoned traditional methods of communicating science for an approach based on catastrophism – an extreme application of the news maxim, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Yet this approach is inherently unscientific. As Mike Hulme, who directs the influential Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, has written, “I believe climate change is real, must be faced and action taken. But the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory.” The rejection of exaggeration is proof of Hulme’s wisdom.

Yet even if the scientific debate doesn’t permeate the consciousness of the average American except as obviously contrived, there is another reason for Americans to feel skeptical. The “sticker shock” of the cost of climate alarmism is starting to hit. Most people know by now that the President’s enormous budget relies in part on an increasing income stream from fees on energy use, called a cap-and-trade program by economists. When the Congressional Budget Office examined a similar scheme last year, it found that the costs of such a scheme rested most heavily on the lowest income levels. This should be unsurprising; the poorest spend a greater proportion of their income on energy than anyone else. Therefore, the supposed tax break that 95 percent of working Americans have been promised by the President will to a large extent be wiped out by the increase in energy costs. All this for a purported effect on greenhouse gas emissions far less than the Kyoto Protocol demanded.

Now Congressional Republicans could be expected to object to this, but more interesting opposition is forming in the ranks of Congressional Democrats, particularly the so-called “blue dogs.” They are unhappy that the money raised from cap and trade is not being used to soften the blow on the poor in a more targeted fashion than a general tax break. Senate budget committee chairman Kent Conrad put it bluntly: “There an awful lot of senators who are on the margins of this issue who would be very concerned if their leverage was reduced by that mechanism.” It should be noted that every attempt to introduce a cap and trade program in the Senate has floundered on this very issue: it appears to cost much more than the supposed benefits it will provide.

Moreover, initiatives such as the President’s raise cynicism about environmental policies. In Europe, where they have been trying such things for a while now, there is widespread belief that “green taxes” do not help the environment. For example, when asked to describe the motivations for politicians to promote green taxes, 74 percent of Britons polled said that, "politicians are not serious about the environment and are using the issue as an excuse to raise more revenue from green taxes."

If they believe that neither scientists nor politicians are to be trusted on environmental issues (and given that we only hear one side from the mainstream media, we can extend that to journalists too), then Americans are likely to grow increasingly cynical about environmentalism. If there are genuine concerns over the environment, then they need to be debated on a credible. So far, environmentalists have rejected so-called “no regrets” approaches that use genuine market-based principles to reduce environmental risks. The atmosphere they have helped create, however, may mean they are the only politically acceptable option. It’s time to forget hype and taxes, and explore another way.

SOURCE




Climate debate focus shifts away from environment, toward jobs

The debate over climate change is shifting away from saving the planet and toward rescuing the American worker. In selling his controversial plan to cap carbon dioxide, for example — as he did in his address to Congress last month — President Obama has linked the need to save “our planet from the ravages of climate change” with the need to “truly transform our economy.”

In a subsequent speech to a group of CEOs, meanwhile, Obama again sought to sell his plan as a way to green the environment and promote economic growth. He told the business executives that he did not “accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders.” “You and I both know that we need ultimately to make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy,” Obama said. “We know that the best way to do that is through market-based caps on carbon pollution that drive the production of more renewable energy in America.”

Not everyone sees the cap-and-trade bill as a strategy for growth, of course, and who wins the debate will likely have won the day on whatever climate bill emerges later this year.

Although Democrats, who are more supportive of a cap-and-trade program than Republicans, are firmly in control of Congress, several prominent members within the caucus remain concerned about job losses and the impact higher energy prices could have on lower-income workers under the climate proposal.

Given that dynamic, supporters say, the shift from save-the-planet to save-our-jobs is no accident, and Obama’s success in convincing people of his worldview will determine how successful his climate program will be. “It’s deliberate and very smart,” said Matt Bennett, vice president for public affairs at The Third Way, a think tank with close ties to centrist Democrats on Capitol Hill. “The president understands that the only thing that really resonates with the American people right now is economic recovery and growth. “This is a big shift in the economy. … If they can frame the debate properly, they can make it happen,” Bennett said.

Added Daniel Weiss, the director of the climate change program at the Center for American Progress: “They are talking about the energy and jobs, rather than energy and birds and bunnies.”

The theory is that through wind turbines, solar panels, energy-efficient products and carbon sequestration technologies, America can grow new industries and export the technologies to large emitting countries such as China and India.

But a broad disagreement between Democrats and Republicans emerged yet again in a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on Wednesday that examined how American companies could remain competitive if carbon limits were imposed. “There seems to be a consensus on our side that we are going to lose jobs, where[as] you feel we will gain jobs,” said Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), after listing studies from the National Association of Manufacturers, the Heritage Foundation and Charles Rivers Associates that estimated a cap-and-trade system could cost between 4 million and 7 million jobs. “More often than not,” warned Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), “the cost of energy is the difference between operating in the United States and shutting the doors to move overseas.”

In the weeks since the release of the budget blueprint, Republicans have used the president’s cap-and-trade proposal to hammer the new administration. They deride the plan as a “cap and tax” that will force more American businesses overseas, to countries that don’t have a carbon cap — a specific kind of outsourcing known as “carbon leakage.”

One of the central questions in the debate is whether the United States should proceed unilaterally, or at least before developing countries like China and India. While emissions from those countries are rapidly increasing, officials there argue that the developed world should move first because those economies are mostly responsible for the carbon already in the atmosphere that is warming the planet.

One of the central questions in the economic debate surrounding the climate change bill is how to protect particularly sensitive American companies should the U.S. government move forward without a broader, international climate agreement.

Democratic Reps. Jay Inslee of Washington state and Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania have co-authored a bill that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to distribute emissions allowances to certain industrial sectors that would be put at a particular disadvantage in the global marketplace due to a carbon cap.

One of the chief criticisms of Obama’s proposal is that it would not give any allowances to industry away for free, requiring instead that they purchase the credits at an auction. The president’s budget projects such a sale to generate around $646 billion between 2012, its first year, and 2019, the last year of the budget projection. But Margo Thorning, a senior vice president and chief economist at the American Council for Capital Formation, told the House panel that the costs on emitters could be much more than that, from $1 trillion to $3 trillion. The president’s climate change proposal is “almost certain to reduce jobs and increase unemployment,” Thorning said.

Other proposals would impose tariffs on products from countries that do not limit their carbon emissions. Chinese officials, however, are already warning of a trade fight under that scenario.

How to reassure lawmakers that the cap-and-trade bill won’t cause further loss among the manufacturing base in particular may attract Democrats from industrial states to join their colleagues from the coasts in supporting the legislation, backers say.

Many eyes are on the Gang of 16, the bipartisan group of centrists that tried to find a compromise last year to the controversial issue of offshore drilling. Lobbyists said staff for some of these members are beginning to meet informally to discuss a climate change bill. “The pain in some of their states is extraordinarily raw and real. They are waiting to see what emerges… There are a whole series of delicate issues to confront,” said Bennett of The Third Way.

SOURCE




Australia: Victoria's Leftist government is closing the door now the horse has escaped

Controlled burns begin in bid to avoid bushfire repeat

Controlled burning has begun in Victoria aimed at preventing a repeat of the devastating summer firestorm that killed at least 210 people. Environment chiefs have started a program of controlled burns on public land this week following criticism not enough was done to reduce rural fuel loads in the lead-up to summer. The Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) will burn 25ha of public land near Bendoc, in East Gippsland, today to safeguard the town. About 120ha near Mallacoota, in the far east of the state, will also be burnt.

DSE spokeswoman Jennifer Willis said more than 150,000ha of land was torched in fuel reduction burns last financial year. There were no targets for this year's autumn/spring program with the burns being weather dependent. She said conditions needed to be dry enough so that the fire ignited and spread, without getting out of control.

Environment Minister Gavin Jennings said controlled burns would continue as conditions allowed, but acknowledged they may be stressful for some residents. "We are aware that seeing smoke will cause some anxiety for people, especially people impacted by the recent bushfires and ask the community for their patience throughout this program,'' he said.

Mr Jennings said burning would occur in strategic locations to protect towns and minimise disruption to bush ecology. Asset protection burns will target most areas, including the Otways coast, the Wombat Forest and Macedon and the Dandenong Ranges.

SOURCE

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

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19 March, 2009

Global Governance of Science

Just WHY does science need to be "governed"? And who is qualified to govern it? If science is not free enquiry, what is? That the governance is said to be "for the common good" identifies it readily with its Fascist and Communist predecessors. "For the common good" is the normal justification for tyranny

The European Commission has just released a new report titled, The Global Governance of Science. It is available here in PDF. Here is the abstract:

This report is the product of an expert group acting under a mandate from the European Commission Directorate General for Research to which legal scholars, sociologists, philosophers and political scientists from Europe, the United States of America, China and South-Africa have contributed. This report seeks to advance a vision of global governance for the common good that invokes European principles of good governance and fundamental rights. It is our belief that the European Union as a political entity situated between the national and global levels, with its principles of good governance, its charter of fundamental rights and commitments to a European Research Area, is ideally placed to encourage critical reflection and undertake practical leadership in relation to the global governance of science and innovation. Our recommendations are addressed not only to policymakers in the European Commission and the Member States of the EU, but equally to those organisations worldwide operating within and around science.

SOURCE (See the original for links)




Study: West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair

By Andrew C. Revkin

How many times have you seen the word "collapse" used lately to describe what could unfold should human-caused global warming, and more particularly warming seas, erode the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? (One metric: A Google search for "West Antarctic Ice Sheet" and "collapse" gets 29,800 hits.)

The word is used again in the headline on one of two new papers in the journal Nature focusing on past comings and goings of that huge expanse of ice. But this paper, by David Pollard at Penn State and Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, provides an estimated time frame for the loss of ice that its authors say should be of some comfort. (If the sheet melted entirely, sea levels worldwide would rise more than 15 feet.)

Dr. Pollard and Dr. DeConto ran a five-million-year computer simulation of the ice sheet's comings and goings, using data on past actual climate and ocean conditions gleaned from seabed samples (the subject of the other paper) to validate the resulting patterns.

The bottom line? In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process - at its fastest - takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn't go beyond about 1.5 feet per century, Dr. Pollard said in an interview, a far cry from what was thought possible a couple of decades ago. He, Dr. DeConto and other experts on climate and polar ice stressed that when Greenland's possible contribution to the sea level is added, there's plenty for coastal cities to consider. But for Greenland, too, some influential recent studies have cut against the idea that momentous coastal retreats are likely anytime soon.

Over all, the loss of the West Antarctic ice from warming is appearing "more likely a definite thing to worry about on a thousand-year time scale but not a hundred years," Dr. Pollard said.

Several independent specialists on ice sheets and climate said it was premature to conclude from this simulation that fast-paced ice loss from Antarctica was not possible. Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory cautioned that the new findings were based on a single, fairly simple simulation and said that while the results matched well with the seabed evidence, they lacked the precision needed to know what will happen over short periods. "This new study illustrates once more that the collapse of West Antarctica and parts of East Antarctica is not a myth," he said. "It happened many times before when the Earth was as warm as it is about to be [I think that is assuming what you have to prove. Or maybe he has the gift of prophecy. Religious people do sometimes think they have that gift and there seems no doubt that he is of the Warmist religion. He is certainly dogmatic]. In terms of time scales, I do not think the results of this study are relevant to what will be happening in the next 100 years and beyond. The problem is far more complex. But this is a step forward."

SOURCE




Melting Antarctic Ice Part of Natural Cycle

Historical records for the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) show that it is particularly prone to rapid climate change-change that occurs in cycles of ~200 years and ~2500 years. By studying major transitions in plankton productivity in the western Antarctic, scientists have shown that "spectacular" ice-cover losses have happened many times in the past. In other words, the "unprecedented rapid loss of ice" from parts of Antarctica that global warming alarmists make so much of are a normal part of nature's cycles.

According to the latest report in the journal Science, this is how it works: Less ice in the northern zone causes more cloud cover, reducing the amount of light reaching the plankton. A loss of light, together with less ice-melt freshwater and stronger winds means fewer large plankton blooms. By contrast, in the south, the skies stay cloudless for longer and the Antarctic current increases its flow rate, pulling up more nutrients. Both factors contribute to greater primary productivity. These physical changes explain the striking shifts recently observed in krill and the vertebrate communities of the western Antarctic.

For those who take their science straight, here is the abstract of the paper titled "Recent Changes in Phytoplankton Communities Associated with Rapid Regional Climate Change Along the Western Antarctic Peninsula," by Martin Montes-Hugo, et al, as it appears in Science:

"The climate of the western shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) is undergoing a transition from a cold-dry polar-type climate to a warm-humid sub-Antarctic-type climate. Using three decades of satellite and field data, we document that ocean biological productivity, inferred from chlorophyll a concentration (Chl a), has significantly changed along the WAP shelf. Summertime surface Chl a (summer integrated Chl a ~63% of annually integrated Chl a) declined by 12% along the WAP over the past 30 years, with the largest decreases equatorward of 63øS and with substantial increases in Chl a occurring farther south. The latitudinal variation in Chl a trends reflects shifting patterns of ice cover, cloud formation, and windiness affecting water-column mixing. Regional changes in phytoplankton coincide with observed changes in krill (Euphausia superba) and penguin populations."

What this means is that, by measuring amounts of the chemical chlorophyll-a, scientitsts can figure out living conditions in the Antarctic ocean, from which they can infer what was going on with ice cover and other climate conditions. What they found was that the recent period of rapid ice melting in the WAP fits normal climate cycles that have been detected by other scientists. Previous studies have reported similar oscillations in sea ice extent and rate of change during the Holocene-the relatively warm interglacial period we have been in for the past 15,000 years. One such study was by Amy Leventer, et al, reported in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, in December 1996.

In a paper titled "Productivity cycles of 200-300 years in the Antarctic Peninsula region: Understanding linkages among the sun, atmosphere, oceans, sea ice, and biota," Leventer and colleagues report the results of a multiproxy record from a sediment core retrieved from a deep basin on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The report reveals "a dramatic perspective on paleoclimatic changes over the past 3700 yr. Analyses completed include measurement of magnetic susceptibility and granulometry, bed thickness, particle size, percent organic carbon, bulk density, and microscopic evaluation of diatom and benthic foraminiferal assemblages and abundances." Their conclusion was that "variability of these parameters demonstrates the significance of both short-term cycles, which recur approximately every 200 yr, and longer term events (~2500 yr cycles) that are most likely related to global climatic fluctuations."

In other words, ice in the Antarctic region undergoes periodic episodes of rapid melting-and it is all entirely natural, not because of human activity. The new paper echos these findings: "Paleo-records show that analogous climate variations have occurred in the past 200 to 300 years, and over longer 2500-year cycles, with rapid (decadal) transitions between warm and cool phases in the WAP. In this study (~30 years), the Chl a trend evidenced in the southern subregion of the WAP presented similar characteristics to those trends detected during typical interneoglacial periods (~200 to 300 years) (i.e., high phytoplankton biomass, and presumably productivity, due to less area covered by permanent sea ice)."

Science is marvelous, it never rests and never accepts any simple answer at face value. Here we see confirmation of an alternate explanation for rapid ice melting in Antarctica. The latest paper cites thirty supporting references and cross referencing the older paper provides links to eighteen others-this paper's conclusions are not from a single group of "fringe" scientists. Yet have you heard this well documented explanation for rapid ice melting from any media outlet reporting on global warming? Of Course not! What is reported is "more unprecedented melting!"

To have reported that the melting ice could be explained more accurately by a scientific theory other than anthropogenic global warming would muddy the water, not to mention confuse the news anchor doing the reporting. This is what makes other scientists, myself included, so angry about the climate change clique-their lack of open mindedness, their willful disregard for any facts counter to their preconceived ideas, their out right lies. When the dust finally settles on the great global warming debate there will be a number of climate scientist with much to account for.

Meanwhile, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.

SOURCE




A Dozen Reasons Why a Former CNN Executive Producer for Science Doesn't Understand Doubters of Manmade Global Warming

By Dr Roy Spencer

The following editorial appeared on the Huffington Post website today (italicized entries, below).and I couldn't help but give the writer some of his own medicine (my responses not italicized, & in parentheses).

WHY TO DENY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

By Peter Dykstra

A dozen reasons why climate change deniers are the way they are: No, there aren’t only a dozen reasons, but some are bigger than others. Scientists and climate change advocates are constantly amazed and appalled at how durable the climate change denial machine is. Here are some of the varied reasons.

1) Compassion fatigue: No one really denies world hunger, but we sure are good at turning away from it. People have been hearing about climate for two decades now, and they’d really not think any more about it.

(Americans give more to charity than any country in the world, and they are perfectly willing to help out.when there is a REAL crisis. They are not so crazy about supporting those who profit off of imaginary ones.)

2) Stigma: Pick one guy and stick with him as the personification of evil. That would be Al Gore, who plays the same role for climate that Jane Fonda did, and still does nearly 40 years later, for Vietnam. Jane has admitted that she made a huge mistake by posing with the North Vietnamese, and neither her multiple apologies, the fact that she was right about the war, nor the otherwise-accepted concept of Christian Forgiveness will ever let her off the hook for millions of Americans.

(Stigma? You mean like labeling us "deniers"? Or "flat-Earthers"? Or "corporate toadies?" Or "Holocaust deniers"?)

3) Dogma: Those who talk about climate change are the same ones who occupy the tenth circle of Hell for many Americans: Politicians, the Media, Scientists, Educators, Hippies, and Showbiz types. So it’s a moral imperative to be agin what they’re for.

(If the shoe fits..)

4) Fear Factor: Losing your SUV, or ATV, is more of a fright than phenology (the effect of climatic changes on the seasons), or melting permafrost, or polar bears.

(Losing liberty over a theoretical threat is the main concern here (no one has ever been killed by manmade global warming.because there is no way to distinguish manmade warming from natural).

5) Manufactured denial: Marc Morano is a Senate staffer for James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who’s said that climate change is a “hoax.” In that role, Morano’s been the Drum Major of the denial parade. The Marc Moranos of the world function for climate the way that Johnnie Cochran functioned for OJ Simpson: Raise enough shreds of doubt, even if you do it in reckless and theatrical ways, and climate change can win an acquittal, or at least a mistrial no matter how strong the rest of the evidence is. (It was reported last week that Morano’s career as a public servant will soon end, and he’ll take the denial machine to the private sector).

(I think a better analogy is one person, Marc Morano posting information.maybe with some spin.versus hundreds or thousands of journalists who are doing the same thing on the other side. Are those odds still not good enough for you?)

6) Devotion: The corollary to not believing anything Al Gore and his ilk is that you must believe everything that a crackpot like Glenn Beck says. [Blogger's Note: The word "ilk" is a very special one. A nonscientific Googling of the terms "Al Gore" and "Ilk" yielded 705 results. "Al Gore" and "Antichrist" got 693 hits, but that's misleading, since the "Antichrist" in question in many of those hits was either Hillary or Obama, and Gore was just mentioned as a henchman.]

(Actually, WE are the ones who tolerate a variety of theories for what causes climate change. We just don't believe the first place you should look is in the tailpipe of an SUV, or up some bovine orifice.)

7) Lack of backbone in Senior Editorial Management: A long-gone CNN boss of mine once told me that he hesitated about climate change stories. If he had his doubts about a diplomacy story, he said, he could get Henry Kissinger or Madeleine Albright on the phone to explain it to him. But for climate, he said he was “stuck” with only me.

(WHAT? You mean there are MORE ways to be killed by global warming than the 37 that we've already heard about??)

8 ) Current events: The Gallup poll just released that shows an increase in the number of Americans who think that climate fears are “exaggerated” also points out that this always happens with many secondary issues when the merde hits the fan –9/11 or Depression tend to make issues like climate seem less important. They also get covered less.

(Yes, there is something about real death and suffering that concerns reasonable people somewhat more than science fiction documentaries.)

9) Credentials: Peer review means nothing to the general public. And it’s unreasonable to expect a casual reader to make a huge distinction between a respected and peer-reviewed climate scientist like Steve Schneider, and the “coal monkeys” (Schneider’s term) who staff the Denial Labs.

(We have peer reviewed science, too, but it is you journalists who don't have the backbone to report on it. How convenient.)

10) Frank Luntz: Go to www.ewg.org and read the 2003 memo from the peerless Republican consultant. It counsels that manufacturing doubt is the only way to avoid losing the battle. In an interview at last year’s Heartland Institute’s Deny-a-Palooza, Morano claims he’s never read the Luntz memo. Which, if true, means that a superstar political consultant wrote a memo for his party on the environment, and the party’s most prominent environmental spokesman has managed to ignore it for six years?

(Tell me again.who is Frank Luntz, and what does he have to do with me?)

