   GREENIE WATCH -- MIRROR Warmist crooks above: Keith "One tree" Briffa; Michael "Bristlecone" Mann; James "data distorter" Hansen |
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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7 November, 2009
Experts say that fears surrounding climate change are overblown
Alarming predictions that climate change will lead to the extinction of hundreds of species may be exaggerated, according to Oxford scientists. They say that many biodiversity forecasts have not taken into account the complexities of the landscape and frequently underestimate the ability of plants and animals to adapt to changes in their environment. “The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed. We’re going to lose five or six species due to climate change, not hundreds,” said Professor Kathy Willis, a long-term ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the article.
Professor Willis warned that alarmist reports were leading to ill-founded biodiversity policies in government and some major conservation groups. She said that climate change has become a “buzz word” that is taking priority while, in practice, changes in human use of land have a greater impact on the survival of species. “I’m certainly not a climate change denier, far from it, but we have to have sound policies for managing our ecosystems,” she said.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature backed the article, saying that climate change is “far from the number-one threat” to the survival of most species. “There are so many other immediate threats that, by the time climate change really kicks in, many species will not exist any more,” said Jean Christophe Vie, deputy head of the IUCN species program, which is responsible for compiling the international Redlist of endangered species. He listed hunting, overfishing, and destruction of habitat by humans as more critical for the majority of species.
However, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds disagreed, saying that climate change was the single biggest threat to biodiversity on the planet. “There’s an absolutely undeniable affect that’s happening now,” said John Clare, an RSPB spokesman. “There have been huge declines in British sea birds.”
The article, published today in the journal Science, reviews recent research on climate change and biodiversity, arguing that many simulations are not sufficiently detailed to give accurate predictions. In particular, the landscape is often described at very low resolution, not taking into account finer variations in vegetation and altitude that are vital predictors for biodiversity.
In one analysis of the likelihood of survival of alpine plant species in the Swiss Alps, the landscape was depicted with a 16km by 16km (10 miles by 10 miles) grid scale. This model predicted that all suitable habitats for alpine plants would have disappeared by the end of the century. When the simulation was repeated with a 25m by 25m (82ft by 82ft) scale, the model predicted that areas of suitable habitat would remain for all plant species.
The article suggests that migration to new regions and changes in living patterns of species would take place but that actual extinction would be rare.
Other studies comparing predictions of extinction rates with actual extinction rates have come to similar conclusions. According to a high-profile paper published in the journal Nature in 2004, up to 35 per cent of bird species would be extinct by 2050 due to changes in climate. To be on track to meet this figure, Professor Keith Bennett, head of geography at Queen’s University Belfast, calculated that about 36 species would have to have become extinct each year between 2004 and 2008. In reality, three species of bird became extinct.
He said that many species are far more versatile than some prediction models give them credit for. “If it gets a couple of degrees warmer than they’re comfortable with, they don’t just die, they move,” he said.
SOURCE
All hope is lost for Copenhagen climate treaty, British officials say
A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.
British officials preparing for next month’s UN summit in Copenhagen said the best that could be hoped for was that national leaders would make “political agreements” on emission cuts and payments to help poor countries to adapt to climate change. These agreements would be non-binding, however, and could later be revised or rescinded by national parliaments.
At pre-summit talks in Barcelona, the officials said the final agreement would not emerge until at least six months after the Copenhagen summit, which ends on December 17. They said they hoped another meeting would be convened by next December to allow leaders to sign the treaty.
The admission that no treaty will be signed at Copenhagen marks the failure of the process agreed at a UN meeting in Bali in December 2007, when industrialised countries agreed to deliver a binding climate-change agreement within two years. The delay has angered developing countries, which say they are already suffering from man-made climate change. The Global Humanitarian Forum, based in Geneva, has estimated that more than 300,000 people are killed each year by climate change, nearly all of them in poor countries.
Delegates from 190 countries are now trying to agree a new timetable for signing a treaty but it is likely to be vague and contain no clear deadline. Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, told the House of Commons yesterday that little progress was being made in Barcelona, where delegates are discussing more than the 1,000 remaining disagreements over wording. He said: “The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well. We would have preferred a full legal treaty, it has to be said. I think the important thing about the agreement we now seek in December is that while it may be a political agreement it must lead, on a very clear timetable, to a legally binding treaty.”
Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission’s negotiator on climate change, said in Barcelona that the absence of commitment from the United States on emission cuts was a key factor contributing to the delay, although other countries were also to blame. He said that without a treaty the EU would agree to cut its 1990 emissions by only 20 per cent by 2020, whereas with a treaty it would agree to a 30 per cent cut. Cuts of 25-40 per cent are needed by developed countries if a dangerous rise in global temperatures is to be avoided, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-appointed group of more than 2,000 scientists.
China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has also failed to announce targets. It has promised to cut carbon dioxide emisissions per unit of GDP but has not said by how much.
Benedict Dempsey, Save the Children’s humanitarian policy officer, said: “The cost of any delay to a climate deal will be counted in children’s lives. Save the Children estimates that 250,000 children could be killed by climate change next year. “Negotiators must realise that the world’s poorest communities can’t afford to wait.”
Joss Garman, of Greenpeace UK, said the EU should put more pressure on the US to agree targets. Copenhagen was the best chance to slash emissions, he said, but added “politicians seem determined to blow it”. He said that the US, influenced by “Big Carbon special interests”, was “a dead weight” on the talks.
SOURCE
The Quiet Death of the Kyoto Protocol
Reading the climate-change news in recent weeks, one might wonder who won the last election. The Obama administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol (ensuring it will expire), adopted some of former President George W. Bush’s key positions in international climate negotiations, and demurred when asked about reports that the president has decided to skip the December climate summit in Copenhagen. United Nations climate negotiator Yvo de Boer has concluded that it is “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive climate treaty—which also describes the once-fond hopes for passage of domestic climate legislation this year—or even in Obama’s first term.
This is not how it was supposed to be. Among all the things that President Bush did to infuriate environmentalists, none was more inexcusable than his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and it was assumed that Obama’s election meant a triumphant American return to the Kyoto fold—symbolically, at least, if not literally. Backed by large majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama was widely expected to quickly pass a Kyoto-style domestic cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, positioning America to take the moral high ground in Copenhagen, thus luring (or compelling) China and India to accept emissions targets.
The story, at least on the international side, is complicated by our actual history with Kyoto, which is not as simple as some greens would portray it today. Rejection of Kyoto—in 1997, three years before Bush’s election—was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on climate policy; the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against its basic tenets, and the Clinton-Gore administration never submitted it for ratification. (Even a little-known state legislator from Illinois named Barack Obama voted to condemn Kyoto and prohibit the state from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.)
The treaty’s fundamental flaws were well understood: It set very ambitious—and costly—targets for the United States while allowing emissions from the developing world to continue to rise unchecked. (And indeed today, despite Kyoto’s ratification, China has become the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.) Americans don’t mind contributing to a solution, but Kyoto asked a lot of sacrifice for little reward.
Despite that moment of bipartisan consensus on Kyoto, the election of George W. Bush quickly made opposition to Kyoto indefensible among all right-thinking environmentalists; Kyoto’s genuine structural flaws were excused, if not forgotten, by all but a few. And instead of it being Al Gore’s fault for agreeing a pie-in-the-sky treaty in defiance of a unanimous vote of the Senate, Kyoto’s demise was blamed on Bush for his more forthright refusal in 2001 to seek ratification. This is natural in politics, of course, but the cost was a loss of focus on the need for effective alternatives to Kyoto.
While Barack Obama did not explicitly campaign on a pledge to ratify Kyoto, his hope-and-change message was clear: Elect me and America will no longer be an outcast on climate policy; I will lead the charge for a new, Kyoto-style agreement in Copenhagen. And President-elect Obama’s first statement on climate change was a bold pledge: “Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.” In retrospect, the commitment seems a bit vague, but his audience has no doubt what he meant. As one British newspaper breathlessly reported:
Prospects for success in the world's struggle to combat global warming have been transformed at a stroke after U.S. President-elect Barack Obama made it clear that America would play its full part in renewing the Kyoto Protocol climate-change treaty. His words, in effect, brought an end to eight years of willful climate obstructionism by the administration of George Bush, who withdrew the U.S. from Kyoto in March 2001, thus doing incalculable damage to the efforts of the international community to construct a unified response to the threat.
Eleven months later, the dream of a successful global climate policy seems as far out of reach as ever, and America continues to have profound disagreements over climate policy with much of the world. In the good old days of the bad old Bush administration, it was easy to paper over the profoundly complicated and difficult obstacles to effective national and international climate agreements; “Blame Bush!” was a cry greens could all rally around. Today, the inconvenient truth of the matter is harder to hide, and to a surprising degree, the rallying cry for the rest of the world remains “Blame America!”
How did we reach this point, less than a year into the Obama administration? There are different dynamics at work: undue deference to Congress on domestic legislation, and insufficient leverage in international negotiations to overcome vastly dissimilar national interests and abilities.
As he has with a number of key issues, President Obama has let Congress largely take the lead in crafting domestic climate legislation—to his regret, one must imagine, seeing the results. The bill that passed the House by the narrowest of margins was a monstrosity by any measure, hailed even by its most fervent supporters as a detestable mess. Progress in the Senate has been far slower, and it is increasingly clear that no bill will pass this year. Hopes for action on climate will have carry over to 2010—a contentious election year, at a time when unemployment may well top 10 percent and polling suggests that public concern about climate change is falling dramatically. The prospects for a bill in 2010 are not good—and Democrats are likely to lose seats in those elections, leaving them poorly positioned to pass legislation in 2011–12 as the next presidential election approaches.
Less than a year into Obama’s first term, it seems plausible that no climate bill will pass before 2013 at the earliest, and that the Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012 without a comprehensive successor agreement to take its place.
Having promised to lead the Copenhagen negotiations to a successful conclusion, Obama now finds himself in a bind: Unable to get a bill through Congress, he doesn’t want to repeat Gore’s mistake of letting Europeans pressure him into signing a treaty the Senate won’t ratify while sanctioning unrestricted emissions from the developing world. Since treaties require the support of two-thirds of the Senate, ratification will be more difficult than passage of domestic legislation. So the administration’s draft implementing agreement submitted to the UN in May specified that emissions reductions would be subject to “conformity with domestic law.” In other words, whatever is agreed to here doesn’t mean a thing if the Senate doesn’t agree. As Jonathan Pershing, a top State Department negotiator, remarked at the recent climate negotiators’ meeting in Bangkok. “We are not going to be part of an agreement we cannot meet.”
This position protects Obama from the danger of getting ahead of the Senate—while infuriating Europe and developing nations that consider strong American action on climate long overdue. As an anonymous European Commission official remarked in September, climate negotiations are “not going well”:
European Union officials have grown increasingly frustrated at the U.S. stance, saying it has fallen short on both its level of ambition to reduce emissions and on offering aid to developing nations. “So far, we thought the basic problem was the Chinese and the Indians. But now I think the problem appears to lie most clearly with the U.S.”