11) Ideology: Environmentalists often make the mistake of tarring all skeptics with the same brush. Not everyone’s on the take from Exxon and Peabody Coal. Not by along shot. But policy fixes to climate change are absolutely toxic to many freemarketers and libertarians.

("Policy fixes to climate change" is like saying, "let’s outlaw gravity".)

12) Ossified science: William Gray, the hurricane guy, is the best example of an old-line scientist who has complete contempt for any science that’s not generated in a lab or on a chalkboard. He’ll go to his grave not believing in any global warming, nor anything else that relies on computer models for its science. Chris Mooney’s book “Storm World” tells this story very well.

(Actually, I think Bill Gray has the best answer to ultimately what causes most climate fluctuations, including global warming (and cooling): changes in ocean circulation. In fact, we now have satellite evidence that a major mode of this kind of change - the Pacific Decadal Oscillation - has caused most of the warming we've seen in the last century. But don't look for it in the news when it finally gets published.)

So there’s a dozen reasons for denying climate change, and I didn’t even mention Creationists.

(So, there's a dozen reasons why a journalist can be misinformed on climate science, and I didn't even mention Atheists.)

SOURCE

I mentioned a previous pathetic smear attempt by the dick-headed Dykstra on 15th.. The insinuation that skeptics are creationists is slimy. He offers no proof of it. I am sure I am not the only atheist who is a skeptic. I think in fact that atheism is skeptical per se




Warmist Challenged to Debate

NBC 4 Chief Meteorologist Bob Ryan, who recently wrote a lengthy online series of articles on global climate change that was covered here, has earned praise from a prominent environmentalist, and scorn from a Department of Energy worker who challenged Ryan to a climate science debate in a forum of his choosing.

Department of Energy engineer Brian Valentine, who according to the Department's web site works with the Industrial Technologies Program, where he helps the petroleum industry use energy more efficiently, is seeking to debate Ryan on the subject of climate science. Valentine's challenge was distributed by Marc Morano, spokesman for Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has called climate change a "hoax."

"Ryan may or may not be aware that that ALL phenomena he discusses have different scientific interpretations with regard to the relationship of 'cause' and 'effect'; in any case no viewer of the Series would be aware of such differing scientific interpretations - and this remains a disservice to the viewers of the Series," Valentine wrote (apparently not realizing that the series consists of articles and not videos).

"As a matter of enlightenment and fairness to viewers of the Series, I cordially, and respectfully, invite Bob Ryan to consider discussion of the subject matters of the six-part Series in a public forum that would invite audience participation. The venue could be any that Bob considers appropriate within the DC area and could be as public as he chooses with televised coverage. These matters weigh heavily on proposed legislation in these United States, and the public has the complete right to understand all sides of issues that will influence their lives so greatly."

Ryan is aware of the challenge, although it's not clear if he will take the bait, or in what form he may decide to do so. We at CWG have offered to provide a forum at our web site if so desired.

A blog post in support of Ryan's discussion of climate science escaped our attention earlier this month. Laurie David [Whose only real talent is big tits], who was a producer of Al Gore's climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and serves as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), wrote on Huffington Post that Ryan did a very "brave" thing by discussing climate science in an apolitical manner.

"Don't underestimate how brave this is," she wrote, "There are hundreds of meteorologists on TV and very few ever mention the words global warming." In an interview with CWG on March 5, Ryan had criticized some TV meteorologists for covering climate science from their personal political perspectives, rather than basing reports on scientific research.

SOURCE




Australia: Federal Labor party Reps. keep quiet on proposed Warmist laws



They represent blue-collar workers and mums and dads who face the greatest job losses under an emissions trading scheme, but three Queensland federal Labor MPs are publicly remaining silent about the risk. Chris Trevor, Kirsten Livermore and James Bidgood -- who represent parts of central Queensland and north Queensland -- have repeatedly refused to talk about the concerns of industries and workers in their electorates.

Fears of thousands of job losses in the mining sectors have intensified in the past week as resource giants warn of massive job cuts under an ETS. Mayors in Mt Isa and Gladstone are demanding the measure be delayed from 2010 to 2012. Queensland representatives from the coal and mining sectors yesterday held protracted meetings with advisers from the offices of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson. Queensland Resources Council chief executive Michael Roche and mining giants also held a private dinner with about seven Queensland MPs, calling for the coal sector to receive at least 60 per cent in free permits under the ETS.

But Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has repeatedly refused to budge on the matter, saying the coal industry would have to pay to pollute. "We are not letting up on this. It is too important," Mr Roche told The Courier-Mail yesterday. "It's fair to say that the Government underestimated the concerns of the coal sector under the white paper. "One of the MPs we met with . . . said if there isn't (policy) change, 'I'll lose my seat'."

For the past two days, The Courier-Mail has asked the three MPs to explain how the ETS will affect their electorates and what they were telling their constituents. But staff in their offices said the MPs were either unavailable or too busy.

Mr Roche said he had no complaints dealing with Labor MPs even though they were publicly toeing the party line. However, he said he was told Queensland MPs were strongly advising Caucus about the concerns of the industry. The Courier-Mail understands Caucus is split on the starting date of an ETS because of the continuing global economic uncertainty.

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said it was time Queensland Labor MPs stood up for their electorates. "He (Mr Trevor) represents thousands of people involved in the coal mining industry and yet where is he speaking up for them?" he said. "Where is Chris Trevor standing up for the miners of Central Queensland?"

SOURCE

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

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18 March, 2009

Some foot-shooting alarmism

The people who write this stuff really are poor intellects. Note the bits highlighted in red. The first shows that Arctic melting is NOT part of a global phenomenon and the second says it is comparable to past natural melts. They are also slippery in their prophecy of a "nearly complete" melt of the Greenland icecap. In fact, the Greenland icecap stayed largely intact during much hotter eras of the past. As Bamber notes, it survived at about 50% of it present size during the Eemian period of about 125,000 years ago -- when temperatures were about 5C higher than today

A major U.S. government report on Arctic climate, prepared with input from eight Canadian scientists, has concluded that the recent rapid warming of polar temperatures and shrinking of multi-year Arctic sea ice are "highly unusual compared to events from previous thousands of years."

The findings, released on Friday, counter suggestions from some skeptics that such recent events as the opening of the Northwest Passage and collapse of ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic are predictable phenomena that could be explained as part of a natural climate cycle rather than being driven by elevated carbon emissions from human activity.

A summary of the report - described as "the first comprehensive analysis of the real data we have on past climate conditions in the Arctic," by U.S. Geological Survey director Mark Myers - warns that "sustained warming of at least a few degrees" is probably enough "to cause the nearly complete, eventual disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet, which would raise sea level by several metres."

The study also sounds the alarm that "temperature change in the Arctic is happening at a greater rate than other places in the Northern Hemisphere, and this is expected to continue in the future. As a result, glacier and ice-sheet melting, sea-ice retreat, coastal erosion and sea level rise can be expected to continue."

Ice cover in the Canadian Arctic and throughout the polar world has experienced record-setting melts in the past few years. The summer of 2007 saw polar ice cover shrink to its lowest extent in recorded history. Last summer's melt came close to matching that record, and recent research indicates that overall ice volume - because of the ongoing replacement of thicker, multi-year ice with thinner new ice - was lower in 2008 than 2007.

This past summer also saw further dramatic evidence of the unusual warming of the Canadian Arctic, including record-setting high temperatures in Iqaluit, Nunavut, rapid erosion and flooding of a glacial landscape on Baffin Island, the re-opening of the Northwest Passage, an unprecedented clearing of ice from the Beaufort Sea, and the collapse of hundreds of square kilometres of ancient ice shelves on the northern shore of Ellesmere Island.

Research for the U.S. Congress-commissioned report was conducted by 37 scientists from the U.S., Germany, Canada, Britain and Denmark. The Canadian scientists involved were Mary Anne Douglas and Alexander Wolfe from the University of Alberta, John Smol from Queen's University, Garry Clarke of the University of British Columbia, Shawn Marshall from the University of Calgary, Jerry Mitrovica from the University of Toronto, Arthur Dyke of the Geological Survey of Canada, and McGill University's James Savelle.

"The current rate of human-influenced Arctic warming is comparable to peak natural rates documented by reconstructions of past climates. However, some projections of future human-induced change exceed documented natural variability," the scientists conclude. "The past tells us that when thresholds in the climate system are crossed, climate change can be very large and very fast. We cannot rule out that human-induced climate change will trigger such events in the future."

SOURCE




Warmist "explorers" freezing to death in the Arctic

It's just a stunt that more realistic people will have to rescue them from -- at some danger to the rescuers

Three British explorers trying to ski to the North Pole to measure the thickness of sea ice only have one day's food left as bad weather hampers supply flights, the mission said Tuesday. Project director and ice team leader Pen Hadow and his colleagues Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels are now down to half rations and fighting to survive in brutal sub-zero weather conditions. "We're hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice and, because we're not moving, the colder we get," Hadow said Tuesday in a statement from the London headquarters of the Catlin Arctic Survey. "Waiting is almost the worst part of an expedition as we?re in the lap of the weather gods. This is basic survival."

The expedition set off on a 85-day hike on February 28 when the three were dropped off by plane on an ice floe some 668 miles, from northern Canada. During the past 17 days temperatures have consistently dropped below minus 40 degrees Celsius, and have been accompanied by strong winds increasing the chill factor. Bad weather has forced three attempts to drop food supplies to the team on a landing strip close to their camp to turn back.

More HERE




THE WORST FILM EVER MADE

Today on spiked: Editor Brendan O'Neill reports from the premiere of "The Age of Stupid", a cretinous film that unwittingly exposes the elitism and dodgy science of the green lobby.

O'Neill writes: "The film is so cretinous it makes Michael Moore look like a modern-day Bergman; so scientifically vacuous it makes Lysenko look like Einstein; so achingly middle-class it makes The Good Life look like a kitchen-sink drama about miners' wives."

Read the review in full here




Your "Carbon Legacy"

The "anti-people" agenda of the Greenies revealed again. Like the Communist Chinese, they want to restrict how many babies American women can have

Politicians who bow to the demands of the world's climate alarmists have long sought various means of reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. To date, the measures they have proposed have been rather mundane, focusing primarily on reducing emissions associated with one's household activities and transportation habits. For example, we have been encouraged to replace our incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient ones. We've also been asked to participate in municipal recycling programs, to drive less, to car pool or to utilize public transportation. But the "rules of the road" will soon be become much more stringent, and you and I may be asked - if not mandated by law - to make an unprecedented lifestyle change that could dramatically curtail one of our most cherished personal freedoms, all in the name of "saving the planet."

Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University - Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax - identify this lifestyle change in a paper entitled "Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals." In this treatise they attempt to quantify, in their words, "the carbon legacy of an individual," and to examine "how it is affected by the individual's reproductive choices," based on the premise that "a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him." So what did they find?

The two researchers calculated that a woman in the United States would reduce her lifetime CO2 emissions by about 486 tons if she implemented the green-approved household and transportation activities mentioned previously. But they estimate that if she were to have just one child, that child, over its lifetime, would eventually release nearly 20 times more CO2 to the atmosphere than the reductions achieved by its mother via her more mundane green activities.

In light of these calculations, Murtaugh and Schlax conclude that "the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle," adding that "enormous future benefits can be gained by immediate changes in reproductive behavior," and, therefore, that "an individual's reproductive choices can have a dramatic effect on the total carbon emissions ultimately attributable to his or her genetic lineage."

We can only hope, in this regard, that everyone's future reproductive behavior will continue to be a matter of choice. But in light of the supposedly "enormous" CO2-related "benefits" of curtailing child-bearing - especially in the United States - no one can assume that such will continue to be the case, especially in light of the claims of climate alarmists such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, who consider CO2-induced global warming to be the greatest threat to the survival of civilization ever to be encountered. Faced with such a unique and unparalleled threat, we could well awake one morning and find ourselves with no choice in the matter, mandated by law to only procreate to the extent deemed ecologically appropriate by those enlightened few who somehow simply "know" what is best for the biosphere.

It may seem unthinkable today that our government - of the people, by the people and for the people - would ever assume the power to tell us how many children we can and cannot have. But much has happened in the past few months that truly was unthinkable, and only a single year ago. And if it's happened before, it can happen again; for in times of crisis - either real, as in the current economic crisis, or imagined, as in Al Gore's climate crisis - normally-rational people can do some wildly-irrational things.

We must, therefore, maintain the eternal vigilance that is needed to preserve our God-given rights that no one has the authority to rescind. Stand up with us and demand that your elected officials carefully scrutinize both sides of the CO2-climate debate and think for themselves. We need thoughtful men and women of integrity to guide our nation, not mindless lemmings.

Reference: Murtaugh, P.A. and Schlax, M.G. 2009. Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals. Global Environmental Change

CO2 Science Volume 12, Number 11: 18 March 2009




Blame sunspots for cool winter, spring weather

By George Taylor (George Taylor retired as Oregon State Climatologist last year and now operates Applied Climate Services of Corvallis)

Brrrr! It's been a cold week, in a cold month, in a cold winter. And it shows no sign of letting up. Last week the Northwest was gripped by unseasonably cold weather. Areas west of the Cascades saw temperatures dip into the 20s. Locally we dropped as low as 27 on the 13th. Eugene was even colder (24 on the 11th). Two days later, Eugene's 25 degree-low broke the daily record (26) set in 1944.

So far in March our local Hyslop Experiment Station has seen nine days with lows of 32 or below. The month of March averages 5.7 days, so we're already well ahead of average for an entire March.

As cold as it was here, the Cascades generally protected us from the coldest Arctic air, which remained mostly north and east of us. On the 11th, Spokane, Wash., reported a low of 2 degrees. This was the latest date for a temperature of 2 degrees or less. The previous latest date occurred March 6, 1891. Sandpoint, Idaho, set a similar record the same day with a reading of -4 degrees, the latest date for a temperature that low.

Western Montana saw temperatures as low as -14, and subzero readings were reported in other states. In Oregon, many daily records were set, many far below the previous. Meacham was -11 on the 11th; the record for was 7, so this week's weather broke the record by 18 degrees! LaGrande, Pendleton, Moro, The Dalles, Bend, Redmond, and others also set new records.

The cause of this cold month and cold year? Two things: the tropical Pacific and the sun.

The tropical Pacific continues in its "La Nina" mode, in which ocean temperatures off South America are cooler than average. During such conditions, winters in the Northwest are cooler than average, wetter than average, or both. Snowpacks tend to be average or deeper. Thus far, we've had a cold but dry winter, with and average mountain snowpack.

The sun continues in its "solar minimum." There is an 11-year cycle (about) in sunspots. When spots are plentiful, the sun's energy is stronger, and there is a tendency for Earth's temperatures to increase. During the low point there are few sunspots, and temperatures are more likely to drop. We have been in a solar minimum for more than a year. NASA and other agencies predicted that sunspot numbers would be increasing by now, but they are not. According to NASA, we are seeing:

* The lowest sustained solar radio flux since the F10.7 proxy was created in 1947;

* Solar wind is the lowest observed since the beginning of the space age;

* The solar wind magnetic field 36 percent weaker than during the minimum of Solar Cycle 23;

* Effectively no sunspots;

* Cosmic rays at near record-high levels.

These might make sense, but here's what it means: The sun is quiet, and has been for an unusually long period.

Looking back over the last several hundred years, we see that solar output has been high for the last 60 years; this coincided with a general increase in temperatures. There have been some periods with low sunspot counts for many years. The early 1700s and 1800s saw lengthy solar minima, accompanied by cold temperatures.

Some solar physicists are suggesting the minimum is a harbinger of lower sunspot numbers for the next several decades. That would mean lower air temperatures, in general - global cooling!

Others suggest El Nino and La Nina conditions are driven by variations in the sun; periods with low solar output would bring La Nina conditions (such as now). We'll see. But with a quiet sun and a continuing La Nina, I don't expect temperatures to warm up much in the near future. Expect a cool spring, like last year.

SOURCE




SCIENTISTS CLAIM EARTH IS UNDERGOING NATURAL CLIMATE SHIFT

The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing. The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.

However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down. Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years. "Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift. "In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000. Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have? "But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

SOURCE




Green/Left car-hatred backfires in Britain

The contortionist's skill required to squeeze a car into a tiny modern garage and climb out of a barely opened door will become redundant under plans to allow more generous parking provision on new housing estates. A decade after the Government ordered developers to discourage car ownership by making it difficult to park, a local authority has produced new guidance that acknowledges that the policy has failed.

Far from reducing car usage, the policy has turned modern housing developments into obstacle courses for pedestrians and cyclists, who routinely find pavements and cycle paths occupied by cars with nowhere else to park. A study by Essex County Council found that 78 per cent of garages were not being used to store vehicles, largely because a trend towards larger cars and 4x4s meant that many did not fit comfortably inside the space.

Essex has become the first authority to challenge the Government's anti-car planning guidelines. It has issued draft guidelines that require larger garages and driveways, more parking spaces per dwelling, bigger on-street bays and at least 25 extra spaces for visitors for every 100 homes. The council has discussed its approach with several other authorities interested in relaxing limits on parking. The new parking standards will be treated as a minimum rather than, as at present, a maximum. Developers will be free, for the first time in a decade, to offer as many spaces as they believe their customers will want. Garages will have to be at least 7 metres by 3 metres (23ft by 10ft), as opposed to the existing guidance of 5 metres by 2.5 metres. Any garage smaller than the new dimensions will be treated as a storeroom and not counted towards the minimum number of parking spaces. Any home with two or more bedrooms will require at least two spaces.

The council found that planning guidance issued between 1998 and 2001 had created a severe shortage of spaces in many developments. Families had responded not by giving up their second car but by parking on narrow residential roads, blocking access for emergency services and refuse collection lorries. There are more than 1.5 cars per home in 35 per cent of council wards in Essex. Nationally, there are more homes with two or more cars than there are homes without a car. The proportion of car-less households fell from 45 per cent in 1976 to 24 per cent in 2006. Over the same period, the proportion of homes with two or more cars rose from 11 per cent to 32 per cent.

Norman Hume, the Conservative-controlled council's Cabinet member for transport, said: "This new parking guidance is a radical break from the past failed approach which has seen local communities blighted by parked cars. We are effectively asking people whether we should continue living in neighbourhoods that often have the appearance of disorganised car parks or if instead we should look much more closely at how we accommodate the car to allow a better quality of life for our residents."

The Campaign for Better Transport, which promotes alternatives to cars, said that Essex was undermining a decade of work to help people to become less car-dependent. Stephen Joseph, the campaign's director, said: "Essex will create a new generation of car-dominated estates, causing congestion and pollution. In the guise of offering freedom, people will be locked into car dependency. Homes will be too spread out to make good public transport feasible." Mr Joseph said that Essex should have adopted the approach in Cambridge and Kent Thameside, where clusters of new homes are being built close to dedicated bus lanes offering fast, regular services.

John Jowers, Cabinet member for planning in Essex, said: "Whether you like it or not, you have to live with the car. Rationing parking spaces doesn't stop people owning cars, it just means they park where it is most inconvenient for everyone else." He said that Essex was considering reducing the number of people commuting by car by imposing a charge on workplace parking spaces.

SOURCE

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

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17 March, 2009

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD DESCRIPTION OF THE WARMISTS -- AND MUCH ELSE BESIDES

Academic journal article below: It was written with the many bogus theories in medicine in mind (e.g. longevity and the Mediterranean diet, the unhealthiness of "obesity" and the desirability of a low fat diet), but the article specified none of the theories concerned and certainly in my experience the critique applies to science generally. It was the tenacity of bogus theories in psychology that caused me to abandon psychological research. So the three areas of science that I know best -- psychology, medicine and climate science -- are all dominated by zombie science. From what I hear of astrophysics, the situation there is similar too -- but I don't have the energy to go there as well. The bottom line is that most people will believe what they want to believe -- and evidence be damned

Zombie science: A sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest

By Bruce G. Charlton, MD

Summary

Although the classical ideal is that scientific theories are evaluated by a careful teasing-out of their internal logic and external implications, and checking whether these deductions and predictions are in-line-with old and new observations; the fact that so many vague, dumb or incoherent scientific theories are apparently believed by so many scientists for so many years is suggestive that this ideal does not necessarily reflect real world practice. In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas for so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status.

The classic account has it that bogus theories should readily be demolished by sceptical (or jealous) competitor scientists. However, in practice even the most conclusive 'hatchet jobs' may fail to kill, or even weaken, phony hypotheses when they are backed-up with sufficient economic muscle in the form of lavish and sustained funding. And when a branch of science based on phony theories serves a useful but non-scientific purpose, it may be kept-going indefinitely by continuous transfusions of cash from those whose interests it serves.

If this happens, real science expires and a 'zombie science' evolves. Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down. It keeps twitching and lumbering around so that (from a distance, and with your eyes half-closed) zombie science looks much like the real thing. But in fact the zombie has no life of its own; it is animated and moved only by the incessant pumping of funds. If zombie science is not scientifically-useable - what is its function?

In a nutshell, zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda to be deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally. It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion. Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science; and it is precisely the superficial face-plausibility which is the sole and sufficient purpose of zombie science.

Medical Hypotheses, Volume 71, Issue 3, Pages 327-329 (September 2008)




OBAMA BACKS DOWN ON COSTLY CLIMATE POLICY

Under the weight of the global economic crisis, the new U.S. administration is having reservations about its own climate goals and is considering to relieve heavy industry from the cap-and-trade burden. In a speech to senior business representatives, President Barack Obama promised to reconsider the auctioning of emission permits for CO2 emissions, planned for 2012, for large coal-fired power plants, refineries and cement factories. "If this is so overburdening that you cannot carry it out, then it misses its purpose and we won't be able to enforce it politically," Obama said. "We will have to find an arrangement that creates a balance."

Only a few weeks ago, in his draft budget for 2012 to 2019, Obama had envisaged an annual revenue stream of $646 billion from the auctioning of emissions permits - under the premise that all industries, in the medium-term, would have to buy 100 percent of their emissions permits via auction. With this cash, Obama planned to, inter alia, subsidise renewable energy projects.

In the face of global competition, the EU, under pressure from Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), decided already in December to shield its heavy industry against the cost of a tighter EU emissions trading scheme. Accordingly, the EU's energy-intensive industries will contribute to receive its emissions permits for free - unless the United States and big emerging economies such as China, India and Russia agree to binding emissions cuts at the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009.

In Brussels, the EU Commission is already working on the legal exemption of heavy industry from the auctioning process. The Commission has created an inventory that lists all industries that will be exempt, in accordance with criteria agreed at the EU's climate summit in December. The condition for the free allocation of emissions rights is that industry products are traded globally and that the cost due to auctioning would increase the gross value by more than five percent.

The energy-intensive chemicals, steel, cement, pharmaceutical and paper industries and refineries would thus receive free emissions credits until 2020. A preliminary analysis of an internal Commission paper which has been obtained by FTD shows that industry sectors that are above this threshold account for 80 to 90 percent of all emissions in the EU. Manufacturers of bricks, glass, detergents, paints and coatings, metal processors and automotive, textile and electrical industries would have to buy 20 percent of their allowances at auction as of 2013 - but they are responsible only for a maximum of one fifth of industrial emissions.

The extent of the financial burden to industry depends on two factors: By the end of 2010, Brussels plans to publish technical standards for the cleanest available equipment. Those companies that operate less clean plants would have to buy emissions credits. In addition, the costs for industry depend on the price for a tonne of CO2 which, as a result of the recession, has dropped by over 20 euros to 11,50 Euro per ton.

Revenue from emissions trading schemes of industrialized countries are regarded as important source of funding for the fight against climate change in emerging and developing countries. EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas is holding talks in the U.S. with Obama's climate adviser Carol Browner until Tuesday on the issues of emissions trading and a global climate agreement.

SOURCE. (In German. Transl. BJP)




FORGET COPENHAGEN: GERMANY TO BUILD 12 NEW COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS

Germany's environment minister Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democratic Party) is pushing for the construction of new coal-fired power plants in Germany. "We need eight to twelve new coal plants if we want to get out of nuclear energy," Gabriel said on Friday at a meeting of the Mainz-Wiesbaden AG (KMW) in Mainz. With regard to the opponents of the planned coal-fired power in Mainz, the minister said: "Those who demonstrate against coal-fired power will get nuclear power plants instead." Gabriel said, the decision about which power plants are built is the responsibility of companies and not politics. He added that new coal power plants would not increase carbon dioxide emissions.

First of all, old plants would be closed. In additon, the emissions trading scheme would limit the level of emissions. "You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don't have to have higher CO2 emissions," said the environment minister.

Renewable energies would not be able to close the gap in energy supply that will arise due to the shutdown of nuclear power plants by 2020, said Gabriel. Even gas-fired power plants are not a real alternative because their power generation is expensive and thus not competitive for the energy supply of industrial production.

SOURCE. (In German. Transl. BJP)




Nobody listens to the real climate change experts

The minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers, says Christopher Booker

Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker. The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".

What worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".

None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant").

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

SOURCE




Global Warming and The Endangered Species Act

There are indications that some in the media are finally figuring out that the environmental movement is very serious when it says it intends to use the federal Endangered Species Act and the listings of the polar bear and other species to force regulation of many "lower 48" operations, especially those in the energy business. This article covers a recent gathering of ESA experts wherein the path forward that environmental activists envision was discussed:

Under most traditional interpretations of the Endangered Species Act, an agency like the Bureau of Indian Affairs would have to determine how much of an impact a new coal-fired power plant in New Mexico or Colorado has on polar bears near the North Pole and penguins in Antarctica.

The vexing question is how to measure the site-specific impacts of such a project on a global scale. Top conservation leaders like Kieran Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the federal government is legally obligated to do just that.

The about-to-be-impacted industries have adopted a "hear no evil, see no evil" approach, and have refused the sort of preemptive litigation strategy that would have defined the outer limits of the ESA's reach via test cases on carbon-emitting activities in industries unrelated to direct energy-production. Had the oil-and-gas industry brought suit, for example, to oblige a small airport expansion to conduct a Section 7 consultation, it could have begun to build a defense against overreaching by the Act's most aggressive proponents.

Instead it has ceded the legal initiative to the very capable lawyers at the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups, and the rollout of the prevent-global-warming-via-the-ESA strategy is beginning. The impact on energy production across the U.S. will be to sharply curtail new exploration and production and to greatly increase the cost of existing production. Every time a federal permit is proposed that will facilitate energy production --or any carbon-releasing activity for that matter-- environmental activists will argue that an ESA mandated permitting process is required. This process, called a Section 7 consultation, is very time-consuming and mandates necessary "mitigations" that are imposed on the sought-after permit. Landowners have learned how to negotiate this regulatory maze in the past two decades, but the vast expansion of jurisdiction foreseen by the advocates of the polar bear and related listings will greatly increase the scope of the Act's reach and the workload on the Fish & Wildlife Service, not to mention the cost of each permit if a cost can even be calculated.

All of this fallout was easy to predict at the time the Bush Adminstration listed the polar bear last year, but the coverage of the controversy has resolutely refused to explain to the public the enormous price tag it will be paying for the use of ice coverage models in the listing process that were at best speculative and at worse wildly so.

SOURCE




Australian Labor Party heartland turns on proposed Warmist laws as modelling shows big regional job losses

The mayors of three of the nation's biggest mining cities have demanded Kevin Rudd delay introducing carbon emissions trading, warning it will smash jobs and seriously damage key regional areas. The mayors of the traditional Labor strongholds of Newcastle, Gladstone and Mount Isa have called for the emissions trading scheme to be put off.

And the managing director of Frontier Economics, Danny Price, who conducted still-secret modelling for the NSW Treasury on the Rudd Government's plan, said the impact of the scheme across industrial regions, including central Queensland, the Hunter and Illawarra in NSW and Victoria's Gippsland, would be "very high" and "very severe". "In those regions, the effect on regional GDP would be many, many times more than the national effect forecast by the Treasury, which predicted an ETS would cut 0.1 per cent of average annual growth," Mr Price said.

The growing opposition to the Rudd Government's ETS came as the Opposition intensified its attack on the scheme as a job destroyer, with Malcolm Turnbull declaring the Coalition would not vote for the ETS in its current form. After the Opposition Leader's weekend declaration that the Coalition would not support a 2010 start-up date or the current design of the Rudd plan, the Government has become increasingly isolated on its support for the scheme.

Newcastle Lord Mayor John Tate said any sensible person had to be concerned about climate change, but he saw no harm in delaying the introduction of the ETS while also pursuing alternative energy sources and developing technologies to reduce emissions from coal. "I just can't understand why you would put that sort of impost on Australian industry and agriculture at a time when we are trying to compete with the world," Mr Tate said. "I would urge the Government to consider the economic future and the job future of our citizens. Don't bring an impost on business large or small that's going to affect the viability of those businesses. It's just like another tax."

Mr Tate said Newcastle was faring reasonably well in the current economic climate because the federal and state governments were funding massive infrastructure spending, including a new coal loader at the city's port, works to deepen the south arm of the Hunter River and more than $580million on rail improvements. The spending was designed to boost the city's capacity to export coal.

Mount Isa Mayor John Molony said mines in his community employed 4000 people, including 300 apprentices. "I believe the ETS should be held in abeyance until the economic downturn is over," Mr Molony said. Mr Molony said copper and lead smelting and copper refining in Mt Isa and Townsville added major value to the nation's exports and would be severely hindered by emissions trading. Stressing that the problem of climate change required global action, he said it made sense to delay Australia's contribution to reducing emissions until it was clear what action other nations would take.

Gladstone Mayor George Creed, whose city's port is the exit point for massive coal exports from central Queensland, said the ETS would damage his community's industrial viability at a time it could least be afforded. Mr Creed said mines and heavy industry in Gladstone were already shedding jobs, and Australia's total carbon emissions accounted for a fraction of the world's output. "We are not going to hurt anything in the world if we wait for another year or two," Mr Creed said.

Latrobe Mayor Lisa Price, who represents an area that includes three open-cut brown coal mines, said her community was sitting on 500 years' worth of coal supplies and would not accept emissions trading without clear undertakings on structural adjustments to replace the jobs lost in mining.

The mayors spoke out as independent senator Nick Xenophon said the Government's legislation was doomed in the Senate, given that all parties on the cross benches believed it to be fundamentally flawed. During a sustained question-time attack on the claimed job-destroying consequences of the ETS, Mr Turnbull suggested the scheme should be shelved until the outcome of the UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen later this year were known. The Opposition Leader said the Government should not commit itself before the administration of US President Barack Obama clarified the details of its proposed emissions scheme. Mr Turnbull cited a confidential briefing from coalmining giant Xstrata predicting that the scheme would force the closure of up to four mines and cost 1000 jobs, most of them in Queensland.

But Mr Rudd said the Government was determined to act on climate change, saying the economic costs of inaction would be far greater than the costs of action, particularly for a hot and dry nation such as Australia.

SOURCE

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16 March, 2009

The Clear and Cohesive Message of the International Conference on Climate Change

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." -- from the Oregon Petition, signed by over 31,000 scientists

United by that conviction, over 800 scientists, economists, and policy makers arrived in New York City last Sunday to attend the Heartland Institute's 2nd Annual International Conference on Climate Change. They came to talk a wide range of subjects, from climatology to energy policy, from computer climate models to cap-and-trade, from greenhouse gas (GHG) effects to solar irradiation. But most of all they came to help spread the word that the answer to the question posed by this year's theme -- Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis? -- is a resounding NO.

Sunday's keynote speakers wasted no time making that point. Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus scolded those whose alarmist opinions are driven by profits from writing and speaking fees, carbon trading and investments in non-carbon fuel products. And policy makers who blindly accept hyped Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publications as the final word in climate science. In truth, says Klaus, there is no fixed relationship between CO2 and temperatures, as clearly illustrated by the wavering heat trends of the 20th century, despite the steady rise in CO2.

Next, M.I.T's Richard Lindzen explained that many scientists toe the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) line to "make their lives easier," as underfunded scientists can write a single paper endorsing AGW and suddenly be inundated with offers. Even ambiguous or meaningless statements that can be easily spun are financially beneficial to scientists, so why complain about the spin? Ever wonder why you never stop hearing about studies finding GW responsible for everything from kidney stones to cannibalism? Explains Lindzen: It's become standard that whatever you're studying, include global warming's effects in your proposal and you'll get your funding.

Lindzen then dismissed climate models that alarmists depend on as they themselves depend entirely on warming positive feedback but, unlike nature, ignore the cooling effects of negative feedback. And rejected the warming alarmists alarm us about as so miniscule that there's no need for any external forcing to achieve or explain it. In reality, said the world renowned atmospheric physicist, doubling or even tripling CO2 would have only marginal impacts on temperatures. Both speakers masterfully set the stage for the days and sessions to come. What follows is just a sampling of the brilliance I encountered.

Roy Spencer echoed Lindzen's position that negative feedbacks ultimately bring equilibrium to the energy balance, making sustained global warming a non-issue. David Douglass assured us that ocean and atmospheric heat will always work toward such balance as per conservation of energy laws. S. Fred Singer commented that a 2005 paper by Hansen et al claiming that Earth's energy imbalance is proof of AGW was absurd.

Geologist and former astronaut Jack Schmidt inverted the IPCC position that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric CO2, which in turn warms the planet. Slowly increasing temperatures from 1660 AD or so, said he, would increase CO2 and methane from land, land confined water, the biosphere and, mostly, the oceans. The vapor pressure of CO2 is temperature sensitive. So as a matter of established physics of gases, we'd expect atmospheric CO2 to increase as temperature increases. Therefore, he concludes, saying that CO2 causes heating is like saying "accidents cause speeding."

Singer moderated a panel discussion thoroughly debunking a recent paper claiming that CO2 put into the atmosphere lasts thousands of years. Participant Douglass questioned the premise as "it has nothing to do with global warming as CO2 continues to rise but GW stopped after 1991." But as Singer pointed out, alarmists will claim it proves that peak values reached in the next few years will determine climate for the next millennium.

And Christopher Essex nailed it: Their 1000 year forecast is remarkable - even groundhogs only predict 6 weeks ahead.

Astrophysicist Willie Soon proclaimed the sun-induced climate change theory alive and well. He believes that, while IPCC AR4 fraudulently disregarded Milankovich's theory of orbital influences on climate, the comings and goings of the ice ages may be controlled by changes in solar insolation at climatically sensitive latitudes. He displayed adjacent line graphs overlaying 20th Century arctic temperature anomalies with solar irradiance levels on one and atmospheric CO2 levels on the other. Whereas the former lined up almost perfectly, the latter wasn't even close.

Jack Schmidt pointed out that the 1400 -1900 cold period known as the Little Ice Age corresponds to a cycling sequence of 3 deep minima of sunspot activity and was at its coldest during the last of these minima, the 70 year period of exceptionally few spots we now know as the Maunder Minimum. Dennis Avery reinforced his 1,500 year climate cycle argument and its implications for the current warming period. He told us that solar variations are linked to decade-lagging sea temperatures. What's more, diminished sunspot activity since 2000 and Pacific Sea Surface cooling since 2008 predict a 20-30 year global cooling due to short term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Don Easterbrook neatly tied variances in the PDO and another natural climate variability, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), to that of solar activity and, ultimately, temperatures. The geologist pointed out that while the IPCC predicted 1øF warming by 2011, there's been none since 1998, and that the 1øF drop in 2008 was the largest global temperature change ever recorded. He too believes that the current PDO cool phase assures global cooling for as long as the next three decades.

Roy Spencer blamed the PDO for 75% of twentieth century warming. He provided a line graph plotting temperatures against the PDO and the correlation was quite remarkable. Weaker PDOs yielded warmer temperatures and the onset of stronger circulations cooled things down. As one might suspect -- Spencer's graph depicted a decided cooling trend beginning in 2003.

ICECAP's Joe D'Aleo also made an extremely compelling argument against the greenhouse effect and for the natural climate drivers of oceans, Sol, and yet another -- volcanoes. On D'Aleo's graphs, PDO/AMO aligned well with USHCN temperatures over last century, as did stratospheric aerosol levels from volcanic eruptions, and total solar irradiance. He remarked that "all three show a cycle where the last few years look a lot like the 1960's," which immediately caught my attention. You see, just hours prior, I had been discussing NY weather with a British representative and had commented that this winter reminded me of those I experienced as a child in the 60's.

Lord Monckton of Brenchley suggested that the positive feedback factor might actually be half what IPCC claims. Citing Soon's work, he said temperatures have been plunging at the rate of 2øC per century over the last 7 years, and the reduction of Outgoing Longwave Radiation as observed by satellites is on an order of magnitude below what models predict: "And Dick Lindzen says that's game, set and match."

California Congressman Tom McClintock offered examples of just how global warming alarmism is damaging his state --- all in the form of radical construction blocking, agriculture crippling, resource wasting legislation the warm-mongers have gotten through to fight it. Here's a beauty -- a homeowner can be fined $1000/day for refusal to cut down his trees if they block a neighbor's solar panels, but also faces fines if he cuts them down or clears brush for fire preventive purposes. And Gov. Schwarzenegger - who just proposed the largest tax increase in history to make up for funds lost by his failed green policies -- wants Cal-E-Fornia to be "an example to the country."

Benny Peiser, founder and editor of the fabulous CCNet, explained the political backlash European greenies are experiencing. And it's pretty bad -- Labor and Green parties are seeing the amalgamation of the recession and failed Kyoto-inspired energy policies driving their core voters away.

Lawrence Solomon offered more examples of overseas carbon regulation disasters, declaring Kyoto the greatest single destroyer of the environment, especially in the third world.

And speaking of bad GHG accords, Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Chris Horner explained how liberals could sneak Kyoto II through the Senate by changing it from a treaty to an executive agreement. Treaties require a 2/3 Senate vote, and the Gore brigade knows damned well they'd never pull that one off. But with a little legislative sleight-of-hand, the vote required could be lowered to 3/5. And Horner warned in detail against an even slicker trick that would place it on the fast track, making it both amendment and filibuster proof - thereby requiring only 50% plus one.

Needless to say, the regressive tax increase which is Cap and Trade (CAT) was also a popular target. CEI director Myron Ebell proclaimed John McCain's loss last November to actually be good news, as McCain is the biggest supporter of CAT in the Senate and actually claims that energy rationing would be a net benefit to the economy. Ross Mckitrick blasted the idea of CAT systems with predetermined carbon caps as betraying a complete lack of faith in their design. If the goal is to force down carbon output, then a "truth-based" floating cap determined by temperature is called for. Suggesting we force down caps regardless of temperature response is a sign that they don't believe their own rhetoric.

Dave Kreutzer warned that analytical models predict estimated aggregate losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $4.8 trillion and job losses in the manufacturing sector of nearly 3 million by 2029 if CAT were imposed under S. 2191. That's over and above the million manufacturing job losses economists predict will occur even if we do nothing.

On Thursday, Easterbrook responded to a NY Times piece suggesting his positions are aligned with those of Obama's science advisor -- John Holdren:

"[Holdren] wants carbon cap and trade that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to curb `global warming' that the PDO shows isn't going to happen in the next several decades (no matter what the cause). The PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling is going to continue for several decades, causing increasing demands of energy and resources (while population escalates), but if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cap and trade (as Holdren is pushing), we will have little left with which to handle the real problems of increasing demands on dwindling resources. Holdren's path will lead to a real global catastrophe."

And the losses will extend beyond the monetary. Professor Arthur Robinson, author of the afore-quoted Oregon petition, revealed the true reasons we import 30% of our energy, even though "one Palo Verde Nuclear Installation in each state results in $200 billion net export of energy." Robinson says there are those who would prefer that 30% grow much larger, encouraging higher energy prices and ultimately - rationing. And quickly advised -- once we become victims of rationing in the west we lose our all of our freedoms, but energy deprivation in third world countries will lead to the loss of tens of millions of lives.

And Monckton took on another deadly green scheme as only his Lordship can:

"Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent `global warming' bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama's stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves."

Such, as Kreutzer so perfectly described it, is the true "cost of accomplishing nothing."

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist John Theon expressed his regret that former employee, James Hansen, "didn't receive the attention from me that he should have." What followed was a heartfelt denunciation that included the fact that Hansen's 1988 announcement of "unprecedented global warming" came as a surprise and embarrassment to Theon, as it was not NASA's position. He then cried foul over Hansen's endorsement of John Kerry for president in 2004, particularly after receiving the Heinz Environment Award, a $250,000 prize honoring the late-husband of Kerry's wife in 2001. He pointed out that a civil servant endorsing a political cause violated the Hatch Act, and that alone should be grounds for dismissal, which he has publically called for. Says Theon: "I think the man is sincere, but he is suffering from a bad case of megalomania."

There were a number of problems with data collection methods discussed. Tom Segalstad gave us a lesson in the dubious integrity of ice-core samples. The Norwegian geologist cited numerous problems with retrieval, sampling, and storage, all of which may contaminate results. Remember -- the accuracy of these figures, combined with temperature proxies such as dendrochronology (tree ring growth analysis) is crucial as they are used to plot past temperature/CO2 correlations.