The China-India problem remains unsolved as well, and Obama clearly is not blind to the serious political, economic, and environmental problems with any treaty that reaffirms Kyoto’s sanction of unrestricted emissions from developing countries. Climate advocates have long argued that the key to overcoming developing world resistance to emissions limits is American leadership; if we go first, China and India will follow. Skeptics note that what we gain in credibility we may lose in leverage needed to force a deal in Copenhagen. In any case, Congress’s inaction—and its continued concern about trade competitiveness questions—has forced Obama, in effect, to take the Bush position: No new treaty without developing world participation. As NPR recently reported, Kyoto will be allowed to expire after 2012. “The United States never ratified the agreement because it doesn't require any action from the developing world, including China, the world’s largest emitter. The Bush administration considered that a fatal flaw. And so does the Obama White House.”
This is the crux of the argument: The crucial feature of the deal that Gore struck in Kyoto was its exemption of the developing world from emissions reduction obligations. Without that concession, the developing world would never have accepted the treaty—but with it, the treaty was almost worthless (particularly since, as a political matter, that provision precluded American participation). This was the fatal flaw of Kyoto—and, having established that exemption, it will be doubly hard to persuade developing nations to undo it.
Obama apparently hopes to finesse these issues by reaching bilateral agreements with China and India, although critics complain that doing so would potentially undermine the multilateral architecture of the prospective Copenhagen treaty. But recent reports that no bilateral agreement will be announced during Obama’s visit to China in November suggest that a deal by Copenhagen is unlikely. China and India are both under enormous international pressure to accept emissions limits—and even greater domestic pressure to maintain a strong rate of economic growth. Both countries have so far firmly resisted calls for binding emissions caps, although President Hu Jintao has said that China will cut its emissions relative to economic growth—that is, the greenhouse-gas “intensity” of the Chinese economy, not total emissions—by a “notable” margin by 2020.
Meanwhile, to its credit, the administration is taking a surprisingly hard line with developing countries. State Department envoy Todd Stern recently called on developing nations to make significant, binding commitments to emissions reductions, remarking: "We don’t in the U.S. deny that we have real historical responsibility but the IEA [International Energy Agency] in Paris will tell you that 97 percent of the growth in emissions between now and 2050 will come from the developing world. The U.S. has to act and the EU and Japan but also the developing countries. It’s the only way to solve this problem."
This is strong stuff—and it runs contrary to much conventional liberal wisdom in the United States, Europe, and particularly in the developing world, which holds that the nations most responsible for past emissions should be primarily responsible for mitigation. If climate change is a moral issue (as most liberals insist), then the polluter responsible for past emissions should be on the hook for their consequences today; if we see the issue purely in pragmatic terms, then responsibility must be shared significantly with the major developing economies. The insistence that developing nations make credible commitments to emissions reductions has been a core conservative principle on climate; seeing Obama pick up that torch is encouraging—it is vital to crafting any true, effective global agreement—but it remains to be seen whether any combination of pressure and persuasion will be sufficient to strike a deal on those terms.
What should we make of the surprising Bushification of these aspects of Obama’s climate policy? It is too soon to say. It is easy to see these events as a series of failures, yet they may still prove to be the first steps to success if the president is committed to crafting real alternatives. Certainly the first step to success lies in rejecting the failed approaches of the past—and inadvertently or not, Obama has moved further in that direction than might have been expected a year ago. On the international side, he has taken a surprisingly reformist stance. But building a new architecture for domestic and international climate policy would be an enormous undertaking.
Doing so would require a willingness to challenge the cherished assumptions of many environmental advocates, a risky proposition for a president who has been increasingly forced to rely on his base for support. Yet the potential rewards are also great: if ever an issue cried out for a sensible, centrist approach, it is climate change.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the President Bush’s climate policy was not its substantive flaws (although there were many), but rather that the president was such an inarticulate advocate for it. The president’s greatest power is the bully pulpit, and if he uses it wisely, he can change the way America, and even the world, thinks about a complex issue like climate change. President Bush had that opportunity and squandered it; President Obama is better positioned to tackle the task, but healthcare and other matters have, so far, come first. The question is whether, as the president retrenches following a disappointing first year in office, he will be willing to take a gamble on a new approach to climate.
The odds against that scenario are tall; the smart—or at least, natural—political move for Obama would be to simply blame Republicans for blocking the climate bill, an easy charge to make, and both parties appear willing to take their positions to the voters. Yet a new approach to climate policy will require a willingness to somehow rise above politics to challenge conventional liberal wisdom on key aspects of climate policy. Doing so would not be easy for Obama in this intensely partisan time. But with polls indicating dwindling support for him from independents and Republicans, a creative, centrist approach to climate could be the key to turning that trend around.
There is a credible body of serious, creative work exploring different approaches to both domestic and international climate change issues; if, in the face of gridlock in Congress and the collapse of the Kyoto system, Obama chooses to make this issue a top priority, a fresh start on climate policy could still earn bipartisan support. Alas, what we have heard so far from President Obama is merely a pledge to “redouble” his efforts to strike a deal in Copenhagen—or, at least, to create a “framework for progress”—without acknowledging the genuinely thorny issues that have precluded agreement to date. Admitting failure is the first step to success—yet it violates the first rule of politics. Obama campaigned on a promise to change politics as usual in Washington and around the world. Can he do it on climate? Some commentators argue that the only problem with the legislation being considered by Congress is that it lacks sufficient votes for passage; in fact, its political problems are rooted in its structural flaws, not vice versa. An acknowledgment from President Obama that a new approach is needed would start a fresh conversation on climate that is long overdue.
SOURCE
Red-faced Times abandons fishy eco ad
The Times newspaper says it won't be repeating an advertisement that contained a false and misleading piece of environmental alarmism. The advert, part of a series boasting its eco-credentials, claimed that the world's oceans would be free of fish by 2048. But the prediction was debunked when it was made three years ago, and the academic responsible has since joined forces with his critics to disown his earlier claim.
The paper has told fishing industry journal Intrafish that it wouldn't be repeating the advert, which was created to show that The Times was the only national paper with an Ocean correspondent. Last month we reported how The Times had claimed in advertisements that the North East Passage - a commercial trade route open since 1934 - had just been "opened" for the first time by global warming. Again, it used an assertion to justify its, er... brilliant environmental reporting credentials.
Maritime conservation researcher Boris Worm had made the claim in a 2006 paper in Science, which despite its reputation as a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, has a weakness for publishing shoddy junk science on environmental subjects. In a note accidentally sent to the press, Worm had said the attention grabbing claim could be an effective "news hook to get people's attention."
The Worm has since turned: revising his earlier view. According to Intrafish, Times correspondent Frank Pope contacted the paper's marketing department.
But if there's one thing dumber than environment reporters, it's environmentally "aware" celebrities. This summer Greta Scacchi was one of several celebrities to pose nude with a cod, to draw attention to the cause. Richard E. Grant, Terry Gilliam and Lenny Henry also stripped off. A documentary called The End Of The Line also makes the "No Fish by 2048" claim. The film has been described as the equivalent of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth for fishing. Which says it all, really.
SOURCE
A Rational Look at Sea Level Rise
The one thing that is the most certain about climate change, is that no matter what happens, we’ll have to adapt. In fact, even if the climate doesn’t change a lick, adaptations will take place, aimed at improving our overall health and welfare by either better protecting us from, or taking better advantage of, the prevailing climate conditions. Such has always been the case, and such always will be.
This is something that global warming alarmists either fail to understand, or fail to acknowledge.
Consider the dire warning that anthropogenic climate change is going to lead to a global food crisis. This scenario is predicated upon the “dumb farmer scenario” in which agriculturists around the fail to respond to changing climate conditions, and instead hold on to old, failing ways, as the climate changes around them. The “dumb farmer” scenario, should more aptly be termed the “dumb forecaster” scenario, because such an assumption illustrates a glaring disconnect between theory and reality. People adapt to change.
Another grossly inaccurate claim which totally ignores our adaptive response involves sea level rise. Al Gore likes to show maps of what coastal areas look like presently, and what they would look like assuming a multi-meter sea level rise. A dramatic section of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth showed some before and afters of coastal locations under Gore’s scenario of a 20 foot sea level rise that would happen “[i]f Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea—or half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea.” For a dose of reality, a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters pegged the current rate of sea level rise contributed by Antarctica and Greenland combined at 6 inches/century. How inconvenient.
No matter what, is that Gore’s pictures will never represent reality for the simple reason that we won’t let them. Do you really think that the powers that be will let a large portions of Manhattan Island sink beneath the waves like Gore depicts? Of course not. Instead, appropriate responses will take place to protect the high-priced development there. This will happen not only in Manhattan, but in most places where we have already invested a lot of time, effort, and money.
This was the conclusion recently reached by a team led by EPA sea level rise researcher Jim Titus, who has been working with land-use planners up and down the eastern seaboard to determine how various areas along the coast will be impacted by sea level rise—whatever the magnitude.
Titus’s team categorized all the dry land along the East Coast that is within 1 meter of sea level into four categories—developed, intermediate (likely to be developed), undeveloped, and protected from development. The first two categories were considered land-use types that would be largely protected from sea level rise by human intervention—raising of the land, or holding back the sea. These categories make up about 60% of the low-lying coastal land area between Florida and Massachusetts.
The remaining 40% of the low-lying land area is potentially flooded by rising oceans at some point in time. This is considered good by Titus et al. because it allows for natural processes to respond to rising sea levels (i.e., letting ecosystems migrate inland). But only about one-quarter of it is currently protected by conservation requirements. The other 3/4th (or 30% of the total land area within 1 meter of sea level) is currently unprotected. Titus et al. would like to see as much of this unprotected land as possible left alone (or moved into conservation).
The major point Titus et al. are trying to make is that now is the time to be thinking about the how to designate land use for the future in light of rising ocean levels. This sounds like a pretty rational approach because, it is virtually certain that sea levels will continue to rise into the future. Starting to talk about how to best prepare for this eventuality is a good thing.
Contrast this with the irrational approach that shows urban areas under 20 feet of water and demands that human greenhouse gas emissions need to be immediately curtailed to prevent this.
Here is what Titus et al. have to say about that favorite technique of the Al Gores on the world: "We hope that [our work] can help to change the way people think about rising sea level. Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future. Our maps show some of the choices coastal residents face, but losing Manhattan is not one of them."
SOURCE
Australia: Sea rise much slower than predicted
SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the New South Wales Government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites. The Rees Government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects. Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide.
However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until about 2200 - another 191 years - before the east coast experienced the kind of increases that have been flagged. According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Meteorology's National Tidal Centre, issued in June, there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991. This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average.
By comparison, the NSW Government's projections - based on global modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as CSIRO regional analysis - equate to a future rise of about 6.6mm a year. Such a projection has caused widespread concern for landowners and developers, derision from "climate sceptics" within the scientific community and even some head-scratching from Wollongong locals such as Kevin Court, 80.
"I have swum at this beach every day for the past 50 years, and nothing much changes here," Mr Court said yesterday as he emerged from the surf at Wollongong's North Beach, just a short paddle from the Port Kembla gauging station. "All this talk about rising sea levels - most of us old-timers haven't seen any change and we've been coming down here for decades. "A few years ago part of the bank at the back of the beach was eroded. But you look at it now, and all the grass has grown back over it. The water hasn't washed back there for years. "And that's nature. It's up and down, it comes and goes in cycles - nothing dramatic."