WUWT's Anthony Watts favored us once again with stories and photographs of misplaced Maximum-Minimum Temperature Systems (MMTS). He and his cohorts have photographed and analyzed 75% of the 1200 plus national weather stations, and the results range from bad to hysterically bad. One slide showed a station in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota where the thermometer was placed within feet of not one, but two air conditioning outlets. The fact this town reported temperature well above those of its neighbors didn't seem to raise any red-flags with the good folks ate NOAA. So it's not particularly shocking that only 11% of stations surveyed met the required Class I or Class II requirement of likely measurement error under 1øC.

Joe D'Aleo believes that surface data suffer from serious issues biasing them to the warm side, this due to station dropout, missing monthly data, and inadequate or nonexistent urban heat island effect (UHI) adjustment. Half of the warming since 1880 may be attributed to these measurement contaminations. In fact, Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre said we don't actually know that the 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium as minor variations in data version yield different results.....

During Tuesday's standing-O-rousing conference-closing speech, in which he marvelously referred to alarmists as "bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency -- those Greens too yellow to admit they're really Reds," Lord Monckton added:

"Every opinion poll--even those conducted by the bed-wetters themselves - shows that global public opinion is cooling as fast as the global climate. In one recent survey, `global warming' came at the very bottom of a list of political and environmental concerns, immediately behind the need to clean up dog-poop on the streets. Why? Because dog-poop is a real environmental problem and `Global warming' is not. The correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing."

And then emphasized unequivocally: "There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis."

More HERE (See the original for links)




A Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Denier

That's me, friends and family, colleagues, Objectivists and other freedom-lovers, and, yes, you socialists who by and large see catastrophic man-made global warming as one of the best routes for the promotion of socialism and the dismantlement of capitalism.

Marc Morano of the Senate Committee for the Environment and Public Works, minority side, has just asked me if I would join the many scientists who are increasingly willing to buck the environmental hysterical and religious movement to state that we are not facing catastrophic global warming due to the ill-considered acts of man. I, being fearless, am willing and happy to do so.

Of course, I am not a climatologist, a sun-spot activity expert, an expert on the effects of ocean currents, or an expert on greenhouse gases and their effects upon the atmosphere. I am a materials physicist by training, who has long functioned as a materials scientist with broad interests across many scientific and technological fields.

I became interested in the issue of the global warming alarmism several years ago, because the reports I kept hearing about it did not present the context of our knowledge of the earth's climate history well and because it seemed that many so-called scientists were leaping to the conclusion that recent warming was largely or mostly due to man's activities without seeming to have done a thorough job of examining the natural forces effects which have long caused much more drastic changes in the earth's climate than those we have seen in recent times. I was also concerned that so much of the justification for man's role was based on complex computer models, which nonetheless did not take into account many major natural effects and which had a well-established history of being modified to produce ever-decreasing rates of temperature increases. The more I studied the issue, the more problems I found with the claims that man had suddenly become so powerful that he was dominating the natural climate forces.

I was also concerned about two other observations. One was that when people do bad science, they tend to become very angry when they are challenged. I have seen this effect time and time again. Observe which side resorts to the most vociferous name-calling and you are likely to have identified the side with the weaker argument and they know it. Of course, just because a man has written many peer-reviewed papers and is in a science department at a university does not mean that he is doing good science. Good science starts with acute and critical observations, attention to the context of one's knowledge, a rational and critical examination of factors affecting the outcome, and finally an ability to predict as-yet unobserved events or historical events about which one had no prior knowledge. Most of the scientists working on global climate issues were either working for universities or for government agencies, and these institutions have become so highly politicized, predominantly toward the left, that it is common to find scientific reasoning weaknesses whenever there is a political consequence to the scientific outcome. I saw much that was lacking in the scientific work which was backing the claim that man was causing or soon would be causing catastrophic global warming.

The other observation of concern was that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming was a perfect tool to use to make the civilized and advanced societies cut back on energy use to the point that life was going to be much more miserable for human beings. This has always been something that the socialists have been willing and happy to do to their fellow human beings. They like it so much that they develop a religious fervor whenever offered the opportunity to hurt others. This may seem paradoxical because they always say they are more motivated to help others than most people. They are so motivated in fact, that they are always very eager to use brutal force to make others do what they want. It has become clear that this use of force has become in itself very exhilerating for them, like a dopamine drug for their minds. So, when you examine who believes fervently in man-made global warming, do you find that fervor cutting across the usual political spectrum with respect to commitments to personal and economic liberties or do you find the fervor in one camp only? In this case, there is pretty much that one camp of socialists.

I have developed computer models myself for the study of materials properties. When developing and using models is very important to keep a clear physical picture of the aspect of reality you are modeling. It is easy to mess up your boundary conditions, which is a known problem with many of the climate models; it is easy to fall into divergent conditions such as the claims of catastrophic positive warming feedback are likely to be; and it is easy to overlook some factors of importance in a complex problem, which the global climate most certainly is. The most important checks for these problems are to apply your model to a number of available simple situations if there are any and to already observed events and see if it is consistent with those events. There may be no simple climate system for such checks, but the past is available. I observed that there was anguishingly little effort to apply the climate prediction models to past climate changes. The reason for this was that the models really only contained elements of the Big Picture of factors affecting the climate of the earth. But, even granted that, some effort could have been put into comparing the model-predicted effects with those of high CO2 atmospheric concentrations from the geological record. This is an obvious check and no one was eager to do it. This is a clear warning sign.

However, because it is their bread and butter to use the models to predict future rapid temperature increases, these predictions have been made. Every time, the models predicted too much temperature increase and had to be scaled back. Every IPCC report shows scaled back computer predictions and yet every future IPCC report shows another scale-back. Clearly, the modelers do not know what they are doing. Nonetheless, on the strength of their predictions of unacceptable man-made warming, we are to make drastic cuts in our use of the inexpensive fossil fuels and have a future of expensive electric power only when the wind blows or the sun shines. Even this is provided that enough Democrats are willing to have wind generators and acres of photovoltaic panels in their backyards or in areas inhabited by animal species.

The very fact that the CO2 effect models did not contain sufficient factors affecting the global climate to make predictions about the past increases the likelihood that many of the factors affecting feedback mechanisms are not adequately handled. That there are critical feedback mechanisms is obvious. We know for instance that as the oceans warm, more water is evaporated, which is a cooling process. We also know that as the humidity of the atmosphere increases due to warming and ocean water evaporation, there are increased possibilities for cloud formation, which is usually a cooling mechanism. There is reason to believe these effects of water are not handled adequately. I have also looked at the sinks and sources for CO2 and have found that it is unlikely that they are adequately understood as yet. One problem exists with respect to the effects of the earth's crust absorbing CO2 both to form many carbonates, carbonate hydroxides, and lamellar (layered) minerals which absorb water with high CO2 concentrations between their expanding layers as water becomes available. Increases in precipitation will lead to increases in CO2 absorbtion in many minerals.

We also know that the earth's geological record shows that it has a tendency to never get warmer than an average temperature of about 22C and that the glacial periods tend never to get cooler than an average temperature of about 12C. We are now and have been for a few thousand years in a temperature regime which is between these extremes, but the earth over the last 600 million years has tended to be at one or the other of these two extremes most of the time. We do not know why we are not at one of the extremes now and we do not know how to predict when the earth may go to one or the other in the future. We do know that man did not cause any of the previous extreme temperature conditions.

Let me make it clear that I am not saying that man does not affect the weather or the climate. I am sure he does. But my evaluation is that man's affect upon the global climate is still small compared to the natural forces at work and that they are incapable of causing anything on the scale of a catastrophe. But, man can cause a catastrophe to his lifestyle and to his lifespan. An example would be the catastrophe which would be caused if Obama and the anthropogenic global warming alarmists force us to give up half of our electric generating capacity due to coal-fired power plants. This cannot be replaced by wind power and solar power by any technology yet known. It is a fool's errand to destroy half of our electricity generation capability while we have nothing to replace it with, when the reason given for doing this is to decrease the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere.

Any warming that is caused by man, is probably the cause of more good than bad. The higher CO2 concentrations in the air are certainly good for plant growth, which is good for both man and other animals. As I have pointed out before, most of the predicted warming is in the northern parts of North America, northern Europe, northern Russia, northern China, northern Japan, southern Chile, and southern Argentina, all of which would benefit from warmer temperatures in the winter and at night, which appears to be when the warming is greatest. This makes life in these areas easier for man, animals, and plants in most cases. This is not a bad outcome and it most certainly is not a catastrophe!

SOURCE




Global warming's no longer happening

So why are eco types moaning about record highs while ignoring record lows? Comment from Canada

So far this month, at least 14 major weather stations in Alberta have recorded their lowest-ever March temperatures. I'm not talking about daily records; I mean they've recorded the lowest temperatures they've ever seen in the entire month of March since temperatures began being recorded in Alberta in the 1880s.

This past Tuesday, Edmonton International Airport reported an overnight low of -41.5 C, smashing the previous March low of -29.4 C set in 1975. Records just don't fall by that much, but the airport's did. Records are usually broken fractions of degrees. The International's was exceeded by 12 degrees.

To give you an example of how huge is the difference between the old record and the new, if Edmonton were to exceed its highest-ever summer temperature by the same amount, the high here some July day would have to reach 50 C. That's a Saudi Arabia-like temperature.

Also on the same day, Lloydminster hit -35.2 C, breaking its old March record of -29.2 C. Fort McMurray -- where they know cold -- broke a record set in 1950 with a reading of -39.9C. And Cold Lake, Slave Lake, Whitecourt, Peace River, High Level, Jasper and Banff, and a handful of other communities obliterated old cold values, most from the 1950s or 1970s, two of the coldest decades on record in the province.

This has been an especially cold winter across the country, with values returning to levels not often seen since the 1970s, which was an especially brutal decade of winters. Temperatures began to plummet on the Prairies in December. The cold weather did not hit much of the rest of the country until January, but when it hit, it hit hard. Even against Canada's normally frigid January standards, "this particular cold snap is noteworthy," Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson said this past January. Many regions across the country had not been as cold for 30 years or more, he added.

Does this prove fear of global warming is misplaced? On its own, probably not. But if records were being broken the other way -- if several Alberta centres had recorded their warmest-ever March values -- you can bet there would be no end of hand-wringing, horror stories about how we were on the precipice of an ecological disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Environmentalists, scientists who advance the warming theory, politicians and reporters never shy away from hyping those weather stories that support their beliefs. But they tend to ignore or explain away stories that might cast doubt.

In 2005, the summer and fall of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when several major 'canes pummelled North and Central America, we were told again and again that this was proof warming was happening and it was going to be bad. Al Gore has emissions from industrial smokestacks swirling up into a satellite image of a hurricane on the DVD box for his propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth to underline the point that more and eviller hurricanes will be the result of CO2 output.

But since 2005, only one major hurricane -- this year's Ike -- has struck North America. And now comes a study from Florida State University researcher Ryan Maue, that shows worldwide cyclonic activity -- typhoons, as well as hurricanes -- has reached a 30-year low (tinyurl.com/bunynz).

Indeed, the hiatus may go back more than 30 years because it is difficult to compare records before about 1970 with those since, since measurements four or more decades ago were not as precise or thorough. Current low activity may actually be the lowest in 50 years or more.

If Maue had proven hurricane activity were at a 30-year high, of course his findings would have been reported far and wide. But since he is challenging the dogma of the Holy Mother Church of Climate Change, his research is ignored.

For at least the past five or six years, global temperatures have been falling. Look at the black trend line on the chart at www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ put out by the man who runs NASA's worldwide network of weather satellites.

Also, in the past few months, two studies -- one by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Germany and another by the University of Wisconsin -- have shown a slowing, or even a reversal of warming for at least the next 10 to 20, and perhaps longer. Even the Arctic sea ice, which has replaced hurricanes as the alarm of the moment ever since hurricanes ceased to threaten, has grown this winter to an extent not seen since around 1980.

Global warming is not only no longer happening, it is not likely to resume until 2025 or later, if then. So why are we continuing to hear so much doomsaying about climate change? There are a lot of people in every age who think they know better than everyone else and, therefore, have a right to tell everyone how to live. In the 1950s, it was country-club and parish council busybodies with their strict moral codes. In the 1970s, it was social democrats with their fanciful economic theories. Today, it's environmentalists. Same instinct, different wrapper.

SOURCE




Britain's very strange "green" car plan

It's "green" to encourage the automobile industry? Quite a turnabout!

I've had my 42in television for a good few years. I fancy replacing it with a new 55in model but the 4,800 pounds price has put me off. Thanks to Peter Mandelson, however, I've realised that I've been worrying over nothing. I'm going to knock on someone's door and ask them to give me 2,000 towards it. In return, I'll smash my old one up. Lord Mandelson, you see, is about to set up precisely such a scheme, not for plasma TVs but for cars. If you fancy a new car, take your existing one to a car recycling plant and you'll get a œ2,000 voucher towards it.

Isn't life grand! Bored with your Nissan Micra? Upgrade to an MG and someone else will pay. That someone else, of course, is you and me, through our taxes. At a time when public spending is running away with itself, tax rises are inescapable and most of us are counting every penny, the Government is planning to force those of us still in work and paying taxes to subsidise other people's luxury spending. Genius.

The rationale, of course, is that it will protect jobs in an industry where demand has collapsed. As Roy Kishor, described in Saturday's Times as a "car industry restructuring expert", put it: "Scrappage is an absolute no-brainer. It addresses the two most fundamental issues facing the car industry today - the first is that it creates demand, getting inventory moving and helping the car companies get back to manufacturing. The second is that it deals with emissions."

Translated from car-industry- lobby-speak that means: "We wanted to find a way to persuade the Government to take your money and hand it over to car companies that can't sell their cars. And because we came up with some environmentally friendly spiel - newer cars cause fewer carbon emissions - they bought it."

But why just the car industry? There are all sorts of companies struggling at the moment to make ends meet. Cars have no greater right to taxpayer support than coffee shops or book publishers. They all create jobs. They all manufacture something. And they are all facing collapsing demand. Forget the nanny state; this is old- fashioned 1970s-style government investment in failing industry, dressed up in 21st-century, market-friendly, cuddly green disguise. British Leyland, you are reborn.

Rather than being forced to hand over an even greater proportion of our income to the Government to spend as it sees fit, can't we be left to decide for ourselves how, and on what, to boost demand?

SOURCE




Icing the hype

By Andrew Bolt, writing from Australia

The ABC accepts - without question - the word of a green alarmist that the world is both heating and drowning:

BARBARA MILLER: Just two years ago the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a worst case scenario, sea levels could rise by up to 59 centimetres by 2100. New information has now led to that figure being revised significantly upwards to a projected rise of a metre or even 1.2 metres. Dr Will Steffen the executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University is at the summit in Copenhagen.

WILL STEFFEN: The 59 centimetres did not take into account the changes of the big polar ice sheets like Greenland and west Antarctica because they couldn't be modelled very well at that time. We now have better information on how Greenland and west Antarctica, the polar ice sheets are behaving, and they're leading us to believe that sea level rise will indeed be more than that 59 centimetres.

But here's what the same conference was also told about Greenland - but which the ABC didn't report:

The giant Greenland ice sheet may be more resistant to temperature rise than experts realised. The finding gives hope that the worst impacts of global warming, such as the devastating floods depicted in Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, could yet be avoided.

Jonathan Bamber, an ice sheet expert at the University of Bristol, told the conference that previous studies had misjudged the so-called Greenland tipping point, at which the ice sheet is certain to melt completely. "We found that the threshold is about double what was previously published," Bamber told the Copenhagen Climate Congress...

And what of the actual observations of this reputedly fast-warming, fast-drowning climate? In fact, sea levels haven't risen for the past two years. Temperatures haven't risen for the past decade. Hurricanes and cyclones have been decreasing in total energy. Greenland hasn't been following Europe's warming trend.

And while the ABC subcontracts its reporting of an alarmist conference to alarmist scientists and activists, it virtually ignores another conference of sceptical scientists and other experts running at the very same time. Is there a reason that so many reporters refuse to tempter their alarmist reports with cool facts based not on predictions but on observations?

When the wildest predictions at the IPCC conference are for sea level rises this century of up to 1.2 metres, will ABC science guru Robyn Williams concede at last that his own claims of sea level rises of up to 100 metres were grossly alamist and hyperbolic, with no basis in science? When will Media Watch pounce on a science journalist that can insist on something so preposterous?

More HERE (See the original for links)




Australian Greenie thugs urge environmental movement to use violence

A thin cover for hatred of other people

People are being urged to break into shops, "disable" four wheel drives and throw pies at people by an extreme environmental group being promoted by the NSW Greens. The group Rising Tide is planning a blockade of the world's biggest coal port in Newcastle, for which Greens MP Lee Rhiannon has held a "direct action and civil disobedience" workshop to prepare protesters. Rising Tide claims the protest will be legal and peaceful, however it also warned participants "there can be no guarantee against arrest". Ms Rhiannon - who will attend the blockade with her staff - yesterday praised Rising Tide but said she was unaware of its support of vandalism and did not condone it.

Rising Tide said people concerned about climate change should also "shut down" petrol stations and blockade power plants. The suggestions are contained in a list of 64 "actions" posted on the group's website. A spokeswoman for Rising Tide stood by the list, saying the actions were "trivial" compared to the threat of climate change. Many of the suggestions are benign but some are clearly illegal and potentially dangerous. They include:

* DISABLE a 4WD. (Letting the tyres down is one way - and doesn't leave you open to "malicious damage" charges, because it doesn't damage the vehicle);

* THROW a pie at chief spin doctor at the NSW Minerals Council;

* SHUT down petrol stations;

* SUBVERTISE - distort the messages on adverts for climate criminals;

* PAINT bike lanes on the road;

* START a campaign against air flights; and

* BLOCKADE or occupy a power station."

Rising Tide spokeswoman Georgina Woods said the group stood by the suggestions, saying they were "on the scale of things, a little bit of inconvenience". "Our group is non-violent but we feel we're facing a wide unprecedented challenge and a little bit of civil disobedience as an expression of community frustration," she said. Green activist Lisette Salkavich, who distributed an email urging people to get involved in the Rising Tide blockade, said that while she had not done it herself damaging property could be morally justified in some circumstances and climate change was an urgent threat.

SOURCE

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

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15 March, 2009

Greenie attack on Marc Morano

Just for fun, I reproduce below an attempted smear job from a Greenie site. Note that not a single fact about climate is mentioned. It is all abuse. But even the abuse is not done well. Mentioning that Marc Morano assisted in the exposure of John Kerry by the swiftboat veterans is actually a badge of honour for anyone who cares about the truth, for instance.

The one climate-relevant fact the writer mentions is also misconceived. He points to some current poll numbers about agreement with global warming and points out that the numbers are high. What he omits is the central point in what Marc Morano claimed: That they may be high but they have been declining in recent years. See here. They are lower than they were. The writer is just a dumb little hate machine. He puts up a nice picture of Marc Morano, though

By Peter Dykstra

So if the Gallup organization releases a poll that says that 59 percent of the American public doesn't buy anything you have to say, and a sizeable chunk of the rest thinks you're at least partly wrong, what do you do?

If you're the remarkable Marc Morano, you claim victory, of course.

I've mentioned Marc Morano a few times in this column. Improving on an already colorful career, Marc has emerged in the last few years as the guy in the center square of the climate change denial industry. With his boss, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, Morano is the Roy Cohn to Inhofe's Joe McCarthy of climate change paranoia. Or maybe the Edgar Bergen to Inhofe's Charlie McCarthy. (If you're not up on your mid-20th century pop culture, look these two up.)

Marc's a piece of work. The stops on his career are a pageant of triumphs in making the guilty look innocent, and vice versa. After four years as the "Man in Washington" on Rush Limbaugh's mid-90s TV show, Morano settled in at the Cybercast News Service (CNS), an outfit that sort of serves as the Tass and Pravda of the far-far right. There, he's best remembered for penning two political attack pieces. His CNS story was the first salvo in the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry prior to the 2004 election. In early 2006, after another Vietnam vet, Congressman John Murtha, dramatically came out against the Iraq war, Morano co-penned a piece questioning Murtha's receipt of two Purple Hearts for wounds while serving in Vietnam. Under the headline "Murtha's War Hero Status Called Into Question," Morano pegged the story to decades-old allegations made by three former election opponents - one deceased, one too feeble to be interviewed, and the third merely angry.

Morano hooked up with Inhofe while the senator was still the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. But he hung on to the playbook: Like his character attacks on Kerry and Murtha, Morano took off on climate scientists as if he were doing opposition research for a county commissioners' race. In an exchange at the 2006 annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Morano was called out by NASA Scientist James Hansen. Hansen's work on projecting global warming had earned him the Heinz Award, an environmental honor named for the late John Heinz, an eco-minded Republican senator who died in a plane crash three years before Inhofe was elected to the Senate. Like the Nobels, Pulitzers, and other awards, the Heinz Awards offer cash to the winner - a quarter million. Morano consistently suggested that Hansen received $250,000 as a bribe for spun science. Here's a Senate floor speech where Inhofe makes the same suggestion.