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 are mirrors of this site here and here
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6 November, 2009
Gore abandons science-talk for theology
The science is too pesky and he was after all a divinity student once
Al’s Gore’s much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward....
Much of the material was developed through the series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions.
“He is one of the only politicians that takes the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn’t ask us how our results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four or five times for the book. “Nobody that we have dealt with has ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science and all the different complications and what it all means as Al Gore.”
Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies – published only last week – that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming.
Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions. “Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” he told the magazine. “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.
The former vice-president has been working behind the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power. On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, he was “almost certain” Obama would attend the negotiations. The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.
But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action. The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious debate about the costs of dealing with climate change – with conservative Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America’s use of oil will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.
Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change. Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready to move ahead without any Republican participation.
More HERE
Damn this false God! How in the name of sanity can being green be a religion?
Have you ever noticed how closely green zealotry resembles religious fanaticism? Well, now the law has, in effect, recognised environmentalism as a religion. An employee who claimed his boss showed 'contempt' for his green beliefs has won the right to seek unlimited damages for unfair dismissal. In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Barton found in favour of Tim Nicholson, who was made redundant by the property company he worked for. The judge argued that a 'philosophical belief which is based on science' should receive the same protection as religious beliefs.
Some of us would question whether the more extreme opinions of green activists have any basis in science at all. For example, their violent opposition to nuclear power runs against the tide of scientific opinion.
Climate change is a contentious issue, yet green activists brook no opposition to their views that unless we give up air travel, throw away our lightbulbs and slaughter every cow, the world is doomed.
But Mr Justice Barton is profoundly mistaken to suppose that, just because greens often behave like zealots, therefore their beliefs amount to a religion. A political ideology, such as environmentalism, is not a religion. Only totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia try to turn politics into a religion - with disastrous consequences for human freedom.
The whole of Western civilisation has Jewish and Christian roots, without which it cannot thrive. There is no comparison between the fundamental role of Christianity in our history and that of ephemeral red or green political fashions. In our militantly secular society, however, official recognition of people's religious convictions - especially Christian ones - is being constantly eroded. For example, a Christian registrar in Islington, North London, was sacked because she felt unable to conduct civil partnership ceremonies at her register office, arguing that homosexuality runs contrary to Christian morality. An even more notorious case was that of the British Airways check-in worker who was suspended for wearing a crucifix.
That well-worn prophecy attributed to G.K. Chesterton - 'When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything' - now seems more pertinent than ever.
It appears that no fashionable nostrum, from Madonna's Kabbalah to Carole Caplin's crystals, is too fatuous. Today, the chattering classes might more accurately be called the credulous classes. They hold everything sacred up to ridicule, while treating as sacred all that is most ridiculous.
And so the green creed of Mr Nicholson is protected by law, while the belief that a child is best brought up by a mother and a father, on which Catholic adoption agencies have traditionally been based, is expressly prohibited by the courts who insist that those same agencies must allow same-sex couples to adopt children.
It seems the only religion that is still sometimes granted unqualified respect and cast-iron protection in Britain is Islam. Our bold secularists are unaccountably timid when it comes to offending Muslim sensibilities. But nobody is afraid of trampling over the rich legacy that Christianity has bequeathed to our civilisation.
And so the green creed of Mr Nicholson is protected by law, while the belief that a child is best brought up by a mother and a father, on which Catholic adoption agencies have traditionally been based, is expressly prohibited by the courts who insist that those same agencies must allow same-sex couples to adopt children.
The European Court of Human Rights has this week ordered Italy, the heartland of Catholicism, to remove crucifixes from classrooms on the bizarre grounds that these traditional symbols are a violation of pupils' religious and educational liberties. The secularists who are behind such aggressive campaigns want nothing less than to extinguish Europe's Christian identity.
What will replace Judaeo-Christian morality, based on the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount? We have only to look at the horrors on our streets and our sink estates to see how the vacuum created by secularism is being filled by an amoral morass of lawlessness.
Green zealotry is one of the most influential of the pseudo-religions that today substitute for Christianity. It offers a view of the world in which the true believer in, say, manmade global warming can feel morally superior to the sceptic.
One of the arguments by which Mr Nicholson persuaded Mr Justice Barton was his claim that he no longer travels by aircraft, because air travel produces carbon emissions. Yet the prejudice against air travel is preposterous humbug. Not only do the most zealous advocates of extreme environmentalism, such as Al Gore, turn out to have the largest 'carbon footprint', but the entire green movement, not to mention such global jamborees as next month's Copenhagen climate change summit, is made possible only by air travel.
Mr Nicholson and others who share his views are entitled to do without air travel. That is their right in a free society. But they are not entitled to bully others who wish to fly abroad for work or pleasure. Yet that is the consequence of elevating their zealotry into a legally protected realm. How many employers will discipline an employee who tries to make colleagues feel guilty every time they take a trip by air?
Mr Justice Barton has contributed to placing the greens above the law. In doing so, he is following a trend. Last year, six Greenpeace activists were cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at Kingsnorth in Kent, the first of a new generation of coal-fired power stations. The Greenpeace zealots persuaded the court at Maidstone that they were entitled to damage the power station - which they claimed was causing climate change - because climate change might cause even greater damage to the planet. This dangerous verdict, which legitimised violent protests, has now been reinforced by Mr Justice Barton's ruling that green politics should enjoy the status of a religion.
SOURCE
ELECTION DEFEATS MAKE DEMOCRATS NERVOUS ABOUT OBAMA'S CLIMATE AGENDA
Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races may make some congressional Democrats more leery of backing key elements of President Barack Obama's agenda because of the political price they could pay, analysts said.
Democrats in competitive House districts, many of them already cautious about Obama's push to overhaul the U.S. health- care system and curb emissions blamed for global warming, might be more resistant to move ahead on the measures and face attacks from a newly energized Republican Party, the analysts said.
The Nov. 3 election results are "a real warning bell for moderate Democrats," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate professor of communications at Boston University. "They are not going to think twice about their vote on health care. They're going to think five times."
David Primo, a political science professor at the University of Rochester in New York, said Democrats in competitive districts may demand more concessions in exchange for their votes on contentious legislation.
The election "may make it harder to swing moderates on the fence in favor of Obama's proposals, for fear of being made examples in the midterm elections," Primo said. "The results may increase the price those on the fence charge for their support."
More HERE
WHY RUSSIANS ARE LAUGHING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
Russia doesn't seem to care two bits about global warming, and it's not hard to see why. Most Russians would probably be happy if the country was a little warmer. Officials even joke that once climate change has run its course, people may start pouring into Siberia instead of trying to escape it. If the polar ice caps melt any further, Russia would be able to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, where it's believed to have huge fossil-fuel reserves. For the rest of the planet, however, the picture is not so cheerful.
To say that Russia is hesitant about tackling climate change is putting it mildly. The last time the world tried to get the country's cooperation on the issue was in 1997, during negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol (the international treaty on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions). Because Russia is the world's third largest source of emissions after the U.S. and China, the accord would have failed without it. So the treaty was written in a way that would allow Russia to keep polluting as much as it wanted and grant the country billions of dollars in emissions allowances to sell to other countries that needed to meet their Kyoto commitments.
As a U.N. official who participated in the talks put it, "Russia got the sweetest deal: free money, no restrictions." But apparently even that wasn't enough. It took another seven years of painstaking negotiations - and promises from the West to help Russia join the World Trade Organization (WTO) - to get the country to ratify the deal. How the world will persuade Russia to take an active part in the upcoming climate-change summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 2 remains to be seen.
More HERE
Forests in the desert: the answer to climate concerns?
CO2 levels could be reduced by a staggeringly ambitious plan to plant the Sahara desert and Australian outback with trees. But it's unlikely to be a destructive enough policy for the Greenies. They will probably say that it threaten the habitat of the desert rat, or some-such
Some talk of hoisting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight, while others want to cloud the high atmosphere with millions of tonnes of shiny sulphur dust. Now, scientists could have dreamed up the most ambitious geoengineering plan to deal with climate change yet: converting the parched Sahara desert to a lush forest. The scale of the ambition is matched only by the promised rewards – the scientists behind the plan say it could "end global warming".
The scheme has been thought up by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, together with Igor Aleinov and David Rind, climate modellers at Nasa. The trio have outlined their plan in a new paper published in the Journal of Climatic Change, and they modestly conclude it "probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of greenhouse gas induced global warming".
Under the scheme, planted fields of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus would cover the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback, watered by seawater treated by a string of coastal desalination plants and channelled through a vast irrigation network. The new blanket of tree cover would bring its own weather system and rainfall, while soaking up carbon dioxide from the world's atmosphere. The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today. Sounds expensive? The researchers say it could be more economic than planned global investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).
"The costs are enormous but the scale of the problem is enormous," says Ornstein, who is best known for pioneering a cell biology technique called polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in the 1950s. "It's a serious suggestion in that I believe it is the most promising and practical option in terms of current technology to solve the biggest parts of the problem."
The scheme could cost $1.9tn a year, he says. "When that's compared to figures like estimates of $800bn per year for CCS, our plan looks like a loser. But CCS can address only about 20% of the problem at the $800bn price. Mine addresses the whole thing. And CCS would involve a network of dangerous high-pressure pipelines coursing through the most developed neighbourhoods of our civilisations, compared to relatively benign water aqueducts in what are presently virtually uninhabited deserts."
Planting trees to combat rising carbon dioxide levels is controversial on a large scale, because most places where it has been suggested, such as Canada and Siberia, are in the northern hemisphere where the resulting change in surface colour, from predominantly light snow and rock to predominantly dark trees, could soak up more sunlight and cancel out the cooling benefit. Ornstein says subtropical regions, such as the Sahara and the Australian outback, do not have this problem. The areas have only minimal "human occupation, agricultural food and fibre resources and competing natural biomes" the team says. "We must bite the bullet, global warming will not go away by itself ... solar, geothermal and wind power can make modest contributions. All of these are other parts of a fix. But the quicker a forest can be grown, the more time will be available to choose among and to implement such adjustments, and perhaps to develop more attractive substitutes."
Ornstein says several desert-heavy countries are suitable, including large chunks of Saudi Arabia and a string of African nations west of Egypt. The scheme would provide jobs and investment, he says, as well as a long-term source of sustainable wood that could be used as a biofuel to replace fossil fuels. Other plans for the desert region, such as the installation of giant arrays of mirrors and solar panels to generate electricity would not be affected, he says. Tree-planters, and the resulting clouds, would stick to the flatter regions further south.
Since the paper was published a few weeks ago, Ornstein has attempted to seed serious discussions on specialist websites, with little success. Critics have pointed out that the deserts are not total wildernesses, but rich and diverse ecosystems in their own right, which would be destroyed. Ornstein says: "If sacrifices are required to stem global warming, the almost non-existent ecosystems of the central Sahara and the outback seem like reasonable candidates compared to the alternatives."
The scheme does have some support. "It is incredibly important and definitely worth taking seriously," says Rick Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "While there are many practical and political difficulties of afforestation of regions this large, the benefits could be enormous and go well beyond carbon sequestration."