Morano's latest triumph is the victory lap he took when Gallup said that Americans' skepticism on climate change had grown. In classic McCarthy style, it's a half-truth. In the midst of an economic crisis and a continued onslaught of fact-free denial from the likes of Lou Dobbs, George Will and Glenn Beck, Gallup found 41 percent of Americans feel media reporting on climate change is "generally exaggerated." This was the "highest level of public skepticism" measured by Gallup in a decade. For fear that it would ruin his story line, Morano failed to mention that "Gallup has documented declines in public concern about the environment at times when other issues, such as a major economic downturn or a national crisis like 9/11, absorbed Americans' attention," and that "Americans generally believe that global warming is real."

Inhofe took to the Senate floor on Thursday to crow that the global warming verdict was in "freefall." Morano launched another personal attack on Andrew Revkin, the climate reporter and blogger for the New York Times, for portraying last week's Climate Deniers' Conference in New York as an event apart from real science.

It seems that half a truth is just about capacity for these fellas. There's a time for honest and respectful debate, and a time to move on and call out a dishonest broker for the phony that he is. Have you no decency?

SOURCE




New Paper: Increasing Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) could have contributed significantly to global warming

At the December 2008 NRC meeting "Detection and Attribution of Solar Forcing on Climate" [see] there was extensive criticism by Gavin Schmidt and others on the research of Nicola Scafetta with respect to solar climate forcings. He was not, however, invited to that December meeting. There is now a new paper that he has published that needs to be refuted or supported by other peer reviewed literature (rather than comments in a closed NRC meeting in which the presenters would not share their powerpoint talks). The new paper is:

Scafetta N., R. C. Willson (2009), ACRIM-gap and TSI trend issue resolved using a surface magnetic flux TSI proxy model, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L05701.

Abstract

"The ACRIM-gap (1989.5-1991.75) continuity dilemma for satellite TSI observations is resolved by bridging the satellite TSI monitoring gap between ACRIM1 and ACRIM2 results with TSI derived from Krivova et al.'s (2007) proxy model based on variations of the surface distribution of solar magnetic flux. `Mixed' versions of ACRIM and PMOD TSI composites are constructed with their composites' original values except for the ACRIM gap, where Krivova modeled TSI is used to connect ACRIM1 and ACRIM2 results. Both `mixed' composites demonstrate a significant TSI increase of 0.033%/decade between the solar activity minima of 1986 and 1996, comparable to the 0.037% found in the ACRIM composite. The finding supports the contention of Willson (1997) that the ERBS/ERBE results are flawed by uncorrected degradation during the ACRIM gap and refutes the Nimbus7/ERB ACRIM gap adjustment Fr”hlich and Lean (1998) employed in constructing the PMOD."

A key statement in the conclusion reads

"This finding has evident repercussions for climate change and solar physics. Increasing TSI between 1980 and 2000 could have contributed significantly to global warming during the last three decades [Scafetta and West, 2007, 2008]. Current climate models [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007] have assumed that the TSI did not vary significantly during the last 30 years and have therefore underestimated the solar contribution and overestimated the anthropogenic contribution to global warming."

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




Climate change is nature at work

By Seymour Merrin

I am confused. I have a Ph.D. in the geologic sciences. I am a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and other scientific organizations. And I have worked as a research and manufacturing scientist for major corporations.

I was taught, and used professionally, what is called the "scientific method." Although it is not easy to sum up the "method," it can be condensed into a simple sequence: Research to form a theory, use the theory to predict the outcome of events/tests, compare the results to the predicted outcome. If they fit, you assume a certain degree of validity. If there is no correlation between the results and the theory, then you have to go back to the beginning or at least modify the theory to obtain predicable results.

Hence, the confusion. There is little doubt that the Earth's climate is changing, as it always has. A multitude of specific evidence leaves no doubt that 10,000 years ago, glaciers covered a large part of the polar regions down to the latitude of New York City in the north. Concrete evidence shows that since then, the temperature has been significantly warmer (sub-tropical plants in Alaska) and colder during the Little Ice Age from the 15th century through the middle of the 19th. It was warmer in the 14th century than it is now.

Enter the human-caused warming of the Earth, and testing it with the scientific method. The basic theory states that, as human-produced CO2 increases, Earth temperatures increase. Simple prediction, simple to test. The predominance of "hottest" years should be in the last 20 years, but that is not true. In fact, the last 10 years have been relatively flat - with 2007 and 2008 having declining temperatures. No correlation at all - actually, a disproval of that particular theory.

Some of the computer models representing the theory (despite the fact that even the most ardent supporters of human-caused global warming admit that the models are poor and cannot even predict one year out, let alone the distant future) show Arctic sea ice declining. Yet the ice now covers the same area it did in 1980. Yes, there was a period of decline, but that has markedly reversed itself. No correlation, again.

There are simple facts in such abundance that the media never reports.

When the media lambastes a great scientist and brave patriot, Jack Schmitt, a geologist, astronaut and former senator for apostasy, you know that it isn't science they're talking about, but agendas. Schmitt knows more about the Earth and its environment than all the staff at The New Mexican put together. Listen to a proven scientist.

SOURCE




Skeptics Score at Climate Change Conference

But don't expect the climate horror industry to decline anytime soon.

by James Lewis

Be still my beating heart. There is hope for honest science, even in the gruesome Age of Algore. But only if we really grasp what's happening with the Global Horror Picture Show these days. The biggest danger to good science is that rational skeptics will continue to be outgunned by the fear peddlers: A big lie can go around the world before the truth can get its boots on. The fear merchants just have to make up new scares faster than they can be knocked down, and honest scientists will always get there too late. Thoughtful skepticism takes thought. New alarmist scenarios can be made up by science fiction scribblers on an assembly line. It's the Nazi panzers against the Polish cavalry. Sure it's heroic, but it's not really a contest.

So here's the good news. The skeptics are winning against the global warming mythogogues. The polls show a drop in public faith in the global warming meme. Last week a stellar skeptics' conference was held in New York City and the New York Times actually covered it - in its usual bitchy fashion, but they decided to cover it anyway. There are many excellent talks at this website, notably by Viscount Monckton, Margaret Thatcher's former adviser, who provides a truly elegant and devastating deconstruction of the infamous IPCC "consensus statement" - done for the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and of the bureaucrats. Any real scientific analysis and debate was left out of the IPCC statement, and Lord Monckton simply shoots it out of the water with a satisfying bang. Others like Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen were there as well, and you can listen to their presentations online. They are heroes.

But that's not why I think the skeptics are winning. The rational skeptics are winning because the global warming crowd has simply dropped the two words "global warming" from its vocabulary. No more official global warming! This is like the old Soviet Communist Party. You have to analyze not just what's said but what's not said. You have to look to see who has been airbrushed out of the pictures of the Politburo waving on top of Lenin's tomb watching the May Day parade. And "global warming" has disappeared from respectable scientific discourse. Only the elementary school teachers of the world will keep teaching about global warming, because their lesson plans are already written, and they're a little slow on the uptake. Somehow it's all morphed into climate change.

What's "climate change?" It's a scientific surrender by the Algore-James-Hansen Planetary Fear Brigade. No more global warming, folks. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

But it's a silent surrender, so millions of readers of the New York Times will never notice a thing. Al Gore just has to drop one solitary slide from his infamous PowerPoint lecture. James Hansen just needs to pretend that all those horrific mistakes over at the NASA Climate Playstation Center were tiny computer glitches. Anybody can make an honest mistake, right? And they always fixed the published data after they were caught - I mean, after the errors were called to their attention. That's what honest scientists do. (Funny thing, though, how those glitches always favored the global warming faith?)

Still, real scientists have to use words with precision, and when all the big science journals change the words "global warming" to "climate change," all at the same time, you know somethin's up. It is. The real scientists have simply, silently acknowledged that the skeptics were right all along, as a child of six might have figured out. And since everybody knows that "climate change" has been going on for a half billion years, it's sure to keep happening. Now there's a solid scientific prediction for you.

Nobody can object to "climate change." So nobody has to apologize to the skeptics. (Hint: If the New York Times deigns to cover skeptics who challenge their orthodoxy for the last decade or two, it's because they are doing a quick CYA. They are not recanting. They are not doing the skeptics a favor. If you want a favor, go ask Tony over in Joisey.)

What really happened there, it seems, is that the science section of the NYT caught on, and hired a skeptic named John Tierney, who blew the cover off the scam. Check out the columns by Tierney, who sounds like an honest man in a impossible job. The science section people have to actually know something about science. They also have to stay respectable to real scientists, and they must have smelled the fraud for years and years. It didn't take much. Even the Weather Channel caught on, for goodness' sake!

What about those highly respectable scientists who were constantly giving scare headlines to their friends in the media? Well, they can pretend they were right all along, too. After all, they told us about climate change, didn't they? And now everybody agrees that, yes, the climate is changing. Gotcha!

As for the media, they don't care - most of their readers can't remember yesterday's stories anyway. With the 24/7 news cycle you can just swamp yesterday's scare headline with bigger ones today. In fact, the imaginative scribblers of the media now have even more room to let their horror fantasies soar. Which is exactly what's happening. If you think global warming gave the media a lot of room for planetary fear stories, just wait till you see all the really catastrophic climate change stories to come. Who needs warming?

How about . the oceans are turning acid and killing all the little carbonaceous critters? Yesterday, Nature magazine proclaimed that the oceans are turning acid and reducing the calcium in Pacific Ocean marine carbonate organisms. But skeptics will note that this study suffers from a huge sampling error. There is no way to cover an enormous ocean region with vast underwater mountain ranges and make generalizations about the acidity and the actual population of all carbonate organisms in that enormous volume of sea water. So it's just another scare study that is grossly overgeneralized. Sounds like the good old "global warming," right? But it did get published in the oldest and one of the most highly respected scientific journals in the world.

Or, how about "World leaders told to act on climate before it's too late!!"? That's one by the reliable eco-prop specialist Lewis Smith in the London Times. Mr. Smith is the environment reporter of the formerly respectable Times, and is a reliable bellwether to see which way the imaginary winds are blowing. His headline is illustrated by the infamous propaganda picture of a lonesome polar bear on its fast-disappearing little crag of ice in the vast Arctic Ocean. Now polar bears swim like sea lions for dozens of miles in search of prey. But this is the iconic "ET call home" image of the Arctic warming crowd. It's a fraud, but they can't let go of it. Mr. Smith is a one-man shop for eco-horrors. Just within recent days he had "85% of Amazonian rainforests at risk!!!" Then there was "World heading for resources war!!" And "Hopes of climate change accord `are sinking.'"

Or how about this story? "Oil spill disaster on Australian beaches!" This is also from the Times, which is the new voice of the Euro socialist elite.

Well, as Bill Ayers told us `way back when, "you don't need a Weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing." That's not metaphorical. Apparently they meant it literally, and now we don't need any weatherfolk at all, because the winds are always blowing the same way. This is like those mythic battles between the gods and the demons, where both sides are always shape-changing. The eco-props have figured out they don't really need global warming, but I don't know whether the skeptics have figured out how to keep pace with the assembly line production of ever-new "scientific" scare stories. It's a matter of supply and demand, and the fear industry is constantly cranking out new models to be greedily gobbled up by the scare-hungry masses. It's a new genre of fiction parading as science, and until a whole new generation learns how to exercise rational skepticism, to laugh at the frauds on their own initiative, they are going to get suckered over and over again.

President Obama just sent $400 million to replenish the eco-scare industry. With that kind of money coming in on a regular basis, and the new "science czar" in the White House who is one of the true believers, the climate horror industry is not going to decline anytime soon. We may be losing our banks, the dollar may crash, and you've just lost half your savings, but here is a growth industry with fabulous prospects for the indefinite future.

SOURCE (See the original for links)




The World Wildlife Fund's Polar Bear Lies

by Tom DeWeese

No doubt you've seen the ads: The music is dramatic. The scene is tragic. The message emotional. Polar Bears, holding on for dear life to bits of ice, their artic habitat destroyed by Global Warming. And the narration tells you of the tragic fate of the bears, all because of man and his selfish destruction of the earth. Of course, the ad ends with a plea for funds to help the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) protect the bears and stop Global Warming. Cute, fuzzy animals always do the trick.

Trouble is, it's all a lie. Not one word of the ad is true. Polar Bears are not endangered. There is no indication of any reduction of their populations. In fact, they are actually being hunted by locals who have to live with them in an effort to keep their populations down. Of 13 Polar Bear populations, 11 are thriving and growing.

The real agenda behind WWF's Polar Bear campaign is to stop drilling of American oil and to shackle the United States with the UN's Kyoto Climate Change Treaty. The policy is called Sustainable Development.

Using the Polar Bear, which WWF and the Sierra Club managed to get listed on the Endangered Species (ESA) list last year, the greens can grab control of the U.S. economy, controlling energy production.

Last year, in a Congressional hearing on the listing of the Polar Bears, Congressman Don Young of Alaska said testimony by Bush Administration officials "clearly indicated the overriding goal was to use the ESA as a tool to stop energy production in any and all states." Under questioning, former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Dale Hall confirmed that if a coal-fired power plant in Arizona were seeking a federal permit, with the Polar Bear listed as protected by the ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to consult on the permit. In other words, a power plant located thousands of miles away from Polar Bear habitat would be considered a danger - because of global warming. How could any industry be possible? And that's just the way WWF wants it.

The truth is now rapidly coming out. There is no man-made global warming - it's a lie. There is no threat to Polar Bears - it's a lie. Drilling American oil is not a danger to the environment - it's a lie. And yet, WWF continues to spread the lies and fan the fear.

It is time we fight back against these zealots who put anything else on earth ahead of man. Taking donations based on lies is fraud and WWF should be called on it. We should call on the federal government to take away WWF's non-profit status. We should complain to any television network that runs their lies. We should demand that such false advertising be pulled from the airways.

The World Wildlife Fund is dangerous to our way of life - to our very civilization. We should no longer just treat them like some nice folks with a different point of view. Political debate is one thing, outright fraud is criminal.

SOURCE




Low-energy bulbs 'worsen skin disorders' and those at risk should have medical exemption, say doctors

The phasing out of traditional light bulbs could cause misery for thousands who have light-sensitive skin disorders, medical experts warned yesterday. Dr Robert Sarkany said some low-energy bulbs gave vulnerable people painful rashes and swelling. He backed calls by patient groups for the Government to give medical exemptions for those at risk. The warning comes as British shops start to clear their shelves of traditional bulbs, which are being replaced by more energy-efficient versions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Large retailers have already stopped selling conventional 100-watt bulbs, the most popular size. They will be banned from September along with frosted 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs, followed by most others before 2012. Shoppers will then be able to buy only halogen bulbs - which resemble normal bulbs but use 70 per cent of the energy - or compact fluorescent ones, which use just 30 per cent of the energy.

Although low-energy bulbs cut household electricity bills, the move has proved unpopular with shoppers. Halogens are more expensive - costing around œ1.99 each - while critics say the fluorescent type have an unattractive harsh light and take up to a minute to warm up to full strength.

But medical charities say the light from low-energy bulbs triggers migraines, epilepsy and rashes. Dr Sarkany, a photodermatologist at St John's Institute of Dermatology, St Thomas' Hospital, in London, said he has treated patients for rashes caused by exposure to low-energy lamps. Some suffer from lupus, a disease of the immune system that can cause skin to become hypersensitive to sunlight. But Dr Sarkany said lupus sufferers were also reporting an adverse reaction to fluorescent lights. He added: 'Patients with lupus feel strongly about this. They feel their skin deteriorates with fluorescent lights and have taken this issue to Parliament.'

A spokesman for Skin Care Campaign said: 'The main concern is over the intensity of the ultraviolet light from low-energy bulbs. 'Particularly for people with skin conditions such as lupus, eczema and psoriasis, it causes a lot of problem with burning. 'There are also more unusual conditions where people are completely light-sensitive. 'At the moment, they can use a traditional incandescent light bulb because the ultraviolet light is so dim. 'But low-energy fluorescent lights are a problem.'

SOURCE

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

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14 March, 2009

ECO-BLOAT: EXTRA MELTING OF GREENLAND'S ICE

An email from Dave English [prospector@znet.com] pointing out that the Warmists have not done the math behind their scare

David Adam writes from Copenhagen: "Scientists at the Copenhagen conference said that modest IPCC estimates of likely sea level rise this century need to be increased. Extra melting in Greenland could drive sea levels to more than a metre higher than today by 2100"

This is typical eco-bloat. Taking into account that the Earth's surface is 70% ocean and that it takes 1.1 cubic mile of ice to make a cubic mile of water, to raise the oceans one inch would take 2400 (2398+) cubic miles of ice. To raise the oceans one meter would take 94,488 cubic miles of ice melting. Greenland is melting at 55 cubic miles a year, their dream is to make us believe that the melting would become not two or four times faster than today but 18.67 times faster, from 55 cubic miles a year to 1027 cubic miles a year for 92 years.




Climate Change: Driven by the Ocean not Human Activity

Paper by William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

Abstract

This paper discusses how the variation in the global ocean's Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) resulting from changes in the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation (THC) and deep water Surrounding Antarctica Subsidence (SAS) can be the primary cause of climate change. (MOC = THC + SAS) is the likely cause of most of the global warming that has been observed since the start of the industrial revolution (~1850) and for the more recent global warming that has occurred since the mid-1970s. Changes of the MOC since 1995 are hypothesized to have lead to the cessation of global warming since 1998 and to the beginning of a weak global cooling that has occurred since 2001. This weak cooling is projected to go on for the next couple of decades.

Recent GCM global warming scenarios assume that a slightly stronger hydrologic cycle (due to the increase in CO2) will cause additional upper-level tropospheric water vapor and cloudiness. Such vapor-cloudiness increases are assumed to allow the small initial warming due to increased CO2 to be unrealistically multiplied 2-4 or more times. This is where most of the global warming from the GCMs comes from - not the warming resulting from the CO2 increase by itself but the large extra warming due to the assumed increase of upper tropospheric water vapor and cloudiness. As CO2 increases, it does not follow that the net global upper-level water vapor and cloudiness will increase significantly. Observations of upper tropospheric water vapor over the last 3-4 decades from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis data and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) data show that upper tropospheric water vapor appears to undergo a small decrease while Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) undergoes a small increase. This is opposite to what has been programmed into the GCMs. The predicted global warming due to a doubling of CO2 has been erroneously exaggerated by the GCMs due to this water vapor feedback.

CO2 increases without positive water vapor feedback could only have been responsible for about 0.1-0.2oC of the 0.6-0.7oC global mean surface temperature warming that has been observed since the early 20th century. Assuming a doubling of CO2 by the late 21st century (assuming no positive water vapor feedback), we should likely expect to see no more than about 0.3-0.5oC global surface warming and certainly not the 2-5oC warming that has been projected by the GCMs

SOURCE




COPENHAGEN SUMMIT GETS FLAK FOR DOOM-MONGERING

By Andrew C. Revkin of the NYT

A three-day conference on climate science and policy that drew some 2,500 scientists, economists, campaigners, dignitaries, industry representatives and journalists to Copenhagen has wrapped up, and organizers have issued a list of core "messages" that you can see at the bottom of this post. Their bottom line, echoing what many climate scientists have been saying with rising vigor for two decades, is that there is an urgent need to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, and "inaction is inexcusable."

Is this effort, which one organizer described as "a deliberate attempt to influence policy," likely to change things? There are signs, some scientists warned on Thursday, that overheated descriptions of looming dangers coming out of the conference could actually backfire. More on those warnings is below.

The meeting, organized by 10 universities and paid for by a variety of corporate sponsors, was mainly aimed at moving beyond what many participants described as the overly conservative findings of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. News coverage of the presentations given at the conference over the last few days described new evidence that the Amazon rain forest was poised to dry up and that sea levels could rise more than twice as much as the intergovernmental climate panel projected.

On Thursday, an e-mail message was distributed to a host of Amazon forest experts and to a journalist by Yadvinder Malhi, an Oxford University biologist who is focused on the Amazon and climate. He questioned the Amazon findings presented at the meeting, and decried the resulting media coverage:

"I must say I find it frustrating that the gloomiest take on news gets such a big profile. This is based on one model, and that model has flaws (especially its temperature sensitivity that seems too great (David Galbraith's work), and its rainfall that seems to low (our PNAS paper PDF). The danger is that that such apparent bad news makes all the efforts to conserve the Amazon forests worthless (why bother saving them if they are already doomed?), and encourages disengagement and hopelessness rather than action. If that conclusion was based on solid empirical science then so be it, but when such a story goes out on a pure model study (not yet peer-reviewed) with significant imperfections, it may do a lot of damage in the real world."

A colleague of Dr. Malhi who attended the meeting responded by saying several scientists there were engaged in "damage control." When I ran all of this by a couple of social scientists tracking how climate science is conveyed to the public, they groaned (or the e-mail equivalent).

Daniel Sarewitz at Arizona State University said this was a classic example of how scientists and the media play down complexity in their thirst for powerful framing that catches attention and might drive action. The problem, he and several colleagues said, is that over-reaching can also lead to distrust and further polarization of advocates threatened or empowered by the controversial finding. (This is the "climate porn" concept I wrote about a while back.)

More HERE




BRITISH MET OFFICE ALARMISTS: AMAZON COULD SHRINK BY 85% DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

And pigs might fly

Global warming will wreck attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, according to a devastating new study which predicts that one-third of its trees will be killed by even modest temperature rises.

The research, by some of Britain's leading experts on climate change, shows that even severe cuts in deforestation and carbon emissions will fail to save the emblematic South American jungle, the destruction of which has become a powerful symbol of human impact on the planet. Up to 85% of the forest could be lost if spiralling greenhouse gas emissions are not brought under control, the experts said. But even under the most optimistic climate change scenarios, the destruction of large parts of the forest is "irreversible".

Vicky Pope, of the Met Office's Hadley Centre, which carried out the study, said: "The impacts of climate change on the Amazon are much worse than we thought. As temperatures rise quickly over the coming century the damage to the forest won't be obvious straight away, but we could be storing up trouble for the future."

Tim Lenton, a climate expert at the University of East Anglia, called the study, presented at a global warming conference in Copenhagen today , a "bombshell". He said: "When I was young I thought chopping down the trees would destroy the forest but now it seems that climate change will deliver the killer blow."

The study, which has been submitted to the journal Nature Geoscience, used computer models to investigate how the Amazon would respond to future temperature rises.

It found that a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best case global warming scenario and the target for ambitious international plans to curb emissions, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought over the following century, while a 4C rise would kill 85%. "The forest as we know it would effectively be gone," Pope said.

Experts had previously predicted that global warming could cause significant "die-back" of the Amazon. The new research is the first to quantify the long-term effect.

Chris Jones, who led the research, told the conference: "A temperature rise of anything over 1C commits you to some future loss of Amazon forest. Even the commonly quoted 2C target already commits us to 20-40% loss. On any kind of pragmatic timescale, I think we should see loss of the Amazon forest as irreversible."

Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said the effects would be felt around the world. "Ecologically it would be a catastrophe and it would be taking a huge chance with our own climate. The tropics are drivers of the world's weather systems and killing the Amazon is likely to change them forever. We don't know exactly what would happen but we could expect more extreme weather." Massive Amazon loss would also amplify global warming "significantly" he said.

"Destroying the Amazon would also turn what is a significant carbon sink into a significant source."

More HERE




SOMETHING THE AMAZON ALARMISTS IGNORE

A report from BBC News of 24 September 2007 shows that the Warmist models of Amazon processes are contradicted by the facts

The Amazon rainforest may be more resistant to rising temperatures than has been believed. Researchers found that during the 2005 drought, many parts of the rainforest "greened", apparently growing faster. This finding contrasts with some computer models of climate change, which forecast that the Amazon would dry out and become savannah.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say it is unclear how the forest would respond to a long drought. "We measured the changes between the drought (of July to September 2005) and an average year," explained study leader Scott Saleska from the University of Arizona, Tucson, US. "And what we saw was that there was more photosynthesis going on, more capacity to take up carbon dioxide than in an average year," he told the BBC News website.

The scientists used the Modis (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on the US space agency's (Nasa) Terra satellite to make their observations. Some areas of the Amazon had seen reduced growth during the drought, but these were regions heavily impacted by human activities.

More HERE




Climate sceptics fight tide of alarmism

By Miranda Devine, an Australian columnist

As the Rudd Government's job-killing carbon emissions trading plans come under fire, a conference of sceptical scientists met in New York this week to discuss developments bolstering the case against human-caused global warming. A disproportionate number of Australian scientists who lead the charge against climate alarmism spoke at the conference organised by the Heartland Institute, a US free-market think tank. Among them were the James Cook university paleoclimate scientist Dr Bob Carter, the former head of the Australian Greenhouse Office, David Evans, and Bill Kininmonth, the former head of the Australian National Climate Centre. "Each of the Australians were there because they have something special to offer," said Carter yesterday on the phone from Connecticut.

Evans told the conference the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on the existence of a "hot spot" in the upper troposphere over the tropics, predicted by computer models. But it did not exist. Kininmonth said predictions that global temperature "might pass a 'tipping point' and even go into a phase of 'runaway global warming' are an outcome of the flawed computer models and are not a realistic future scenario". Carter told the conference on Wednesday that climate change has always occurred and by focusing on futile attempts to stop it by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, we have lost sight of the need to adapt. Countries need to "be better prepared to understand, cope with and adapt to the damaging effects of . natural climatic events and trends".

Carter declared the conference mood optimistic but a downbeat Vaclav Klaus, president of the European Union and the Czech Republic, said sceptics had made little headway. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he was the only person in a private session of European leaders who expressed doubts about anthropogenic global warming. "The environmentalists don't want to change the climate. They want to change us and our behaviour," he told the Heartland conference. "Their ambition is to control and manipulate us. Therefore, it shouldn't be surprising they recommend preventing [climate change], not adaptive policies. Adaptation would be a voluntary behaviour." Environmentalism had replaced socialism as the totalitarian threat to freedom in the 21st century, he said. "Environmentalists . do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back."

The Heartland conference has received little coverage in Australia, and the odd New York Times report has dwelled on sneering dismissal from Greenpeace campaigners. But as sober analysis of developments in climate science filters out and economies decline, there are signs public perception is changing. Klaus cited a poll that showed only 11 per cent of Czechs believe humans have a significant influence on warming. A Lowy Institute poll last year found climate change had dropped down the list of policy priorities from equal first place to fifth, with Australians caring more about jobs. An Ipsos MORI poll found most Britons are not convinced climate change is caused by humans. In October, a poll commissioned by US conservation groups found only 18 per cent of respondents strongly believed climate change is "real, human-caused and harmful".

Carter described the most powerful speaker as Arthur Robinson, a professor of chemistry and co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. In a wake-up call to Christian groups who have rushed to embrace climate alarmism, Robinson pointed out the world's poor will bear the brunt of carbon prohibition policies. He described as "technological genocide" efforts to deny cheap energy, in the form of coal-fired power plants, to the Third World. "Billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions." Banning the use of DDT for mosquito eradication was the first "example of genocide by the removal of technology, [resulting] in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and [leaving] half a billion infected with malaria".

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen told the conference: "Being sceptical about global warming does not by itself make one a good scientist, nor does endorsing global warming make one a poor scientist. One of the most difficult things is to realise . that most of the atmospheric scientists who I respect do endorse global warming. [But] the science they do that I respect is not about global warming. Endorsing global warming just makes their life easier." He also told to the conference, in excerpts posted on YouTube, "Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public, authority will generally win, since they do not wish to deal with science . Those who are committed to warming alarm as either a vehicle for a post-modern coup d'etat or for illicit profits will obviously try to obfuscate matters."

But how can the courageous independent scientists in New York compete for attention with climate hysteria coming from such world leaders as Prince Charles, who in Rio de Janeiro this week claimed: "We have less than 100 months to alter our behaviour before we risk catastrophic climate change." Australia's future head of state is on a 10-day eco-tour to South America, aimed at boosting his popularity. He will travel in a luxury private Airbus, delivering a carbon footprint estimated at more than 300 tonnes. It just shows that what counts with climate hysterics is not the greenness of the planet but the brownie points they gain.

SOURCE

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

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13 March, 2009

REPORTS FROM THE HEARTLAND-2 CLIMATE CONFERENCE

Bob Carter [bob.carter@jcu.edu.au] has written a series of reports on the Heartland-2 climate conference in New York for Quadrant Magazine. See here.




What we are not being told

An email from Hans Labohm [mailto:H.Labohm@freeler.nl]

Attached my latest article for `Research Review', March 2009: `What we are not being told'.

What is so special about this article? Certainly not the contents. It's all old hat for climate sceptics. No, it is the fact that the journal has invited me to write it and that the article has been published, whereas so many similar articles have been turned down by editors of many newspapers and journals.

As far as I know, `Research Review' is a mainstream quality science glossy, based in Brussels. Why is this journal sticking its neck out to publish an opinion which is anathema for its neighbours, the EU, in Brussels? Is it just professional journalism? Other than that, I have no clue.

What we are not being told

Hans Labohm argues that experts' warnings of an imminent climate catastrophe are products of computer modelling

Climate change has become a major issue of our time. While history clearly demonstrates that there has always been climate change, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) keeps reminding us that the current climate change - the measured recent warming of the earth - is something exceptional and alarming, and is mainly caused by mankind.

Jumping on the IPCC's bandwagon, politicians, bureaucracies, industry, media and self-appointed climate gurus, such as Al Gore, George Monbiot, David Suzuki and Stefan Rahmstorf, reinforce and grossly exaggerate the IPCC's message with their warnings of an imminent climate disaster, which can only be prevented if we fundamentally alter our social and economic system and lifestyles.

Opinions which deviate from those of the IPCC are more often than not ignored by politics, even if they come from prominent scientists, attached to the most prestigious universities and scientific institutions in the world. Apparently, politics considers that it can do without a second opinion.

That is most unfortunate because is has become abundantly clear by now that the IPCC's modus operandi modus has been characterised by cherry-picking, spin-doctoring and scaremongering, and that its reports lack scientific rigour. Since its inception, the IPCC has been heavily criticised by so-called climate sceptics.

According to Al Gore and other protagonists of the man-made global warming hypothesis, dissident numbers have been dwindling over time. It has even been said that you could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth. Yet the climate conference organised by the Heartland Institute in New York in March last year, which aimed to challenge the man-made global warming hypothesis, was attended by some 400 scientists, whereas the so-called petition project (urging the US to reject the Kyoto protocol) has listed the support of over 31,000 scientists, all distancing themselves from this hypothesis.

This is probably unprecedented in the history of science, although only a few people might be aware of it, as it received little media attention. Today, climate scepticism is extensively documented in thousands of peer-reviewed articles, which have been published in many renowned journals in a variety of scientific disciplines - far too many for one single person to digest.

However, two relatively brief reports have appeared that present an overview of salient points of the critique of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. They offer the additional advantage of being fairly accessible to non-expert readers: Ross McKitrick et al, `The independent summary for policymakers, IPCC fourth assessment report' and Fred Singer et al, `Nature, not human activity, rules the climate', a report by the NIPCC (non-governmental international panel on climate change).

The latter report especially shows that the man-made global warming hypothesis is contradicted by observations. In doing so, it offers a convincing falsification of it. If that hypothesis continues to be used in computer models to produce future projections of climate, one surely enters the field of pseudo-science, no matter how sophisticated the models might be.

Mother nature refuses to comply with the projections of the climate models. Despite the continued rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, there has not been any global warming over the last 10 years - as a matter of fact, there has been a slight cooling. The illustrated graph shows declines in temperatures measured by surface and satellite thermometers over the last 10 years, while the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere still rises. It indicates that over this period there has been no warming, but cooling. It also shows that CO2 is not correlated with temperatures, which suggests that it has only little impact, if at all.



The graph, which is based on the measurements of the official scientific institutions, is the best-kept secret of the `warmoholics'. It indicates that the imminent climate catastrophe exists only in virtual reality - it is a product of computer modelling. Those who are old enough to remember the apocalyptic predictions of the Club of Rome at the beginning of the 1970s will undoubtedly be struck by the similarities. It is high time the EU opened its eyes to facts and discontinued its climate policy, which will only wreck its economy, and will have no effect whatsoever on worldwide temperatures.

GALLUP POLL: GROWING NUMBER OF AMERICANS THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS 'EXAGGERATED'

Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.

As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%.

The trend in the "exaggerated" response has been somewhat volatile since 2001, and the previous high point, 38%, came in 2004. Over the next two years, "exaggerated" sentiment fell to 31% and 30%. Still, as noted, the current 41% is the highest since Gallup's trend on this measure began in 1997.

Since 1997, Republicans have grown increasingly likely to believe media coverage of global warming is exaggerated, and that trend continues in the 2009 survey; however, this year marks a relatively sharp increase among independents as well. In just the past year, Republican doubters grew from 59% to 66%, and independents from 33% to 44%, while the rate among Democrats remained close to 20%.

Notably, all of the past year's uptick in cynicism about the seriousness of global warming coverage occurred among Americans 30 and older. The views of 18- to 29-year-olds, the age group generally most concerned about global warming and most likely to say the problem is underestimated, didn't change.

Dampened Concern

Apart from these findings about news coverage of global warming, the March 5-8 poll shows in a similar vein that Americans are a bit less concerned about the seriousness of global warming per se than they have been in recent years.

Six in 10 Americans indicate that they are highly worried about global warming, including 34% who are worried "a great deal" and 26% "a fair amount." Overall worry is similar to points at the start of the decade, but is down from 66% a year ago and from 65% in 2007.

More HERE




Inhofe Speech: `Consensus' Continues Freefall - Why Americans Are Growing More Skeptical

U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today delivered a floor speech on the latest global warming poll data and the continuing inconvenient science developments refuting man-made climate fears.

Inhofe Speech Highlights:

I come to the floor today with breaking news in the man-made global warming debate: A new Gallup Poll has just been released yesterday reveals a "record-high 41% of Americans now say [global warming] is exaggerated!" This is the "highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting" in more than a decade, according to the March 11, 2009, Gallup survey. You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people. Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm. [...]

Skepticism persists despite an Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. Skepticism persists despite a $300 million campaign by Gore to spread climate fears. Skepticism persists despite a daily drumbeat of scary scenarios promoted by the UN and the media of what could, might, or may happen a 20, 50, 100 or even 1000 years from now. In fact, global warming skepticism appears to have grown stronger as the shrillness of the climate fear campaign has intensified. The latest Gallup Poll, released March 11, 2009, further reveals the American public's growing skepticism. Most telling, Americans ranked global warming dead last -- eight out of eight- out of a list of environmental issues. The new Gallup survey found: "A record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year." [...]

These dramatic polling results are not unexpected as prominent scientists from around the world continue to speak out publicly for the first time to dissent from the Al Gore, UN IPCC and media driven man-made climate fears. In addition, a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists.

Americans are finally catching on in large numbers that the UN IPCC is a POLITICAL -- not scientific organization. Man-made global warming fears have proven simply unsustainable - to use a nice green term.

If new peer-reviewed studies are to be believed, today's high school kids watching Gore's movie will be nearing the senior citizen group AARP's membership age (50 years) by the time warming allegedly "resumes" in 30 years! See: Climate Fears RIP.for 30 years!? - Peer-Reviewed Study Finds Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades' study finds - Discovery.com - March 2, 2009 -

Dr. John Brignell, a skeptical UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton wrote in 2008: "The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date." [...] Confirming this unintended consequence is a study by the scientific journal Risk Analysis released in February 2008 which found that Gore and the media's attempts to scare the public "ironically may be having just the opposite effect." The study found that the more informed respondents "show less concern for global warming."

The study found that "perhaps ironically, and certainly contrary to... the marketing of movies like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected. Directly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feels for it; and indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it."

For Full Speech Texts See here

SOURCE




OBAMA'S CLIMATE POLICY DEAD IN THE WATER

President Obama's budget doesn't have enough support from lawmakers to pass, the Senate Budget Committee chairman said Tuesday. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said he has spoken to enough colleagues about several different provisions in the budget request to make him think Congress won't pass it. Conrad urged White House budget director Peter Orszag not to "draw lines in the sand" with lawmakers, most notably on Obama's plan for a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions. "Anybody who thinks it will be easy to get the votes on the budget in the conditions that we face is smoking something," Conrad said.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, when asked Tuesday about the Democratic criticism of the budget, told reporters that it wasn't unusual. He noted that lawmakers and the president often have competing agendas. "I don't think, ultimately, the criticism is surprising," Gibbs said. "That certainly happens and is all part of a process."

Conrad joined Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the top Republican on the Budget Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in criticizing the administration's cap-and-trade proposal for not doing enough to counterbalance increases in energy costs that will be felt by consumers and companies, especially those in energy states such as North Dakota. Conrad said that it would be a "distant hope" to expect the climate change plan to pass unless it includes help for industries that would be hit hard by limits on carbon emission production.

More HERE




UN CLIMATE CHIEF: US CARBON CUTS COULD SPARK 'REVOLUTION'

The head of the UN body charged with leading the fight against climate change has conceded that Barack Obama will face a "revolution" if he commits the US to the deep carbon cuts that scientists and campaigners say are needed.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said domestic political constraints made it impossible for the US president to announce ambitious short-term climate targets similar to those set by Europe. And he questioned the value of a new global climate deal without such a US pledge.

His words come as scientists at the Copenhagen conference said that modest IPCC estimates of likely sea level rise this century need to be increased. Extra melting in Greenland could drive sea levels to more than a metre higher than today by 2100, they said.

Obama has said the US will work to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Europe has pledged to cut them by 20-30% on 1990 levels by 2020. The IPCC says developed nations should aim for 25-40% cuts by then to avoid dangerous climate change.

Speaking on the fringes of a high-level scientific conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Pachauri told the Guardian: "He [Obama] is not going to say by 2020 I'm going to reduce emissions by 30%. He'll have a revolution on his hands. He has to do it step by step."

Pachauri's remarks echo those of Todd Stern, the US president's new chief climate negotiator, who said last week that it was "not possible" for the US to aim for 25-40% cuts by 2020.

Such a stance could threaten attempts to agree a new global deal to regulate carbon emissions to replace the existing Kyoto protocol, the first phase of which expires in 2012. Campaigners say a new treaty must be agreed at UN talks in Copenhagen this December.

Obama has called for 80% carbon cuts by 2050, but insiders say that such long-term pledges will do little to convince developing nations such as China to sign up to a new climate deal. British officials say meaningful US involvement in the short term is crucial to agree a new treaty.

Pachauri told the Guardian the US needed to do more in the short term. But he questioned whether there would be sufficient domestic movement for the US to agree stricter targets in December. He said it was "hard to say" if a new deal would be meaningful without such a step.

SOURCE




Green Child Abuse

By Alan Caruba

Has it occurred to you that constantly telling children and teens that "global warming" is real and that the Earth is in deadly peril constitutes child abuse? That thought came to me as I enjoyed some of the excellent seminars and speeches during the March 8-10 second annual Conference on Climate Change. Here were some of the nation's leading climatologists and others spelling out in detail precisely why there is no global warming and, indeed, why the Earth is now into a decade-old cooling trend. The experts believe that the Earth will stay in this trend for easily another decade or two, maybe three. Sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank, the conference was, of course, slandered by the few mainstream media "journalists" who took note of it.

My complaint, however, is about the vast media coverage of global warming as something that is actually happening. The other element of this "reporting" is that the GW predictions made always seem to self-adjust forward ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years. The current cooling trend is giving the global warming alarmists fits.

Back in the 1970s the news was filled with reports of a coming ice age. In the 1980s the reports changed to "global warming" and they took off as the defeated Al Gore made global warming his highway to vast wealth, selling bogus "carbon credits."

Requiring school children to watch, often many times, Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", is part of the child abuse to which I refer. It is so filled with inaccuracies that a British court ruled that it could not be shown in schools without a laundry list of disclaimers and corrections being made by the teachers.

This is not to say that adults, too, aren't subject to the same abuse as the children. However, it is about to become far worse if the Obama administration's intention of imposing "cap and trade" regulations on CO2 emissions comes true. This carbon tax is anticipated to raise $646 billion for the federal government and we all know how careful it is when it comes to spending taxpayer's money.

Speaking before the House Ways and Means Committee last year, Peter Orszag, formerly the Director of the Congressional Budget Office and now President Obama's Director for the Office of Management and Budget, said that a "cap and trade" law to cut carbon emissions by 15% would cost the average household about $1,300 in higher energy costs. He added the working class families would be hardest hit.

Actually, the Obama gang wants to cut carbon emissions by more than three times the original figure, 83%. Using Orszag's calculations, that means the average family will pay close to $4,000 a year or $333 a month. For nothing!

There is no scientific justification to cut carbon dioxide emissions. They play no role in global warming. At a time when CO2 emissions have risen, the Earth is still cooling and likely to do so for a long time to come.

This is a vicious tax to be imposed on Americans for the purpose of rendering them further impoverished in the midst of a financial crisis of worldwide proportions. And when you tax the parents, you tax the children too. If the Green organizations are the shock troops of global warming, President Obama is the Abuser-in-Chief.