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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 are mirrors of this site here and here
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5 November, 2009
IPCC CHAIRMAN DR PACHAURI
An email from Henry Geraedts [arbutuspoint@gmail.com] below
I was with growing disbelief that I read the Times of India article "IPCC CHAIRMAN TAKES UP POST AS CHINESE GOVERNMENT'S CLIMATE ADVISOR" followed by the AFP article "THE NEW IPCC CONSENSUS: CHINA, INDIA SHOULD SHAME RICH COUNTRIES INTO WEALTH TRANSFER".
The UN's IPCC's Chairman Pachauri acting as climate advisor to the Chinese government, no less? And the same "climate advisor" stating in Beijing that China and India should "shame" developed economies into "wealth transfer"? Based on evidence, taking Pachauri aside and explaining the fundamentals of conflict of interest to him would likely be an exercise in futility.
Two things have at least been achieved by Pachauri's actions: One, any pretence that may have remained about the IPCC as a "scientific" "intergovernmental" advisory body has been removed, hopefully once and for all.
And two, confirmation by Pachauri himself of what AGW/ACC really has been about all along: a 20 year campaign of fearmongering, orchestrated to trigger massive wealth transfer by the developed economies to the rest of the world, managed by an "appropriate global governance structure" - as explained by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's last week - without any accountability, of course.
IT'S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE (1)
An email from Wayne Richards [theamazingrichards@gmail.com] below:
I've reached my own personal tipping point. I've heard once too often that the Arctic ice melt of 2007 was unprecedented, that it's going to happen again, only worse, and that we're all doomed. Including the polar bears. Never before in history...etc.
Less than a half mile from my home in Vancouver, B.C. sits the RCMP Vessel Saint Roch. She's been declared a national monument or some such designation, and for good reason. In the early 1940's she traversed the Northwest Passage. Then she did it again. Then again, in the other direction. Three times, three times.
She's a small thing, but sturdily built. At a little over a hundred feet long, she displaces about 325 tons. She was powered by some small auxiliary sails and a piddling 150 hp.diesel engine. And she's not steel. She's built of good British Columbia Douglas fir, externally sheathed with Australian gumwood (thank you, Aussies). Mind you, her bow had some metal on it, whether iron or steel I do not know.
This small, woefully underpowered vessel was the first to traverse the Northwest Passage west to east, was the first to traverse it more than once, was the first to traverse it in both directions, and was the first to circumnavigate North America (using the Panama Canal at the small end).
But she was not the first in recorded history to traverse the Northwest Passage. In 1906 Roald Amundsen ran it from east to west in his even smaller (76ft) sloop "Gjoa". It may have been all sail; if it had an auxiliary motor I do not know of it.
The log books of neither the Gjoa nor the St. Roch record any drowning polar bears.
IT'S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE (2)
Note that there is a slight rising trend but that it was happening long before the late 20th century and the era of widespread industrialization
Obama "Bailing Out" Al Gore and Utilities
Obama Rewards Companies Supporting Cap-and-Trade with Over $600,000,000 Million in Grants
Today's page one New York Times story on Al Gore profiting from global warming advocacy illustrates how taxpayer money is being used to reward businesses that support Obama's energy agenda, says Tom Borelli Ph.D., director of the Free Enterprise Project. Gore's venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will benefit from the Department of Energy grants to support the development of the so-called smart grid, according to the Times. "The Department of Energy is doling out $3.4 billion in smart grid grants and some of these funds are being steered to "friends of Obama," said Borelli.
The Department of Energy (DOE) funds were part of the "American Reinvestment and Recovery Act" – President Obama's economic stimulus plan. According to the Times, $560 million in grants were awarded to utilities that had contracts with Silver Spring Networks – a company that Gore's firm has invested in. Silver Spring Networks develops technologies to increase the efficiency of the electricity grid.
John Doerr, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. "Grants to Gore, unfortunately, are only the tip of the global warming iceberg. The big money is going to companies that are lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation," added Borelli.
Utilities lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation are recipients of over $600,000,000 in DOE grants. Duke Energy, FPL Group and Exelon are members of the United States Climate Action Partnership -- a lobbying group seeking a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. DOE awarded the following grants:
Duke Energy Carolinas $3,927,899
Duke Energy Business Services LLC $200,000,000
Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) $200,000,000
PECO Energy Company (Exelon) $ 200,000,000
"It's outrageous that taxpayer money is going to corporations that have their own resources. Clearly, it pays to be on team Obama. No wonder Exelon is turning in its membership with the U.S Chamber of Commerce and Duke Energy left the National Association of Manufactures," said Borelli. "These trade associations are opposing the global warming bill moving through Congress."
SOURCE
Al Gore the new Madoff?
Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies. Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology. The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world's first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is. "Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?" Mr. Gore said. "I am proud of it. I am proud of it."
SOURCE
Africans balking at climate proposals too
African countries boycotted meetings at U.N. climate talks Tuesday, saying that industrial countries had set carbon-cutting targets too low for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The action forced several technical meetings to be canceled at this week's U.N. climate talks in Barcelona. Delegates warned that, unless the African protest was settled, it could set back the timetable for concluding a new climate change pact at a major U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen.
The 50 or so African countries said they would only discuss pledges submitted by wealthy countries, and that talks on other issues including carbon offsets and action by developing countries should not move forward until there is full commitment by industrial countries. "I don't think we can get to a result in the way we're going now," said Algerian negotiator Kamel Djemouai, who chairs the Africa group. "We cannot prejudge what will happen next until we see the reactions of others."
It was the first time the Africans have taken such concerted action at the U.N. climate talks, but they have been coordinating their position over the past year to ensure unity in the final lead-up to the Copenhagen conference, said Antonio Hill, of Oxfam International. Scientists say industrial countries should reduce emissions by 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, but targets announced so far amount to far less than the minimum.
The African walkout stymied only part of the talks, which operate in two parallel bodies. Negotiations on the overall shape of a deal and on financing for poor countries continued uninterrupted.
European delegates met leaders of the African group for two hours, but failed to persuade them to return to the committee rooms. A broader meeting was called to try to break the impasse....
More HERE
American Agri-Women honor skeptical Meteorologist
American Agri-Women (AAW) will present their highest honor, the Veritas Award, to Oregon Meteorologist George Taylor, at their 34rd annual convention in Salem, Oregon, November 13. The Veritas Award is given to individuals who have been public witness to the “pursuit of truth” in accordance with the principles expressed in the AAW statement of philosophy. Of specific interest are personalities of importance to agriculture, or responsible media coverage of agricultural issues and events.
George Taylor has been working in the field of meteorology and climatology for over 34 years. Taylor, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, served for 19 years as Oregon’s climatologist and was elected president of the American Association of Climatologists in 1998. He now runs his own business, Applied Climate Service.
Through his research over the years Taylor has shown that global warming is a natural occurrence with minimal influence by man and that by looking back further than the past few decades, the data shows that warming and cooling periods are common. Taylor continually works to keep the public informed of the effects climate has on their lives by publishing over 200 reports, books and articles, and by writing a bi-weekly column in two local newspapers. He is also a popular speaker, standing up for what he knows to be the truth, even when it disagrees with the prevailing opinion. AAW president Marcie Williams notes that, “George Taylor’s credentials and his courage in speaking out makes him an outstanding Veritas Award winner and we are excited to be able to honor him in this way.”
Past Veritas recipients include Paul Harvey, Michael DeBakey, Julia Child, Dr. C. Everett Koop, and John Stossel, to name a few.
Come to the AAW convention to hear these informative and entertaining speakers. For information about the convention, or agenda and registration form, visit the American Agri-Women website at www.americanagriwomen.org.
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 are mirrors of this site here and here
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4 November, 2009
NOAA deletes an “inconvenient” kids science web page
Hadley CRU isn’t the only government agency that deletes web content related to climate. NOAA/NWS Southern Region Headquarters has gotten into the act. An interesting thing happened today. NOAA deleted an educational web page about an experiment you can do with CO2.
Ordinarily such a thing would go unnoticed, especially since it doesn’t impact anything particularly important like policy, or climate data. It’s just an experiment for kids in the classroom. Fortunately, I still had the web page open in my browser. I had been looking at it yesterday, and I had been thinking I might try the experiment myself with a datalogging thermometer, just for fun. Here’s the web page as it was open in my browser:
click pic for full size image
click pic for full size image
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll_gas.htm
What could cause NOAA to pull a web page like this on a moment’s notice? Two things.
1 It was featured on Climate Depot yesterday.
2 It had this passage that must not have agreed with somebody higher up in the NOAA food chain:
It has been thought that an increase in carbon dioxide will lead to global warming. While carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing over the past 100 years, there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.Or maybe it was this one:
The behavior of the atmosphere is extremely complex. Therefore, discovering the validity of global warming is complex as well. How much effect will the increase in carbon dioxide will have is unclear or even if we recognize the effects of any increase.So rather than corrupt young minds with a simple science experiment with some inconvenient language attached to it, NOAA simply deleted it. Of course nothing is really deleted on the Internet anymore. NOAA looks pretty silly thinking it would go away with a simple delete. The Wayback machine has the missing web page for posterity: http://web.archive.org/web/20060129154229/http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll_gas.htm
SOURCE
Is Global Warmism Real? What politicians actually DO suggests that they secretly don't believe in it
This item asks not if global warming is real but if global warmism is real. That is, does anyone actually believe all the alarmist talk we've been hearing for upward of two decades now? We were prompted to ponder this by an article in "Der Spiegel", which suggests that next month's Copenhagen conference on "climate change" is likely to be a bust:
[Germany's Chancellor] Angela Merkel is blocking aid commitments for climate protection and risking the failure of a global deal in Copenhagen. The chancellor is squandering an opportunity to demonstrate European leadership and show Barack Obama what it really means to be a "citizen of the world."Merkel, it seems has "enraged environmentalists" by opposing massive transfer payments from European Union nations to Third World countries for "environmental projects":
She was once celebrated as the "Climate Chancellor" and seen as an important campaigner for the environment on the international political stage. Now it appears that it is Angela Merkel, of all people, who is dealing a death blow to international climate deals--by navigating a shortsighted course within the European Union.
Such funds should help to cover the additional costs of setting up renewable energy forms, more efficient technologies and green infrastructures in developing countries. Only in that way can it be guaranteed that the most environmentally nondestructive technologies are implemented globally, to put a halt on catastrophic climate change, its advocates say. The talk is of €20 billion ($30 billion) starting immediately, then €50 billion from 2016 and €100 billion annually from 2020. This extra burden should be covered by the US, the EU and Japan.Everyone always talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it! Politicians consistently act as if they don't take seriously the warnings about impending climate "catastrophe." It's possible that they do believe the warnings but are politically constrained from doing what it would supposedly take to avert it. But if they are so constrained, it is because voters act as if they don't take the warnings seriously.
Merkel's decision to block a concrete financial pledge will not exactly boost enthusiasm in other parts of the world--rather it will dampen it. When delays are created by the Europeans, who always pride themselves on being frontrunners in climate protection, then the US and China can get away with not making any progress.
Maybe it's all just a massive political failure, as a result of which we'll all roast to death in a few years. Stranger things have happened. Then again, maybe this is an emperor's-new-clothes situation in which people who aren't actually fooled by the underlying claim are convinced nonetheless that it's not respectable to let anyone know.
SOURCE
Weathering Congress, global warming
Weather changed. People died. They called it the “Little Ice-Age,” a period that spanned the mid-1600s. As global temperatures dropped, the number and frequency of wars rose. Worldwide mortality rates increased. Famines struck across Asia. The pattern of human misery seemed so significant that, about 300 years later, historian Eric Hobsbawm labeled it “the 17th century crisis.”
This summary is not meant as a cautionary tale about the grave dangers of climate change. Quite the opposite. It’s offered as a warning not to run lemminglike off a cliff as we grapple with global warming. What history actually teaches us is that trying to predict the long-term consequences of changes between humans and their environment is a march of folly. The 17th-century crisis is a good example. It was not a century of nonstop crisis. It was, in fact, a mixed bag.
Yes, the tempo of war increased. But the era also experienced an explosion of scientific and intellectual creativity. And it ushered in an economic expansion and increased political stability that produced future superpowers like Britain and France.
Furthermore, after studying “the century” for centuries, scholars are still not sure what caused what. The failure to construct a compelling explanation of the past has left many skeptical of any “social-scientific” explanation of history, let alone the ability of such theories to predict the future.
Jared Diamond’s highly regarded history, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” explains why predictions are folly. Diamond lists a daunting 12 factors that historically contributed to the collapse of a society. And, he can explain how they affected one another in each of his case studies only with the hindsight gained through hundreds of years of historical and archaeological research. “Collapse” illustrates the immense difficulty of mapping cause and effect in complex human-environment systems. Additionally, our ability to apply these “lessons” to the future is greatly complicated by the fact that both human institutions and the natural environment are continually changing and changing each other.
In short, it is virtually impossible to predict the long-term consequence of humans and climate change. That ought to give Congress pause when it hears arguments it must pass a cap-and-trade bill or bear the blame for sparking Armageddon.
The premise behind cap and trade is that the United States must impose a complex energy tax scheme to penalize businesses and other outfits (like, say, schools and nonprofit hospitals) that emit “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide. Proponents argue that this highly expensive approach to reducing man-made carbon emissions is needed to avoid adverse climate changes.
Failure to do so, they claim, will leave us to the mercy of future natural disasters that will yield unprecedented humanitarian crises. These, in turn, will cause some nations to fail and lead others to engage in chronic combat over remaining resources.
The House passed a cap-and-trade bill earlier this year. But the measure has become increasingly controversial as the economic consequences of the legislation have become more apparent. A study by The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis finds that the law would make the U.S. about $9.4 trillion poorer by 2035. Much of this decline would be from reduced economic productivity and job loss. Despite all the talk about “green jobs” galore, Heritage found the bill would actually retard net employment by 1.15 million jobs.
To distract Americans from the economic catastrophe the bill would cause, proponents have turned to arguing that passing the bill is an imperative for national security. The reality, however, is it is too difficult to predict over the long term how the interactions between humans and the environment will turn out.
But here is what we do know. In the short term, the negative economic effects of the bill will create a “21st century crisis.” A collapse in U.S. economic growth would result in even more draconian cuts to the defense budget, leaving America with a military much less prepared to deal with future threats. Indeed, if America’s military power declines, there would probably be more wars, not fewer.
Likewise, a steep drop in American economic growth would lengthen and deepen the global recession. That in turn will make other states poorer, undermining their ability to protect themselves and recover from natural disasters. Now that is something to worry about.
SOURCE
BRITISH REGULATOR TO INVESTIGATE UK GOVERNMENT'S 'DODGY' CLIMATE ADVERTS
Last week it became clear that the Advertising Standards Authority had launched an inquiry into the Government's £6m TV advertising campaign aimed at climate change sceptics. Now it appears that the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, will also investigate complaints that the advert is politically motivated and therefore breeches the ban on broadcasting political adverts. They would seem to have good reason for deciding to do so.
This is what the advert tells viewers about climate change:
So far, the ASA has received over 650 complaints and rising. That score ranks with the most complained about advert of 2008, which attracted 840 complaints. According to a letter that I received from the ASA this morning the following points will be investigated:
1. The ad was political in nature and should not be broadcast;
2. The theme and content of the ad, for example the dog drowning in the storybook and the depiction of the young girl to whom the story was being read, could be distressing for children who saw it;
3. The ad should not have been shown when children were likely to be watching television;
4. The ad was misleading because it presented human induced climate change as a fact, when there was a significant division amongst the scientific community on that point;
5. The claim "over 40% of the C02 was coming from ordinary everyday things" was misleading;
6. The representation of C02 as a rising cloud of black smog was misleading;
7. The claims about the possible advent of strange weather and flooding, and associated imagery in the ad, in the UK were exaggerated, distressing and misleading;
They also say that:
Points (1) and (4) in relation to the TV ad may be subject to Section 4 of the CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code, which is administered by Ofcom. We will therefore be referring to Ofcom objections to the TV campaign raised in respect of 'political' objectives; Ofcom will in due course be publishing a Finding of its determination. When both bodies have concluded their investigations, we plan to notify complainants of both our and Ofcom's determinations.
More HERE
Fish not bothered by variations in ocean acidity
Discussing: Melzner, F., Gobel, S., Langenbuch, M., Gutowska, M.A., Portner, H.-0. and Lucassen, M. 2009. Swimming performance in Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) following long-term (4-12 months) acclimation to elevated seawater PCO2. Aquatic Toxicology 92: 30-37.
Background
With respect to earth's 30,000 species of teleost fish, which include virtually all of the world's important sport and commercial fishes, the authors write that several of them have previously been shown to be able to "fully compensate extra cellular fluid pH," as well as "maintain oxygen consumption rates and growth performance under ocean acidification conditions (e.g. Larsen et al., 1997; Foss et al., 2003; Fivelstad et al., 1998, 2003; Deigweiher et al., 2008)," but they note that there have been no studies of these phenomena that have lasted for more than a few days.
What was done
To rectify this situation, Melzner et al. maintained a group of Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) for four months in a re-circulating aquaculture system of 15 cubic meters volume at an atmospheric CO2 partial pressure of 0.3 kPa (~3,000 ppm) and another group for twelve months at a CO2 partial pressure of 0.6 kPa (~6,000 ppm), after which the fishes' swimming metabolism was investigated in a swim-tunnel respirometer, and tissue samples of their gills were taken for various chemical analyses, including gill Na+/K+-ATPase capacity, which serves "as a general indicator for ion regulatory effort."
What was learned
The six German scientists report that "motor activity in adult Atlantic Cod is not compromised by long-term exposure to water PCO2 levels of 0.3-0.6 kPa," which are "scenarios exceeding the 0.2 kPa value predicted for surface ocean waters around the year 2300 (Calderia and Wickett, 2003)."
What it means
In light of what they learned from their study, Melzner et al. conclude that "adults of active fish species with a high ion regulatory capacity [which is employed to eliminate metabolic CO2] are well equipped to cope with prospected scenarios of global climate change," even those far beyond what could likely be produced by the burning of all fossil fuels in the crust of the earth.
SOURCE
Seeing through the hoax of the century
By national columnist, Janet Albrechtsen, writing from Australia
INCREASINGLY, the road to Copenhagen resembles a suburban street on Halloween with the number of climate change freak shows and stunts reaching a nadir in recent weeks. Nicholas Stern says we should turn vegetarian in order to combat climate change. If you must eat meat, eat kangaroos, says Ross Garnaut, because marsupials emit negligible amounts of methane. And that champagne you drank on Melbourne Cup day? Scientists scolded us with a report that a 750ml bottle of bubbly could produce 100 million bubbles, releasing five litres of carbon dioxide.
Yet far from rallying people to the cause of immediate action on climate change, every new cri de coeur may be turning people away. Could it be that those derided as the great unwashed are beginning to ask more questions than their smart political leaders or the bastions of intellectual curiosity in the media?
Late last month, activists gathered at Sydney Opera House to listen to Sydney mayor Clover Moore announce that “the time for talk is past”. “Already we know that this building, our Opera House, for decades a symbol of optimism and the human spirit, is under threat from global warming,” she says.
The Opera House under threat? That would be from rising sea levels, right? Just like the small island nation of Maldives where, last month, the president conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to remind the world that his country would be rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. Kitted out in full scuba-diving outfits, Mohamed Nasheed and his ministers sat at a table underwater off the coast of the capital of Male. As planned, the president’s stunt made headlines across the globe. Send us money - and lots of it - is his message. The media love stunts. They are so easy to report.
Sadly, the media is not inquisitive enough to report those who question the circus acts of climate change. A week after the Maldives underwater show, Nils-Axel Morner - a leading world authority on sea levels - wrote an open letter to the president telling him that his stunt was “not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments”.
Morner is a former professor who headed the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University and past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary Research commission on sea level changes and coastal evolution. INQUA was founded in 1928 by scientists who aimed to improve the understanding of environmental change during the glacial ages through interdisciplinary research. In other words, the Swedish professor has gravitas when it comes to sea levels. Alas his letter did not make headlines. That is a shame. Morner says there is “no rational basis” for the hysterical claims that the people of Maldives - or the rest of the world - are threatened by rising sea levels. And he sets out some facts.
Fact number 1: During the past 2000 years, sea levels have fluctuated with 5 peaks reaching 0.6m to 1.2m above present sea level. Fact number 2: From 1790 to 1970 sea levels were about 20cm higher than today. Fact number 3: In the 1970s, the sea level fell by about 20cm to its present level. Fact number 4: Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years “implying that there are no traces of any alarming ongoing sea level rise”. Fact number 5 (and I am paraphrasing here): The notion presented by the President of the Maldives that his country will be flooded is bunkum.
Yet, last week a federal parliamentary report told Australians to make plans to evacuate if we live on the coast. Warning that the “time to act is now”, the bipartisan report said the 711,000 addresses within 3km of the Australian coast - and less than 6m above sea level - face threats from rising sea levels. The report called for an inquiry by the Productivity Commission to examine the need for bans on homes within these areas. Viewers of the 7pm News on ABC1 were told by a Richard Branson lookalike - complete with longish wavy grey hair, beard and crisp white shirt - that the township of Byron Bay would be completely flooded by rising sea levels. His expertise? He is a resident of Byron Bay.
Despite the headline grabbing rhetoric about climate change calamity, recent polls reveal that more and more people appear to be challenging the orthodoxy. The most recent Lowy Institute poll found that while 48 per cent of Australian believe that global warming is a serious and pressing problem, the numbers are down 12 points since 2008 and 20 points down since 2006. “This is also the first year that it has not had majority support,” said the Lowy Institute.
A poll by Ipso Reid in Canada in September found that global warming has dropped down the list of people’s concerns. Indeed, a full 41 per cent now say the threat has been overblown. In the US, Associated Press reported on a poll last month that found 57 per cent of people believe there is clear evidence that the world is heating up, down 20 points from three years ago. These are some trend lines worth watching.