SOURCE

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

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12 March, 2009

Misreporting of the Heartland conference by Andrew Revkin in the NYT

Below is part of an email to Andrew Revkin from Marc Morano

Thanks for your response. I am not trying to critique your entire career, just your woeful article on the Heartland climate conference you wrote for paper edition of NYT on March 9, 2009. In fact, I publicly praise you for your NYT Dot Earth Blog today featuring Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook at the Heartland Conference.

But there is more evidence you failed to accurately report on the scientists you quoted. You may want to consider a correction or a "clarification" of your original March 9 article. ( My original analysis of your reporting is here: Andrew Revkin's attempt to smear skeptics detailed!)

MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen has already publicly complained that you were not fair to him in your quotes. Lindzen wrote to you on March 9 and asked: "I specifically asked you not to quote me out of context. Why did you decide to do so?" You have not yet publicly responded to Lindzen's reasonable question.




Lubos Motl dissects Revkin's motivations

By email [lumo@matfyz.cz]

Let me also write a few words about Andrew Revkin (AR) - if he kindly allows (or if he doesn't) - who became a phenomenon in our circles. ;-) If you're not interested in these ideas, please press "Delete" now.

People like Anthony Watts say that AR is mysterious. Others are offended by his text about the conference in NYT and they see a difference from his DotEarth blog.

I may be wrong but I don't see any mystery here. AR seems to replicate the survival strategies that 95% of people in Czechoslovakia and other advanced socialist countries were doing during the totalitarian era. And I am intimately familiar with those. He is pretty much playing both sides, and which side is being played is determined by the immediate context and a cost-and-benefits analysis of the advantages and disadvantages.

You know, I consider NYT to be the leading U.S. newspapers as far as many things, such as the interactions of science and politics, go. It is surely biased in the left direction (but in many cases, this bias is more acceptable than the bias of some competitors in stupid directions). And there are certainly many people in NYT who exert significant pressure on Revkin because even if you may find him insufficiently realistic and insufficiently skeptical, he is almost certainly more neutral and sensible than most of his NYT colleagues.

I am thus not surprised by one article that may be viewed as unflattering towards the skeptics. Moreover, I think that what he writes has a true core, whether you like it or not. The emotional labels and interpretations of this core are often hypocritical but the core is still partially true.

For example, Revkin explains that something is wrong with the skeptics because Exxon is not paying them. That's cute because in the past, similar people have criticized the skeptics for being funded by Exxon (which was never really the case, at least not when you compare the financial flows to the Gore-like 100-million-dollar and Kyoto-like trillion-dollar fraudulent money flows falsely justified by the climate alarm).

So Dr Revkin, what is the morally superior situation? To be paid by Exxon or not to be paid by Exxon? Is there a unique answer to this question that you can give us, or does the answer depend on which of them is better to advance your career?

While the interpretation of the Exxon's lunatic and self-destructive behavior is internally inconsistent and propagandistic in character, Revkin's very observation that fashionable PC alarmist whackos are taking over companies like Exxon is surely correct. Does anyone dispute it? The managers etc. have become detached from the actual purpose of the companies. They can easily imagine themselves switching sides and working in the green industry, for which they are already preparing doors. They're traitors of their industry and traitors for their consumers who actually need the products, they should be ashamed. But their positions are real.

Similar comments apply to Revkin's observations about disunity. Their basis is surely correct but the colors added to this observation are irrational. Disunity is also called a "diversity", it suggests that the opinions have been reached independently, and this feature is often cherished by liberals like Revkin (especially when it comes to relatively irrelevant, superficial things such as skin color or the geometry of genitals). But when it is inconvenient for their careers, the diversity becomes a "disunity". ;-)

But this disunity or diversity is surely there, too. Much like I am irritated by the people who emit nonsense about the "catastrophic" threats for the climate caused by our CO2 and who want to fight non-existing dragons for billions of dollars, I am also irritated by some of the "radical skeptics" who say e.g. that the increase of CO2 has nothing to do with the industrial activity or that the greenhouse effect fundamentally violates the energy conservation law.

Do I have the right to be irritated by both? You bet. That's what we have been officially allowed to do in Czechoslovakia since 1989 again, and many of us did so before, too.

One can create a "box" with all skeptics but it is an artificial construction. People have different levels of knowledge, interests, goals, motivation, and so on. What unifies all climate skeptics is only their knowledge of the ultimate fact that huge investments to such a "crisis" are a waste of money and a deep reorganization of the society justified by such threats is rationally unjustified.

That's the final result and pretty much all skeptics end up with this correct final result. But there are many possible procedures to obtain this result and the intermediate results differ for different people. Do I care about these differences? Well, if the key matter is to decide whether the society should adopt a new kind of communism, the crucial answer is No and I don't care much how the result was obtained. I don't really care whether someone thinks that the Earth was warming by 0.6 deg C, by 0.0 deg C, or cooling by 0.6 C in the last century, or whether the man-made greenhouse effect has added 0.3 deg C or strictly nothing. The practical implications are clearly isomorphic: there is nothing to be solved by politicians or governments here.

Obviously, the people who want the society to be protected against the alarmist lunatics are the good people, my allies, when it comes to the questions at the level of the society, its laws, freedoms, and budgets.

If the discussion were about the ways how detailed scientific research should be done, of course that the people who claim that CO2 hasn't been added by the industry couldn't be my allies (or allies of at least equally serious skeptics). They would deserve the label "crackpots" at this point. There are still many more crackpots in the alarmist circles (and among the doomsayers between Jehovah's Wittnesses, even though the latter got more sensible recently), I guess. There can be and there are crackpots among loud people identified as climate skeptics, too. That shouldn't be shocking. Being a skeptic doesn't make one a perfect, omniscient god. What a surprise.

What is worse about alarmism is that some of the worst crackpots like Al Gore are the very leaders of that movement. The hierarchy in the skeptical circles seems to be more meritocratic.

If I return to AR, I can easily imagine him in the first months or years after this global warming virago collapses - because I can map him to effectively similar people in Czechoslovakia transitioning from communism to freedom. He will surely be painting himself as one of those more courageous people who was oh so badly suppressed by the evil alarmist aparatchiks in the New York Times - but he was still boldly writing almost the right stuff on his Dot Earth blog. And of course, people will be buying it because many of them have been, let's admit, even less courageous than Andrew Revkin. ;-) Most people simply see the alarmist whackos infiltrating all important places in the society, including Exxon, so they will surely respect the party line, won't they?

This is a line of reasoning that must be thought about seriously by the skeptics, too. You know, many of us are the ultimate "dissidents". But even when we're proven right and when our basic answer to the question "Is there a crisis?" is generally adopted, it won't mean that the former dissidents are going to influence everything in this social-scientific arena. The strategies that many of us have been using will continue to be questioned, and so on, and people like AR will almost certainly continue to be allowed by the atmosphere in the society to write about things like the environment. That's how it works.

So I would expect the skeptics to be more realistic about the abilities and desires of AR. It seems that many skeptics expect AR, because of some vague hints, to become a full-fledged skeptical convert and they're irritated that this dream of theirs is not going perfectly well. I don't expect AR to get transformed in this way. Instead, with all the immense respect to him, I see him as a typical member of the "merry coward" category that we have known in socialist Czechoslovakia. ;-)

Such people are playing the games so authentically that it's not possible to operationally distinguish what they mean seriously and what they don't: they may not know it themselves and you shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer this ill-defined question, either. But don't expect them to behave as 100% skeptics until the alarmist regime completely and safely collapses.

Please, plan your interactions with AR assuming reasonable expectations about his diversity of viewpoints in different contexts. ;-) You can get an OK stuff with him but you will never get it against his interests or career in NYT. Don't expect any extraordinary courage unless there is a reason to expect that AR thinks that the courage would pay off to him in some way.

I hope that Andrew Revkin is grateful that I have identified him to be what he is, instead of forcing him to play additional games about being something that he is not :-), and I am also sure that he understands that the "merry coward" category is not a real insult because it is just a description how relatively average people from the moral viewpoint - well, opportunist people - in all social classes - typically behave.




What Planetary Emergency?

Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York

Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.

Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.

Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.

Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.

Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.

Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.

Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."

Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger-all about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.

The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his own, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."

Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century, two factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.

The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:

Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3øC over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.

Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.

SOURCE




Many Democrats doubt Gore

Since 1997, Republicans have grown increasingly likely to believe media coverage of global warming is exaggerated, and that trend continues in the 2009 survey; however, this year marks a relatively sharp increase among independents as well. In just the past year, Republican doubters grew from 59% to 66%, and independents from 33% to 44%, while the rate among Democrats remained close to 20%.

Actually, if you look at the above graph the percent of Democrats who believe that the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated is at 22% this month, versus only 15% just weeks after An Inconvenient Truth was released at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2006. That represents a 46% increase in three years. Read all the data at Gallup.

SOURCE




Flying ice crushes US homes

Greenhouse or icehouse?



Spectacular footage has been captured of dozens of beachside properties being hit by large chunks of flying ice during a wild storm in the US. Gale force winds of up to 50km/h swept the ice from the sea and sent it crashing into homes around Bay County, Michigan, US media reported. Local police said massive mountains of ice had smashed windows and penetrated close to 4m deep inside some homes.

Authorities have so far evacuated 36 homes since the ice started building up on the shorefront on Sunday. Resident Tim Boutell told local media he and his wife had heard the screech of "metal on metal" as walls of ice pushed toward their home along the waterfront bay. "At about 9pm my wife, Beth, heard some noise and I kind of disregarded it until she went downstairs to peek outside, and she obviously screamed. "And then I looked out and saw the ice piled up and moving toward the house," Mr Boutell said.

SOURCE




Cold winds blow for future of green energy

They call North Dakota the "Saudi Arabia of wind energy".

The howling prairie gales that blow almost continually across this flat and empty state could, it has been estimated, light up a quarter of America. If there was one industry whose bright future looked assured, it was green energy, and particularly wind, which is widely regarded as the most promising alternative to fossil fuels. However, just as its fortunes soared last year, so they are on the wane now.

Encouraged by Barack Obama's support for green power and by soaring demand, DMI Industries, one of the world's two biggest manufacturers of wind turbine towers, undertook a $30 million expansion of its West Fargo factory last summer. But just months later, in a dramatic turnaround that has been repeated across the renewable energy industry, DMI had to lay off 20 per cent of its 430 staff after the credit crunch hit its customers and orders dried up to a trickle.

Rich Mattern, West Fargo's mayor, said he wouldn't have been surprised if the town's other major employer, a maker of construction vehicles, had been forced to sack staff, but not DMI. "They did the lay-offs on a Sunday afternoon. I knew some of those who lost their jobs and, quite frankly, I was shocked," said Rich Mattern, West Fargo's mayor. "It never dawned on me that a company like that would have lay-offs. I really believed this industry was bulletproof."

The 40,000-sq ft DMI factory, one of three run by the company, last year made more than 500 towers. Huge two-inch thick steel sheets are rolled into 15ft diameter cylinders and then welded into 270-ft high, cone shaped towers strong enough to cope with all weather conditions. The 130ft long fibreglass blades which are attached to each tower are made at another North Dakota company, which has also had to lay off workers.

Some of the DMI workforce had barely finished their training before they were fired. "This hit us fairly suddenly," said Phillip Christiansen, the general manager. Stefan Nilsson, DMI's Swedish president, stressed that every company in the wind power industry had suffered job losses. "It's just a question of whether it's been announced," he said. He would not say how much his company's order book had been damaged but said he said could understand why outsiders were so shocked at the layoffs. "So many positive things have been said about renewable energy, but when the banks have problems, it has an impact on us too," he said. Of the job losses, he said: "It's not something you want to do. We spent a lot of time hiring people and training them."

The recent rise and fall of wind and solar power (solar panel makers have also been hit badly) is as dramatic as in any area of the economy. After the US wind industry's capacity grew by 50 per cent - and some $17 billion - in 2008, trade organisations are now predicting it could shrink by 30 to 50 per cent this year. Around 18 banks and other lenders were financing wind and solar projects before the economic meltdown. Now, there are only four.

Both wind and solar power depend on subsidies. Barack Obama has called for a doubling of America's renewable energy production in three years and has earmarked a significant chunk of his $787 billion stimulus package for investment in clean fuel or energy efficiency. However, there is some unease as to whether he will be able to make good his intentions while industry experts say that green energy tax credits will only offset the worst effects of the orders freeze. The economic slowdown has dried up investment in cleaner energy to the point that analysts now say that its growth is no longer on track to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change.

Mr Nilsson said it was too early to tell whether the US president would "go cold on his passion for green fuel" but he conceded that politicians tended to pay more attention to his industry when oil prices were high. North Dakota, a conservative state bordering Canada whose population come from Nordic and German stock, has much riding on alternative energy. The second biggest corn-producing state, many of its farmers switched to ethanol only to be hit hard by falling oil prices.

Everyone in West Fargo is optimistic that investors will return and that, when they do, wind power will still be the energy of the future. "In the stimulus package, there's money for alternative energy - everybody realises that it's the way to go," said Mayor Mattern. "It's not like the Carter years when oil prices went down and they all forgot about renewable energy," he said. "Everybody, from my local university to Congress, has gone too far to let it drop."

SOURCE




Climate concerns fading in Australia as economy dives

Concern about climate change is slipping away as the economic crisis continues to bite, a poll shows. The proportion of people concerned about climate change has fallen from 90 per cent two years ago to 73 per cent, the poll found. While worries about global warming fade, anxiety about job security and falling asset prices is very high, the poll of 1,000 people found.

It also found the federal government faces an uphill battle in selling its emissions trading scheme, its main weapon in the fight against climate change. More than a third of those surveyed had not even heard of it, and fewer than one in 10 said they had a good understanding of the scheme. Just under half of the respondents, 49 per cent, said they had no understanding of emissions trading.

The poll was conducted in February by strategic consultancy firm Mobium Group.

SOURCE

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

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11 March, 2009

Accelerated sea-level rise?

I mentioned a few days ago a report that sea levels are rising faster than predicted by the IPCC. There is another such report just out here.

Below is an email on the subject from Professor Dr. Nils-Axel Morner [morner@pog.nu], a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics &Geodynamics at Stockholm University

Misused data! Satellite altimetry 1993-2000 was horizontal - the same data set + 2000-2003 was tilted. On top of the physical corrections (giving horizontallity) they added "personal correction" to fit IPCCs claims. What do we call this? If not falsification? See my scientific papers - best: Global and Planetary Change 62 (2008) 219-220.

Excerpt from the paper concerned below -- pointing out that the raw data on sea levels shows that they have in fact been flat. It is only the addition of various "corrections" -- some of which are quite arbitrary -- that suggests rising sea levels.

Comment on comment by Nerem et al. (2007) on "Estimating future sea level changes from past records"

by Nils-Axel Moerner

First let us clear up the origin of my Fig. 2 (in Moerner, 2004). It is a product of the CLS Company printed in MEDIAS (2000, Fig. 1.2; also available on the net at Aviso, 2000). My curve was a redrawing of this graph. This curve, spanning the time from October 1992 to April 2000, does not record any sea level rise; only a variability plus one (or more) ENSO signals.

That was the point of my picture. It should be noted that this graph includes the technical adjustments (including the drift factor of Mitchum, 2000, Fig. 10) illustrated by the lower arrow in Fig. 1. Later the same graph re-appears with a strong tilt (Aviso, 2003; cf. Leuliette et al., 2004; Moerner, 2005). Why is that?

It is because of the introduction of additional calibrations (Mitchum, 2000; Leuliette et al., 2004; Cazenave & Nerem, 2004) - and those "calibrations" are subjective interpretations (Fig. 1; upper arrow); not objective readings. Consequently, they are opinion-dependent. "We adopt the rate given by Douglas (1991,1995) of 1.8~0.1mm/yr", Mitchum (2000) states. This rate, however, is widely debated and far from generally accepted. Especially not in the geological sea level community (cf. Moerner, 2004, Fig. 4), where we realize that the tide gauges quite frequently are installed in unstable local position, and I quote (from Moerner et al., 2004): "Tide gauge records, however, do not provide simple and straight-forward measures of regional eustatic sea level. They are often (not to say usually) dominated by the effects of local compaction and local loading subsidence.

With this perspective, our multiple morphological and sedimentological records appear more reliable and conclusive" (cf. Moerner, 2007). This makes the requited "correction" for land motion at the tide gauge very delicate and subjective. The nice and interesting thing with the graph under discussion (Moerner, 2004, Fig. 2) is that it represents the readings before all these interpretational "corrections".

35.5m yr old global cooling caused by sharp decline in CO2

Comment on this nonsense at the foot of the article

A new research has found that prehistoric global cooling that started in Antarctica about 35.5 million years ago, was caused by a sharp drop in the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Even after the continent of Antarctica had drifted to near its present location, its climate was subtropical. Then, 35.5 million years ago, ice formed on Antarctica in about 100,000 years, which is an "overnight" shift in geological terms.

"Our studies show that just over thirty-five million years ago, 'poof,' there was an ice sheet where there had been subtropical temperatures before," said Matthew Huber, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University. "Until now, we haven't had much scientific information about what happened," he added.

Before the cooling occurred at the end of the Eocene epoch, the Earth was warm and wet, and even the north and south poles experienced subtropical climates. The dinosaurs were long gone from the planet, but there were mammals and many reptiles and amphibians. Then, as the scientists say, poof, this warm wet world, which had existed for millions of years, dramatically changed. Temperatures fell dramatically, many species of mammals as well as most reptiles and amphibians became extinct, and Antarctica was covered in ice and sea levels fell.

History records this as the beginning of the Oligocene epoch, but the cause of the cooling has been the subject of scientific discussion and debate for many years. The research team found before the event ocean surface temperatures near present-day Antarctica averaged 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius).

Mark Pagani, professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University, said that the research found that air and ocean surface temperatures dropped as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit during the transition. "Previous reconstructions gave no evidence of high-latitude cooling. Our data demonstrate a clear temperature drop in both hemispheres during this time," said Pagani.

To find the result, Huber used modern climate modeling tools to look at the prehistoric climate. The models were run on a cluster-type supercomputer on Purdue's campus. According to Huber, "We found that the likely culprit was a major drop in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially CO2." "From the temperature data and existing proxy records indicating a sharp drop in CO2 near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, we are establishing a link between the sea surface temperatures and the glaciation of Antarctica," he said.

SOURCE

Comment received from Rob Jones [rjones@asplundh.com.au]

The Alarmists will love this. The opening paragraph essentially claims that scientists have proof that CO2 drives temperature. Ass. Prof. Huber says, "Until now, we haven't had much scientific information..". So the reader is lead to conclude that this has all changed with this amazing new scientific discovery.. Reading on, curious to know what this "eureka" moment comprised of, the reader is expected to swallow this:

To find the result, Huber used modern climate modeling tools to look at the prehistoric climate. The models were run on a cluster-type supercomputer on Purdue's campus.. According to Huber, "We found that the likely culprit was a major drop in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially CO2."

AGW Alarmism continues to hang its hat on computer models.. and just to be sure, "modern" super-computers to boot! All they can confidently announce from the analysis using their multi-million dollar super-computer, is "we have found the likely culprit". a lay down misere! which seems to have been true of the recent way of Alarmism. Despite losing every trick (in the current debate on AGW) they win the hand. But they wont win the game!

This is just more flawed theories being reinforced by flawed assumptions programmed into flawed computer models with no scientific proof of cause and effect whatsoever.




The crumbling case for global warming

One young radical turned up at the Heartland Institute's climate change skeptics' conference in New York this week to declare that he had never witnessed so much hypocrisy. How, he asked the panelists of a session on European policy, could they sleep at night? Clearly puzzled, one of the panelists asked him with which parts of their presentations he disagreed. "Oh," he said "I didn't come here to listen to the presentations."

The conference - titled "Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?" - attracted close to 700 participants. Most of those I met displayed almost joy at being among people who dared to stand up to the mindless climate "consensus" and the refusal to debate, or even look at, the facts, as typified by that righteous young radical.

President Obama is considering a cap-and-trade system with which Canada would be forced to co-ordinate its own policies. The conference made clear how damaging and pointless such a policy would be.

Vaclav Klaus, the professorial president of both Czechoslovakia and the European Union, pointed out at the conference's first session on Sunday evening that the global political establishment was still in the grip of thinking reminiscent of the Communism under which he once lived. He noted that few if any politicians seemed even aware of, or interested in, either the shortcomings of officially cooked climate science, or the potential disasters of climate policy.