Perhaps we are wising up to modern day millenarianism where end-of-the-world cults - those who have the most to gain from their fear mongering - preach calamity. Remember Y2K? The cult back then comprised computer experts. They predicted disaster. Planes would fall from the skies. People would be caught in halting elevators. Chaos would descend on anything that relied on a computer, from financial markets to utilities. Governments duly prepared for disaster with the BBC reporting that global preparations for the millennium bug were estimated to have cost more than $US300 billion. All for nought. Nothing happened. It was, as James Taranto wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the hoax of the century.
Maurice Newman, who was chairman of the federal government’s Y2K committee told The Australian last week that “in pressing the urgency for compliance, the committee members relied heavily on confirmatory bias. Most of this came from so-called experts who had much to gain from creating a sense of alarm. The consequence of widespread inaction was claimed to result in chaos and systemic failure. As there was no alternative authoritative voice, this became perceived wisdom and was certainly believed by the committee. As such the Y2K phenomenon took on a life of its own.”
Deja vu? Preparing for the deluge of rising sea levels, we were treated to footage last week from parliamentary question time starring Julia Gillard and her gumboots. Appropriately she was followed on ABC1 by Bananas in Pyjamas. Could man-made climate change turn out to be the greatest hoax of the present century? Certainly, ordinary people are beginning to ask questions.
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 are mirrors of this site here and here
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3 November, 2009
Jim Hansen is not alone: More Warmist "adjustments" to pesky data
The high-quality Argo data has been embarrassing Warmists because it shows the ocean as cooling. So what to do? Say that the sensors showing most cooling are "bad" and discard their data. Then combine the data from the remaining sensors with data known to show too much warming and -- hey presto! -- you have got rid of that pesky ocean cooling! Relevant excerpt below
When scientists mistrust their data, they do they same thing you do when you think your watch is off: they check another clock. To diagnose the problem in the Atlantic, Willis needed to compare ocean temperature measurements from multiple sources. The first source he turned to was sea level data from satellite altimeters.
Because water expands when it absorbs heat, and contracts when it cools, sea level is physically connected to heat content in the upper ocean. Satellite altimeters measure sea surface height with radar. The radar sends a pulse of energy toward the Earth’s surface and listens for the echo. The time delay and intensity of the echo reveal the altitude of the sea surface.
Willis also had ocean-based data sets, including temperature profiles from the Argo robot fleet as well as from expendable bathythermographs, called “XBTs” for short. XBTs are the equivalent of a disposable razor. A temperature sensor is spooled out behind a ship by thin copper wire. It sinks, making measurements at increasing depths, transmitting them back to the ship via the wire until the line snaps and the sensor sinks to the bottom of the ocean, discarded.
The devices are manufactured to free-fall through the water at a known rate; scientists infer the depth of the temperature measurements by the time lapsed after the sensor hits the water. They have been used by the U.S. Navy and oceanographers since the 1960s.
“Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”
The digging led him to the data from the expendable temperature sensors, the XBTs. A month before, Willis had seen a paper by Viktor Gouretski and Peter Koltermann that showed a comparison of XBT data collected over the past few decades to temperatures obtained in the same ocean areas by more accurate techniques, such as bottled water samples collected during research cruises. Compared to more accurate observations, the XBTs were too warm. The problem was more pronounced at some points in time than others.
The Gouretski paper hadn’t rung any alarm bells right away, explains Willis, “because I knew from the earlier analysis that there was a big cooling signal in Argo all by itself. It was there even if I didn’t use the XBT data. That’s part of the reason that we thought it was real in the first place,” explains Willis.
But when he factored the too-warm XBT measurements into his ocean warming time series, the last of the ocean cooling went away.
More HERE
Climate deal must consider forests: Putin
A GLOBAL warming pact to be agreed next month in Copenhagen must take into account the carbon dioxide absorption potential of Russia's sprawling forests, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says. "Are we ready to support Denmark's efforts in the post-Kyoto period? We are ready to do this,'' Putin said on Monday at a press conference with visiting Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen. "But there are two conditions: all countries must sign it. And Russia will insist that the capacity of its forests for absorbing carbon dioxide must be taken into account.''
Mr Putin's conditions highlighted another impediment on the already difficult path to reaching an agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is due to take place in Copenhagen from December 7-18.
The demand spells out a position previously adopted by Russia under the Kyoto Protocol, whose current pledges expire at the end of 2012. Russia and other countries demanded big concessions on forestry in 2001 when Kyoto's complex rule book was being negotiated. They argued that forests are a bulwark against global warming as trees absorb carbon dioxide - the principal greenhouse gas - through the natural process of photosynthesis.
The issue of how much forested land should be offset against emissions targets by rich countries turned out to be a major stumbling block for completing Kyoto. The treaty eventually took effect in February 2005 after a long delay by Russia in ratifying it.
Many green activists say the forestry rules are a potential loophole, enabling polluting countries to statistically write off their emissions yet not reduce them in real terms.
SOURCE
Britons least concerned about climate change
Despite (or because of?) their fanatically Warmist government
Britain is less concerned about climate change than any other country in the world, according to a new survey. The annual Climate Confidence Monitor found the number of people worrying about global warming worldwide has fallen by eight per cent to just over a third in the last year as the economic downturn kicked in.
Just fifteen per cent of people in Britain worry about climate change and how the world responds to the problem, the lowest figure for any of the 12 countries surveyed. The figure is down from 26 per cent last year. In the US 18 per cent of people said global warming was one of their biggest concerns followed by 22 per cent in Australia. In general people in developing countries are more concerned about climate change, with more than half of people in Mexico citing the issue as a major problem and 42 per cent in Brazil and India.
Britain was also the most pessimistic about the world's ability to tackle climate change, with almost half believing nothing can be done compared to 38 per cent worldwide.
However, people still believe that action should be taken. On average, almost half of people say they are taking some action to reduce their carbon footprint such as switching off lights, walking rather than driving or recycling. This is a rise of seven per cent since 2007.
In the run up the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, nearly two thirds of people in the world think a global deal to cut emissions is important. The US, the world's second largest emitter, was the only country where less than half the population thought world needed to take action compared to 86 per cent in Brazil and 75 per cent in China - the world's biggest emitter.
The report, that has been running for three years, questions 1,000 people in each country. HSBC, that commissioned the study, said despite the recession people remain concerned about climate change and are more determined than ever to do something to tackle the problem.
Lord Stern, the former World Bank economist who first warned the British Government about climate change, said the meeting in Copenhagen was a chance for people from all countries to make a difference. "With just over a month to go before Copenhagen, this is a clear call from the global population for a strong and effective deal," he said. "Rich and developing countries must act together to create an agreement that will lay the foundations for a future era of dynamic low-carbon growth.”
SOURCE
U.S. SENATE: DEMOCRATS DEEPLY DIVIDED ON CLIMATE BILL
The climate change bill that has been moving slowly through the Senate faces a stark political reality when it is read in committee this week: with Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the climate change legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.
For all the effort of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to keep Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., as his most visible GOP ally, key Republicans are making their opposition clear. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee who was initially seen as one of the only Republicans who might consider backing the majority, is now helping lead the opposition. He wrote Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson twice this summer to ask for a more detailed economic analysis of the House-passed climate bill, and he has joined the other six Republicans on the committee in boycotting the climate bill markup scheduled for Tuesday. "Why are we trying to jam down this legislation now?" he asked during a hearing last week. "Wouldn't it be smarter to take our time and do it right?"
Like the bill adopted by the House, the legislation favors a cap-and-trade system that would issue permits for greenhouse gas emissions, gradually lower the amount of emissions allowed, and let companies buy and sell permits to meet their needs. The bill has deeply divided Democrats. With states in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain West dependent on fossil fuels for energy, many senators are worried about the legislation's impact on industry and consumers.
So Democratic leaders, with the support of the Obama administration, are trying to enlist at least half a dozen Republicans by offering amendments to speed along their top priority - building nuclear power plants.
Graham has suggested provisions on nuclear power and offshore oil drilling could win his support for a cap-and-trade climate bill; Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, has established a bipartisan working group of 17 Senate offices that is close to producing a detailed amendment aimed at speeding the construction of U.S. nuclear reactors.
But it remains unclear if that approach holds currency in the current era of political polarization. One of the top Republicans that Democrats hope to enlist in this effort - Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, whom Graham and Kerry recently buttonholed on the Senate floor - has voiced skepticism about the bill Kerry had authored along with Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. "A tepid nuclear title isn't enough to get her to support a bad climate bill," said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Boxer.
SOURCE
The Eco-Apocalypse Craze
As I pointed out in a recent article on Quadrant Online, apocalypticism has a firm grip on Western Civilization, reaching fever-pitch on many occasions over the last 2500 years. Critically, in the 20th century, apocalypticism assumed a secular guise, as various cultural historians have observed, “evoking world destruction and transformation through ecological disaster … and technological breakdown”, with both religious and secular versions “converging upon the belief that the [world] is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed” (Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 1992, p.336).
As a further example of such doom-laden prophecy, here is the latest sermon on the impending eco-apocalypse, according to James Lovelock, “the closest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet”, as the Sunday Times observed in its review (19 February 2009) of his latest Jeremiad, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009). According to Lovelock, in the next few years we will face an abrupt leap in average global temperatures of 9 degrees Celsius, leading to the collapse of global civilization and the virtual extinction of humanity in an orgy of violence that Lovelock gloatingly dismisses as a “massive natural cull of humanity”.
Quite quickly, “the earth's landmasses will be largely destroyed by flood and drought, and most of the world's seven billion inhabitants will not survive”, while those who do will struggle for life amidst billions of rotting corpses backing in the sun of a “desert world” that stretches across the globe. Such a prospect might be expected to appall most people but the reviewer just remarks that, “all this should make for a bleak read [but] the effect is strangely exhilarating” - such is the morbid fascination with the eco-apocalypse in our culture.
There is some hope, with fortuitously located island nations like Britain and Australia serving as life boats in this ocean of misery, although some crucial decisions will have to be made – not democratically, for democracy is a luxury that the world cannot afford, but by ruthless, environmentally aware warlords who rise to the top amidst the chaos. They will determine who is kept aboard and who is jettisoned, with evolutionary theory dictating that the old, the sick, and the infirm will have to go, along with those who choose to accompany them as helpers, in a last fleeting expression of human compassion, while the rest surrender to the ruthless amorality of natural selection.
Because “genocide by tribal mobs is as natural as breathing”, human beings will embrace various forms of Green fascism and eagerly agree to the suspension of constitutional rights, convinced that blind obedience is the only way to survive and that their free will and personal autonomy must the surrendered to a self-selected elite of omnipotent environmental scientists and the strutting self-righteous Green politicians who exist to implement their dictates – a species that Australia possesses in abundance.
As a fundamentally religious thinker, Lovelock claims that the earth should be properly known as ‘Gaia’, the Earth Goddess, because she is allegedly a living organism - indeed ‘the largest living being on the planet’ (because she is the planet!) – and ‘she’ operates according to scientific laws that dictate that humanity is an evolutionary dead end – a sort of sentient stool - that will be excreted by Gaia as she continues to ensure her own homeostatic well-being through her manipulation of various environmental parameters, as she has done for millions of years in the past and will continue to do for millions of years after humanity’s apparently well-deserved demise.
Not long ago, most people would have thought that such ideas were best left to bad science fiction, but no longer. Indeed, it is a measure of the corruption of science amidst the moral panic of global warming that Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ has now been elevated to the status of a scientific theory, which Tim Flannery – one of Australia’s own eco-apocalyptic prophets – assures us means that it has “been tested and is considered true” (“A Great Jump to Disaster”, New York Review of Books, 19 November 2009). Consequently, in 2006 Lovelock was awarded the the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London, for opening up a “whole new field of Earth Science study”, apparently some sort of geo-theology.
Moreover that Lovelock feels confident in making such dire predictions on the basis of experiments conducted on a “simple” computer model, while this impending catastrophe is made all the more sinister and irrefutable by his insistence that just “before the jump to a desert world, the climate will briefly become cooler again”, which means that “a cold summer, or even a series of them, is not proof that global heating has ended”. In other words, global cooling – like we are currently experiencing - will only be confirmation that global warming is real and is accelerating towards ‘the final jump’ into the eco-apocalypse.
Such extreme claims, and the invocation of allegedly ‘scientific’ arguments that cannot be falsified, because even negative observations confirm their predictions, is further evidence that the global warming panic and its projected catastrophic effects is a fundamentally religious phenomenon and signals the emergence of an eco-fundamentalist cult that follows a 2500-year old pattern in predicting an apocalypse according to which the world and all human civilization will shortly come to a catastrophic end.
The vital question that we now face is whether our politicians really believe this type of hysterical nonsense or whether some have the courage to step back from the brink of eco-apocalyptic hysteria to insist that Australia’s national interests are best served by a rigorously skeptical attitude towards what is emerging as one of the greatest moral panics the world has faced since the witch-craze of the middle ages.
SOURCE
Australia: Carbon tax will light a slow fuse
A FORM of carbon tax such as the emissions trading scheme cannot reduce global emissions unless there is agreement for a similar level of tax across all economies. That aside, the government's immediate issues are how to spend the money the tax raises, including how to avoid compensating the privatised brown coal generators for losses the tax causes.
Naturally, to ensure re-election, the Rudd government wants as much of the revenue as possible to go to voters. But the government is constrained because the tax would cripple firms that are unable to pass on all its costs. Twenty-five per cent to 35 per cent of the revenues raised are, therefore, to flow to the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries. This has kept those firms quiet by cushioning the effects of the carbon tax on their existing assets.
That the carbon tax means nobody will again build an aluminium smelter, a steelworks or any other facility that makes use of Australian low-cost energy is not their worry. Nor, apparently, is it a concern of governments, all of which seem to envisage a dreamy, new low-energy economy that jettisons domestic consumption of our coal reserves and, eventually, our gas reserves.
Other business users also will be losers from the higher priced electricity brought about by the ETS tax. Higher energy costs will undermine the profits of all firms and even destroy some businesses. But the damage to relatively low energy users will be less easily traced to the government imposition.
The other major loser industry comprises carbon-based electricity producers. These provide 85 per cent of Australia's electricity. The ETS tax hits the brown coal generators hardest, followed by black coal generators. Notwithstanding the government's fantasy about new low-cost power generation technologies emerging, there is no alternative to the present supply profile, so it's more than likely we will see few generator departures.
Indeed, the compensation offered to the coal power stations is contingent on them remaining online when the only way the government can meet its stated carbon reduction goals is if they close down.
That aside, as with energy-intensive industries, the government has made it impossible for any firm to again build a base load power station in Australia without giving it a cast-iron carbon tax indemnification. As with the energy-intensive industries, the proposed tax will impose substantial costs on the existing generators. The most vulnerable are Victoria's privately owned brown coal generators.
Though Canberra refuses to publish its own estimates of the cost to the generators' shareholders, these are unlikely to differ from the $8billion to $10bn estimated by commissioned studies for the Victorian government and for the generators themselves.
Canberra is keen to avoid paying these costs to businesses it has already demonised as producing dirty energy. Its process has been to play the tough cop, soft cop game. The tough cop, Labor's consultant Ross Garnaut, argued that the generators should get no compensation on the (incorrect) basis that there was no tradition for such provision in Australia. Uncharacteristically, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong played the soft cop and offered $3.5bn in compensation.
The Coalition is arguing for $10bn in compensation, though an unknown amount of that is to go to the state-owned black coal generators in NSW and Queensland.
The issues are perceptions of "sovereign risk" on all future foreign investment and whether a hardline approach will mean distress sales and low maintenance causing power outages. The latter is an open question but has belatedly become a concern of the Brumby government since brown coal provides 96 per cent of Victoria's supplies.
With regard to sovereign risk, it is argued that the investors bought these facilities more than five years after the 1990 Kyoto Protocol writing was on the wall, and any business risk of expropriation by regulatory taxation should have been built into their decision frameworks. The generators would maintain that the state government sales documents contained no indication that a future government would impose a new discriminatory tax on the assets being sold, thereby reducing their value. Nor did the opposition at the time indicate such likelihood.
If the sale was by a private enterprise that withheld information about the imposition of post-sale measures, that would significantly devalue the assets and the buyers would have legal recourse.
In fact, the generators have a better case to be compensated than emission-intensive industries, at least those built or bought in the past 15 years, since the emission-intensive industries were not bought from the government, a related branch of which is now imposing a discriminatory tax on them.
This haggling over compensation is vital to present investors and of concern also to the government, which could see some depletion of its election-buying pot of new taxes.
For the Australian economy the stakes are far greater. The planned carbon tax regime (and opposition to nuclear generation) makes significant new power plant investment impossible. This lights a slow fuse under the economy's growth potential.
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 are mirrors of this site here and here
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2 November, 2009
Biblical lessons lost in the rush to control Earth's natural processes
Article below by Richard Courtney from the mainstream "Scotsman"
IN THE Bronze Age, Joseph told Pharaoh that climate had always changed everywhere: it always would. He told Pharaoh to prepare for bad times when in good times, and all sensible governments have adopted that policy throughout the millenniums since. It is a sensible policy, because people merely complain about taxes in good times. They revolt if short of food in bad times. But several governments have abandoned it and, instead, are trying to stabilise the climate of the entire Earth by controlling it.
This attempt at global climate control arises from the hypothesis of anthropogenic (that is, man-made) global warming (AGW). AGW does not pose a global crisis, but the policy does, because it threatens constraint of fossil fuels and that would kill millions – probably billions – of people. There is no evidence for man-made global warming. None, not any of any kind. The existence of global warming is not evidence of AGW, because warming of the Earth does not prove humans warmed it.
At issue is whether humans are, or are not, affecting changes to the Earth's temperature that have always happened naturally. The AGW-hypothesis says increased greenhouse gases – notably carbon dioxide – in the air raise global temperature and anthropogenic emissions are increasing the carbon dioxide in the air to overwhelm the natural climate system.
But empirical evidence says the hypothesis is wrong. Firstly, the man-made emissions and global temperature do not correlate. Secondly, change to atmospheric concentration follows change to global temperature at all time scales. Thirdly, the recent rise in global temperature has not been induced by a rise in atmospheric concentrations.
Global temperature fell from 1940 to 1970, rose to 1998 and has fallen since. That is 40 years of cooling and 28 years of warming. Global temperature is now similar to that of 1990. But atmospheric has increased at a near constant rate and by more than 30 per cent since 1940. It has increased by 8 per cent since 1990. So, the normal rules of science say the AGW hypothesis is completely refuted. Nothing the hypothesis predicts is observed, and the opposite of some of its predictions are observed.
Some people still promote the hypothesis, for several reasons (personal financial gain, protection of their career histories and futures, political opportunism). But support of science cannot be one such motive, because science denies the hypothesis.
Stopping the emissions would mean reducing fossil fuel usage, resulting in economic damage. This would be worse than the oil crisis of the 1970s, because the reduction would be greater, would be permanent and energy use has increased since then. The economic disruption would be world-wide.
SOURCE
Panic, little ones, it's the Carbon Monster
IF you don't reduce your carbon footprint, then puppies will drown and bunny rabbits will die. And a terrifying, jagged-toothed monster with crazy hooked hands will descend from the clouds to eat you up. Believe it or not, that is the message being delivered by the British government to children, in a 6 million pound ($10m) advertising campaign designed to scare the next generation witless about the alleged horrors of global warming.
Taking environmentalist propaganda to a new low, the TV ad shows a father reading a nightmarish bedtime story to his perturbed-looking young daughter. He tells her of a land where the "weather is very, very strange". There are "awful heatwaves" and "terrible storms and floods". A cartoon bunny is shown crying as it starves on the dried, cracked earth, while elsewhere a puppy drowns in floodwaters. Above it all, a sooty, blackened monster - CO2 made hideous flesh - surveys the horrors with a grotesque grin on its face.
And just in case the little girl, and the millions of children that the TV ad is aimed at, thinks this is merely a twisted fairytale, her father makes clear that it is reality. It is the "horrible consequence", he says, of human beings using too much CO2, much of which comes from "everyday things like keeping houses warm and driving cars". In short? Children who live in warm houses and who get lifts to school or football practice should feel guilty, because their evil antics are causing dogs to die and cute rabbits to go hungry.
Not surprisingly, the ad has caused a storm. Nearly 400 people have complained to Britain's Advertising Standards Authority. Some are disturbed by the ad's scientific illiteracy (how one gets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's relatively sober reports about changing weather patterns to a cartoon dog drowning in a flooded city is anybody's guess). Others have slammed the government for knowingly and deliberately - and with taxypayers' money - scaring kids.
Yet the ad is only an extreme version of what has become mainstream environmentalist policy in recent years: terrifying children. The environmentalist ethos, whether it is spouted by official bodies or radical, dreadlock-sporting campaigners, presents itself as caring and considerate, yet it is shot through with the politics of fear. In place of grown-up, adult debate about the future, environmentalists continually use scaremongering - conjuring up horrid, squalid future scenarios based more on their fantastic imaginations than scientific fact - to try to force people to lower their horizons and change their behaviour.
And this green politics of fear is starting to have a detrimental effect on children. As popular culture bombards kids with messages about a fiery, bunny-hostile future, and as many schools in Britain and elsewhere rebrand themselves as "eco schools", devoted to reducing children's carbon footprints as much as expanding their minds, so children are becoming paralysed by fear. In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change. "It's making me and my friends go mad," said a 12-year-old girl.
The children were most likely to be kept awake thinking about "the possible submergence of entire countries" and the "welfare of animals", indicating that hysterical, fact-lite, The Day After Tomorrow-style scare stories about worldwide flooding or the wiping out of polar bears have hit children where it hurts.
Worryingly, the survey also found that one in seven children blamed their own parents for the coming climate doom. This suggests that environmentalists' emphasis on the destructiveness of people's everyday behaviour - their driving habits, their food choices, their holidays - has successfully convinced kids that all adults, even mummy and daddy, are dirty and dangerous.
Indeed, environmentalist activists now cynically exploit children's fears to try to get them to snitch on their parents. A book called How To Turn Your Parents Green, by James Russell, encourages children to "nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking our world", that is, grown-ups, or "Groans".
It tells kids to become "Guardians of a Glorious Green Future" and to get their parents to sign up to a "Glorious Green Charter". Traditionally, it has only been the most authoritarian regimes on Earth - think Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union - that encouraged children to spy on and squeal on their parents. Now environmentalists do it, too, though with a Little Green Book rather than a little red one.