Professor Richard Lindzen, one of the world's leading climatologists, also stressed that climate alarmism was a political and not a scientific matter. Particular worrying, he said, was that various scientific bodies had been seized by alarmists, who now issued statements without polling the members. This played into the appeal to authority rather than science. He called climate modelling "unintelligent design" and global warming a "postmodern coup d'‚tat." He stressed that "Nature hasn't followed the models" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There has been no global warming for 10 or 15 years. Countering all the blather about Exxon's (former) support for Heartland that appeared in coverage of the conference by climate-change cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Guardian, he noted that skeptics in fact had minimal resources to rectify the incipient policy horrors.

Asked why the skeptics had so much trouble in presenting a unified front, Professor Lindzen stressed that there was no "skeptical solidarity." But Joseph Bast, head of the Heartland Institute, pointed out that such diversity was a sign of free inquiry, as opposed to bogus claims that the science was "settled."

The sessions indicated the huge potential costs of the Obama administration's commitment to cap and trade, regulation and the promotion of renewables, effectively rationing energy as a way of grabbing revenue. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who takes pride in having been dubbed a "climate criminal" by Greenpeace, noted that the political struggle had to keep the message simple. Voters should ask politicians one simple question: "Why do you want to raise my energy prices?" Since the one issue on which there truly is consensus is that Kyoto would have had little or no impact on global temperatures, it is a question for governments around the world, not least that of the government of Ontario, which has just introduced its draconian Green Energy Act.

Indur Goklany, an expert on globalization and a contributor to the IPCC, noted, using the UN's own figures, that global warming was by no means the threat conventionally portrayed. Indeed, the UN even acknowledged its benefits, although to establish that fact you had to read the documents "like a lawyer."

The session interrupted by the callow youth outlined the disaster of the EU's emissions trading system, and of its climate change policies in general. The good news, as Benny Peiser of John Moores University in Liverpool, and editor of the influential CCNet science network, suggested, was that the green movement was collapsing in Europe and becoming increasingly unpopular, as its enormous costs and minimal results were becoming apparent. The attempt to "rebrand" Europe as the "Environmental Union" had fallen apart and was now causing increasing discord both between and within countries.

Europe was now desperate for the United States, China and India to share its self-inflicted pain in time for the next great UN expense-fest in Copenhagen, but it was unlikely to happen.

One of the most devastating presentations came from Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economist who indicated how Spain's "leadership" in subsidizing wind and solar power - which had been praised by President Obama - had produced enormous costs, no benefits and was now falling apart. "Green jobs" were calculated not only to cost around half-a-million Euros a pop, they came at the expense of two "normal" jobs. And they were now disappearing as the renewables bubble collapsed.

A questioner asked why European governments continued to promote such destructive and pointless policies. Roger Helmer, a member of the European Parliament, said it was a matter of inertia, plus the fact that there was no "Plan B."

The task of the brave skeptics who appeared at Heartland this week is to find out how to ditch Plan A. There could be no better stimulus to the global economy.

SOURCE




A freezing legacy for our children

An email from James A. Marusek, Nuclear Physicist and Engineer, retired U. S. Department of Navy

There is a lot of talk these days about the legacy we will leave our children and our grandchildren. When I stare into the immediate future, I see a frightening legacy caked in darkness and famine. Instead of intelligently preparing, we find ourselves whittling away this precious time chasing fraudulent theories. We have a decade to prepare, but have a misguided sense of direction and urgency.

Climate change is primarily driven by nature. It has been true in the days of my father and his father and all those that came before us. Because of science, not junk science, we have slowly uncovered some of the fundamental mysteries of nature. Our Milky Way galaxy is awash with cosmic rays. These are high speed charged particles that originate from exploding stars. Because they are charged, their travel is strongly influenced by magnetic fields. Our sun produces a magnetic field that extends to the edges of our solar system. This field deflects many of the cosmic rays away from Earth. But when the sun goes quiet (minimal sunspots), this field collapses inward allowing cosmic rays to penetrate deeper into our solar system. As a result, far greater numbers collide with Earth and penetrate down into the lower atmosphere where they ionize small particles of moisture (humidity) forming them into water droplets that become clouds. Low level clouds reflect sunlight back into space. An increase in Earth's cloud cover produce a global drop in temperature. These periods of quiet sun are referred to as Grand Minima. The Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) and the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) are examples.

During a Grand Minimum the Earth begins to slowly cool. The start of the planting season is delayed and in the fall early frost limits the harvest. Earth's abundant bounty is put on hold and starvation takes its ghastly grip. Historian, John D. Post, referred to the last Grand Minima, the Dalton Minimum, as the "last great subsistence crisis in the Western world". With the cold came massive crop failures, food riots, famine and disease.

Several scientists including David C. Hathaway (NASA), William Livingston & Matthew Penn (National Solar Observatory). Lev I. Dorman and his team of Russian and Israeli scientists, Khabibullo Abdusamatov (Russian Academy of Science) have forecasted that the sun will enter a Grand Minima a decade from now in Solar Cycle 25. A few scientists including David C. Archibald (Australia) and M. A. Clilverd (Britain) have warned this might even begin in Solar Cycle 24. We are at the transition into Solar Cycle 24 and this cycle has already shown itself to be unusually quiet. The number of spotless days (days without sunspots) during this solar minimum appears to be tracking 3 times the typical number observed during the last century (Solar Cycles 16-23).

There are some that urge North America follow Europe's lead. On January 13, 2009, the European Parliament adopted a regulation dramatically restricting the number of pesticides allowed. This move is based on the precautionary principle and on junk science. According to Dr. Colin Ruscoe, chairman of the British Crop Production Council, "If farmers are forced to stop using certain products, crop yields would halve. There would be such huge losses in the yields of potatoes, carrots, peas and parsnips that it would become uneconomical to farm them."

Is this the kind of lead we should be following? Europe is also leading in another area - in its opposition to genetically modified (GM) crops. In Europe, environmentalist have driven fear into the hearts of their citizens by labeling GM food as "Frankenfood". In our country, we have been using GM crops for almost two decades without any ill effects. GM crops hold the promise of helping us survive the next Grand Minimum by offering crops that can grow under extreme weather conditions. North America is currently a leader in this technology. Should we follow Europe's lead and ban GM crops? And in ten years from now when the next solar cycle begins, if the sun goes quiet, who will comfort the starving children who cry out in the middle of the night for a small piece of bread? These will be our children. So what legacy will we leave behind?




Australian conservatives in luck as White House guru backs carbon delay

The Coalition and business groups have received unexpected backing for their argument that a recession is no time to introduce emissions trading -- from US President Barack Obama's top economics guru. In a previously unreported academic paper posted on the Harvard University website last August, Lawrence Summers argues that "expenditures for climate change will be far easier to make in economies where per-capita income is growing". Mr Summers, a former president of Harvard and treasury secretary under former US president Bill Clinton, is currently head of Mr Obama's National Economic Council and works in the White House.

His argument chimes with the position put by Opposition emissions trading spokesman Andrew Robb and Australian Industry Group chief Heather Ridout. However, it is starkly at odds with the determination of Kevin Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong to have an emissions trading scheme in place by next year, despite the downturn.

Mr Summers urges policymakers to create "reference points" for the beginning of the economic losses caused by emissions trading, not just for greenhouse levels themselves. He argues that, in an economic expansion, greenhouse abatement measures will be seen as less painful because they will mean the sacrifice of income growth, rather than of real income. "Prime ministers and presidents can't hope to sacrifice GDP for climate control without hearing strong cries of protest from those experiencing loss-aversion on their incomes," Mr Summers writes. "In growth economies, matters will be easier, because the cuts will come against what would have been their incomes, a moving and hence more fuzzy reference point."

Ms Ridout yesterday reiterated her call for the ETS to be delayed until 2012. "We want the delay for reasons such as the impact of the global financial crisis on the preparedness of business to take action and the scale of the administrative task," she said. "The current timetable is too onerous and the global financial crisis is hampering the ability of businesses to prepare and finance the major emissions reduction strategies that are required."

Mr Robb said the Coalition would examine the Government's draft legislation, released yesterday, but said its version of an ETS was flawed. "There are many in the Labor caucus ... who are deeply disturbed about the direction the Government is taking this, especially at a time when we have got the economy under such enormous pressure," he said.

SOURCE

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

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10 March, 2009

THE EVIDENCE IS THAT THE OCEAN IS COOLING, NOT WARMING

An email below from Craig Loehle [Craigloehl@aol.com]

Hansen's theory that CO2 forcing is hiding in the oceans can't be true if the oceans are cooling, as my latest paper shows (Energy & Environment Vol. 20, No. 1&2, 2009).

Excerpt below:

Cooling of the global ocean since 2003

By Craig Loehle, Ph.D. National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc. (NCASI)

ABSTRACT

Ocean heat content data from 2003 to 2008 (4.5 years) were evaluated for trend. A trend plus periodic (annual cycle) model fit with R2 = 0.85. The linear component of the model showed a trend of -0.35 (~0.2) x 1022 Joules per year. The result is consistent with other data showing a lack of warming over the past few years.

1.0 INTRODUCTION

There is great interest in detecting rates of temperature change in the earth system. It has been suggested (e.g., Pielke 2003) that changes in ocean heat content should be particularly informative. A recent study (Lyman et al. 2006) claimed to find rapid cooling of the ocean between 2003 and 2005, but it was later determined that data from certain instruments caused a substantial cool bias in the result (Willis et al. 2007, 2008a; Wijffels et al. 2008). A corrected and longer dataset has now become available to redo this analysis.....

4.0 DISCUSSION

It has previously been estimated by Willis et al. (2004) that from 1993 to 2003 the upper ocean gained 8.1 (~1.4) x 1022 J of heat. This study estimates a loss since then of from 0.668 to 2.48 x 1022 J, or 19.4% (up to 31%) of the gain of the prior decade. Ishii and Kimoto (In Press) also show a bias-corrected cooling from 2003 to 2006. On an annual basis, this is a cooling of 0.35 x 1022 J compared to 0.81 x 1022 J warming for 1993 to 2003 (Willis et al. 2004) and slightly less for the same period to 700 m in Ishii and Kimoto (in press). Dominguez et al. (2008) show a 700 m depth annual warming from 1961 to 2003 of 0.38 x 1022 J. Thus the estimate of cooling in the present study is not out of line with past results. It is also consistent with satellite and surface instrumental records that do not show a warming trend over recent years. Another bias-corrected estimate (Gouretski and Koltermann 2007) is based on depth profiles too different to make a comparison. By comparison, Willis et al. (2008a) do not find any significant trend (slight negative trend) for 2003 to 2006, but had a shorter record and performed their trend analysis using simple annual means. Heat loss from the ocean has been estimated to also have occurred in the 1980s (Ishii and Kimoto, In Press; Gouretski and Koltermann 2007; Levitus et al. 2001). The data also indicate an interesting damping with time of the annual fluctuations in heat gain and loss (Fig. 1b). While the current study takes advantage of a globally consistent data source, a 4.5-year period of ocean cooling is not unexpected in terms of natural fluctuations. The problem of instrumental drift and bias is quite complicated, however, (Domingues et al. 2008; Gouretski and Koltermann 2007; Wijffels et al. 2008; Willis et al. 2004, 2008a) and it remains possible that the result of the present analysis is an artifact.




Heartland climate conference-2: session one

by Bob Carter

The opening session of the Heartland-2 Conference opened with a bang here in Manhattan tonight [Sunday evening March 8, 2009]. With registrations of around 700 persons, the conference is almost twice the size of its predecessor last year. The audience for the two opening plenary talks, held over dinner, included an eclectic mixture of scientists, engineers, economists, policy specialists, government representatives and media reporters.

In welcoming delegates, and opening the conference, President of the Heartland Institute Joe Bast also launched two new publications. The first, by Anthony Watts, is a summary of his extensive studies of the weather stations at which U.S. surface temperatures are measured ("Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable"), which have revealed that many stations are scandalously poorly sited for their intended purpose. The second, "The Skeptic's Handbook", by Joanne Nova from West Australia, is a succinct and well illustrated briefing paper that summarizes accurately the evidence against dangerous human-caused warming in a humorous and easily understood format.

The first Plenary Address was given by President Vaclav Klaus, who is President of both the Czech Republic and (for a 6 month current term) the European Union. His talk was greeted, both before and after, with standing ovations. In response to a question, he reported a just-released Czech poll, which shows that only 11% of persons questioned in a recent poll believe that man has a significant influence in warming the global climate.

The President commenced his talk by commenting that little change had occurred in the global warming debate since his talk, 12 months earlier, at the Heartland-1 conference. He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a na‹ve and uninformed person. The environmentalists say that the planet must be saved, but from whom and from what? "In reality", the President commented, "we have to save it, and us, from them".

Klaus reported his discouragement at participating in meetings with other senior politicians at Davos and within the EC. Here, he finds that not one other head of state who will make common cause in support of a rational assessment of the scientific evidence. Instead, all believe that the summaries provided by the IPCC represent the scientific "truth" on global warming.

But the climate data do not support the theory of human causation; the IPCC summaries therefore do not represent science, but instead environmental politics and activism. As a result, large and highly organized rent seeking bureaucracies and groups have emerged, and they further propagate the climate alarmism that is now in their self-interest.

President Klaus professed to be puzzled by the environmentalists' approach to technical progress. It as if they "want to stop economic progress and take mankind centuries back", he said. Applying their ethic of "saving the world", western electorates are being asked for the first time in history to abandon successful current technologies before new technologies have been developed to replace them. Klaus stressed that there is no known, feasible way in which modern technological society can be run based on present sources of renewable, clean, green energy.

The second Plenary Address was delivered by Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT, an acknowledged world leader in atmospheric physics and a doyen of meteorological science. Dr Lindzen started by making the important observation that being skeptical about dangerous human-caused global warming does not make one a good scientist, and nor does endorsing global warming necessarily make one a bad scientist.

He then pointed out the professional difficulties that are raised for many skeptics when scientists whose research they respect nonetheless endorse global warming. In most such cases, however, the science that such persons do is not about global warming in the strict sense. It's just that supporting global warming makes their life, and especially their funding life, easier.

Thus, it is a particular problem for young scientists to oppose the prevailing alarmist orthodoxy, because to do so is to cruel their chances of receiving research funding. For as long as it is the AGW spin that attracts the research funds, for so long will there be a strong disincentive for most scientists to question the hypothesis in public.

Lindzen commented that the politicization of the AGW issue has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science. Most funding that goes to global warming would not be provided were it not for the climate scare. It has therefore become standard to include in any research proposal the effect of presumed AGW on your topic, quite irrespective of whether it has any real relevance or not.

Lindzen asserted that it boils down to a matter of scientific logic against authority. The global warming movement has skilfully co-opted sources of authority, such as the IPCC and various scientific academies. For instance, over a period of 20 years, the US Academy of Science has had a backdoor route for the election of environmentalists as Members of the Academy. The success of this tactic is indicated by the fact that the current President of the Academy (Ralph Cicerone) was elected that way and is a strong environmentalist.

But in giving an endorsement of alarm about climate change, the NAS, as well as similar societies in other countries, has never polled their own expert membership. Rather, the pro-alarm policy statements that are issued by various professional societies express the views of only the activist few, who often control the governing Council.

Despite the manifold problems of combating the alarmist climate message, Dr Lindzen concluded his talk with the rousing observation that in time the climate rationalist cause will win. "When it comes to global warming hysteria", he said, "neither gross ignorance nor even grosser dishonesty has been in short supply. But we will win this debate, for we are right and they are wrong".

During an extended question and answer session after the conclusion of the two plenary addresses, Drs Klaus and Lindzen were in close agreement about two things. The first, is that global warming hysteria is being fomented as part of an environmentalist ideology; it is a politically organized movement. The grip that this hysteria now has on public opinion is explained partly by the fact that there is no equivalent, politically organized movement to mount a defense of sound science. Instead, there is simply a collection of persons who are united mainly by their common affront at the gross abuse of science that is going on.

The second common viewpoint was expressed in response to the question "What arguments are the most effective to promulgate the skeptics' cause of building policy, not on authority, IPCC or otherwise, but on sound science".

Both President Klaus and Dr Lindzen agreed that the most important arguments were (i) that sound science demonstrates that human increases in carbon dioxide are not going to cause dangerous global warming, and (ii) that a thorough cost-benefit analysis must be applied to all potential policy options.

For those on all sides of the argument accept that the Kyoto Protocol, despite its high cost, will do nothing towards measurably reducing global temperature; and the public need to be informed that the same is true also for the more ambitious carbon dioxide cuts mooted under cap and trade legislation. If taxpayers are to fund the operation, then it is only fair that they be told that the considerable pain, which will run to many trillions of dollars, will be for no measurable gain.

It was not expected that new science would be presented at the opening Plenary Session of Heartland-2. What participants got, instead, were inspirational messages delivered by two inspirational leaders of the climate rationalist cause.

SOURCE




Monday Morning at the Heartland ICCC - Tom McClintock, Lawrence Solomon, and Some Real Science

We're working hard here. We had to be up early and ready for things to start over breakfast at 7 this morning. There were two keynotes over breakfast, and then we split into tracks; I was in a "science" track and encountered some interesting things which I'll enumerate below.

The first morning speaker was Congressman Tom McClintock; Mr. McClintock was long a lonely but stalwart conservative in the California state assembly, and this past November he won a close and hotly-contested race and became a freshman Congressman. Moe will be having more about this later, and he managed to secure an interview with Mr. McClintock - that's being processed. He mostly noted the policy idiocies that California has imposed on itself that are having catastrophic effects. He humorously noted that as a 3rd grader on a 1964 trip to a natural history museum, he noted from the exhibits that the climate does change over time - and he wonders why Al Gore gets the credit rather than him.

But his descriptions of the way California has been blazing away (on full auto) at its own feet has been horrid to watch. He cited the example of the electric utility in the small mountain city of Truckhee that had just contracted with a coal-burning utility in Utah for electricity at $35 per megawatt-hour - only to have the state greens jump in and force them out of that deal and into one that was "greener" but will cost $65 per megawatt-hour. He finally noted that with all this and now sharply higher taxes (on top of already-high rates), California is losing people at a frightening rate. He cited the long-cited metric that the flow has gotten to be so one-sided that the UHaul rental rate to take a truck OUT of California is now six or seven times the rate to take a truck in.

The next keynote was given by Canadian journalist and environmentalist (!!) Lawrence Solomon. He noted something that hit home to me, since I also see quite a bit of the developing world (particularly sub-Saharan Africa) - that Kyoto compliance is a huge environmental destroyer in the developing world.. mainly because that's where those "offsets" that greens buy are "deployed." For example, one of the largest methods of "doing offsets" is to plant eucalyptus plantations in warmer climates; eucalyptus is a fast-growing tree that is prized as a carbon sink. However, to create these plantations, farmers are often evicted from their land (usually without "just compensation"), and old growth forests are clear-cut to make room for eucalyptus plantations. This to me is a stark case of "out of sight, out of mind" detachedness.

He's actually a big opponent of hydroelectric projects on similar grounds; for example, the construction of the (in)famous "Three Gorges" Dam in China displaced millions of people and flooded an immense area of very fertile land. In his view, hydro is no longer economically-viable - because all of the "good sites" for hydro have already been used. The irony is that the "Kyoto subsidies" are tilting the playing field, and making high-impact hydro "viable" again.

He noted that during the 1980s, large labor unions began to develop a strong interest in "environmental issues" - mainly as a method of slowing the erosion in the membership. He also noted that during the 1990s, large "foundations" moved into the space and became "pro-active" - actively working to set the agenda and force policies.

He concluded by noting that polling data shows that when people hear - at least twice - that there is a continuing debate, they quickly become skeptics; this is proving to be true in both Canada and in the United States. He noted that the 11% belief rate in the Czech Republic is due to continual "education" on the subject from the President himself. As he concluded, "We need to clone Vaclav Klaus."

Since he's Canadian, I asked him the Q&A to tell the audience about Hydro Quebec. The short take is that this was a Quebec-nationalist thing back in the early 1980s, with the goal of energy independence for Quebec via huge hydro projects up in James Bay. Vermont is heavily dependent on this power. At first, the enlightened people liked it, mainly because (back in the late 1980s) it meant that we didn't need nuclear power because of it. But when it emerged that (see above) the flooding was driving large numbers of Cree Indians off their land, the enlightened people turned 180 on HQ. The long-term contracts into eastern North American are expiring, and the new rates will be market-based and much higher. Keep an eye on the Hydro Quebec story in the years ahead - I guarantee that you WILL hear more about this soon.

After that, we broke into smaller sessions; I went to a climatology session that was very good (probably the best science session on the schedule), and I wanted to be sure to get this report out this morning since there are some things in here to which some of our reader-writers can contribute.

Tom Segalstad from Oslo University (Norway) gave a very interesting talk on carbon isotopes and mass-balance modeling. I'll provide just a few interesting highlights. He noted that the IPCC models treat sea water as being completely