When I was a child in the 1980s, the spectre of nuclear war was used to keep children in a permanent state of panic; today climate change plays that role. We should be wary indeed of any campaign that makes children feel scared and guilty and even drives them mad, and which turns them against their own parents.
SOURCE
EAST-WEST DIVIDE THREATENS TO SPLIT EUROPE'S STANCE AT COPENHAGEN
With just five weeks to go before world leaders meet for a global climate summit in Copenhagen, a split has emerged within the European Union. Nobody, it seems, can agree on who should foot the bill. In the past, Europe has played a crucial role in pushing for global consensus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But the bloc may lose its position at the fore of environmental protection if it can't come to an agreement on how to spread the costs fighting climate change.
European politicians said one of the main tasks of a two-day summit that began in Brussels on Thursday would be to work toward a compromise on financing climate protection measures. Developing nations have said they will not agree to tackle climate change unless they receive funding from rich countries, whose industries are largely responsible for the problem.
According to the European Commission, poorer countries will need an annual sum of 100 billion euros ($147 billion) until 2020 to help fight global warming. The EU is proposing that it should contribute 15 billion euros to this annual figure.
Despite falling far below the 35 billion euros called for by environmental organizations, the EU's proposal has met with vocal protest from Poland and eight other central European countries. Poland, which depends largely on coal for its energy, objects to the idea that countries should pay according to what they pollute. "There is a possibility to agree on a mechanism under which, the richer the country, the more it pays," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said. "We will not agree to a mechanism which means the more you pollute, the more you pay."
Some in the EU are looking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for progress on the funding because Berlin has resisted calls to set a precise sum for funding, saying the EU should wait for others to show their hand. "I want Copenhagen to be a success," Merkel said after arriving in Brussels. "The EU has to make clear its ideas. But it is crucial that the United States and China also make clear what they are willing to contribute."
The EU's bickering is the latest in a series of blows which threaten to undermine the Copenhagen summit before it has even begun. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday that while he's still optimistic a political deal to slow climate change can be reached in Copenhagen, negotiaters will not be able to reach the wide-ranging deal many observers had hoped for at the beginning of 2009. The UN head is now urging leaders to make nonbinding agreements with a view to working out the details once the summit is over.
On Wednesday, Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, pushed nations to make commitments to fight climate change quickly. "What has to be absolutely clear is that we do not have another year to sit on our hands," he said.
SOURCE
"Clean" Coal a delusion
Here’s a bit of unalloyed pessimism for you: Carbon capture and sequestration, more widely known as clean coal technology, is not going to work out. Governments and the coal industry are trying to bite off too much at once.
In theory, clean coal is a fine idea. The process of burning coal releases gases, which all modern plants already “scrub” of harmful substances like sulfur dioxide. To fight global warming, coal mine and plant owners want to do the same for carbon dioxide.
Sounds great, except that a fairly average-sized 1,500 megawatt coal plant produces about three billion [million? -- JR] tons of CO2 yearly. All that CO2 has to be separated out, a process that uses up a lot of the energy the plant produces. Then, according to current thinking, we must bury the CO2 and hope that it doesn’t come back up.
That’s a hell of a challenge. A report released Thursday by the pro-CCS Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute helps outline just how much. A few bullet-points:
* Clean coal research is currently moribund; only seven CCS projects exist today, and all are attached to gas plants
* The GCCSSI expects national governments to coordinate to give $100 billion yearly to CCS research
* Provided the money is forked over immediately, we might have 20 plants by 2020
* And if those initial plants work out as expected it will take until 2030 to have a significant number operating
* If the technology works as expected, it will add an average of 78 percent to the cost of electricity from coal
Anyone familiar with the basics of risk wouldn’t bet on that many “ifs”, especially given the looming difficulty of not only coaxing governments to throw trillions of dollars into research, but also share the technology as it develops.
Nevertheless, everything could work out perfectly and clean coal could be spreading in 2030. By that time, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may be over 500ppm. That’s no problem if the climate change skeptics are right; if the 97 percent of climatologists who study climate change are right, that number would mean we’re in for some major upheaval.
In other words, we need better solutions, right now. For coal, there are already some available. Old, inefficient plants can be shut down in favor of new ones that operate at a much higher thermal efficiency, and work onnew concepts like underground coal gasification could be accelerated.
The $2.4 trillion the International Energy Agency says we should spend researching clean coal sould also be spent other ways; research and investment into renewables like geothermal and solar power come to mind, and it’s also enough money to buy several hundred nuclear plants.
If we do insist on clean coal, the concept needs a rethink. Trying to figure out the most cost-effective way to scrub CO2 is enough of a challenge. The additional problem of permanently sequestering it underground adds too much expense and uncertainty.
There are better ways. One would be to use the CO2 to create liquid fuels for transportation. Oddly, this idea is rarely brought up in the debate over clean coal, although scientists are already working on ways to use CO2 they captured from ambient air for fuel.
SOURCE
NEW RESEARCH: EMISSIONS TRADING SCHEME COSTS BRITISH CONSUMERS £3 BILLION A YEAR
A new report (PDF) from the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) reveals the high costs being imposed on British and European consumers by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The ETS is intended to reduce carbon emissions across Europe by increasing the cost of energy for households, businesses and other organisations. This increases household bills, but also increases business running costs and the cost of running public services such as hospitals.
As well as calculating the cost of the scheme, the report investigates the flaws in its design and function. These include the problem of the burden falling disproportionately upon the poor, the highly volatile price of carbon emissions under the Scheme and the failure of the Scheme to properly balance the social costs of carbon emissions with the cost of reducing them.
Key Findings
• The Emission Trading Scheme cost British consumers nearly £3 billion in 2008, equivalent to around £117 per family, by increasing the cost of energy. The report also presents estimates of the cost to consumers in every country participating in the scheme, in each year of the scheme’s operation.
• From its introduction on 1st January 2005 to the end of 2008, our central estimate of the Scheme's cost to consumers across Europe is £67 billion (€93 billion). That is equivalent to around €185 (£132) for every person in the ETS participating countries.
• Some countries' energy markets pass on these costs to consumers at different rates, meaning that at best the Scheme cost around £33 billion (€46 billion) and at worst £83 billion (€116 billion).
• New evidence uncovered using the Freedom of Information Act shows that the British Government has not just accepted this significant burden on consumers, but has actively worked to increase it. Despite continuing rhetoric about reducing fuel poverty, the Government in fact spent £42,899.69 of taxpayers’ money to assist the European Commission in legal attempts at the European Court of Justice to forcibly reduce the supply of emissions allowances and thereby increase the emissions price further.
Matthew Sinclair, Research Director at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:
“The EU Emissions Trading Scheme has cost ordinary families billions, while energy companies have made huge windfall profits. Despite that, it has failed to produce a stable carbon price, leaving consumers with an unpredictable addition to their bills. Manufacturers already struggling to compete with emerging economies like India and China cannot cope with such a substantial addition to their costs, and driving them abroad won’t help cut emissions but will mean fewer jobs in Britain. The Government claim to be against high energy prices but then embrace policies like this and even use taxpayers’ money to support European Commission legal cases which threaten to increase the bill to British families further. The EU Emissions Trading Scheme has been an expensive failure and should be abolished.”
FULL REPORT here (PDF)
SOURCE
Bid to gag scientific attack on Australia's proposed Warmist laws
Censorship of disagreement is a kneejerk reaction among Leftists but it is sad to see it from a major science organization. The CSIRO is obviously putting politics before science
THE nation's peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government's climate change policies. The paper, by the CSIRO's Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed. The paper was accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed.
But Dr Spash told the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics conference that the CSIRO had since June tried to block its publication.
In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is "far removed" from the reality of permit markets. "While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases)," he says. "Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters. "The public appearance is that action is being undertaken. The reality is that GHGs are increasing and society is avoiding the need for substantive proposals to address the problem of behavioural and structural change."
Dr Spash said trading schemes did not efficiently allocate emission cuts because their design was manipulated by vested interests. For example, in Australia, large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction. The schemes were also flawed because: global warming was caused by gases other than carbon; emissions were difficult to measure; carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes "crowded out" voluntary action by individuals. He concludes that more direct measures, such as a carbon tax, regulations or new infrastructure would be simpler, more effective and less open to manipulation.
Dr Spash could not be contacted by The Australian. However, his presentation to the ANZSEE conference in Darwin last Wednesday stated: "The CSIRO is currently maintaining they have the right to ban the written version of this paper from publication by myself as a representative of the organisation and by myself as a private citizen." Dr Spash said CSIRO managers had written to the journal's editor demanding the paper not be published.
CSIRO spokesman Huw Morgan said the publication of Dr Spash's paper was an internal matter and was being reviewed by the chief executive's office. However, he said that under the agency's charter scientists were forbidden from commenting on matters of government or opposition policy.
The CSIRO charter, introduced last year, was trumpeted by Science Minister Kim Carr as a way to guarantee freedom of expression for scientists. Senator Carr said he was seeking a briefing from the CSIRO. Opposition science spokesman Eric Abetz accused the government of empty spin.
Julian Cribb, adjunct professor of science communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, said gagging scientists deprived the public of scientific knowledge they had funded. ANZSEE president Wendy Proctor said if Dr Spash's research questioned current orthodoxy, it should be made public to inform debate.
SOURCE
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1 November, 2009
AS THE EARTH COOLS, FIGHT OVER WARMING HEATS UP
Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by man. Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth's temperature was beginning to drop.
That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don't believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.
The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn't mean that people aren't heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect. "There is a lot of room for improvement" in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again -- a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. "You need to know what you can believe and can't believe from the models."
The renewed discussion of inherent shortcomings in climate models comes on the cusp of potentially big financial commitments. In five weeks, diplomats from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to hash out a new agreement to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions. The science continues to evolve.
The goal of climate models is to project how rising greenhouse-gas emissions will interact with natural forces to affect the global temperature. The models are technological marvels. Using supercomputers, they divide the world into grids of roughly 4,000 cubic miles apiece. The grids are stacked, one on top of the other, up through the atmosphere.
It is complicated stuff. The models consist of dozens of equations written to reflect how liquids and gases move about the planet. Just as a symphony's sound is affected by the crash of cymbals or the pluck of a violin string, the planet's future temperature is influenced by powerful ocean currents and tiny specks of sea salt. In between are other players, such as sunlight, clouds and rain.
Added to the equations are such measurements as past temperatures, barometric pressure and sea salinity. Calculations about the influence of sunlight are entered. Then various projections of greenhouse-gas emissions are factored in. The computers run the equations and generate projections of global temperatures.
The models are only as good as the information they are fed. One big uncertainty is ocean temperature. Oceans trap huge amounts of heat, and they process by which they release it over time affects the temperature of the planet. But there isn't a lot of actual data, because the vastness of the oceans makes gathering temperature data costly and arduous.
The success of the models also depends on the soundness of their assumptions. The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet. The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation -- and how clouds in turn affect temperature -- remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently.
On a graph, the models' temperature projections ultimately point upward, signifying warming. But along the way, each line has dips -- temporary periods of cooling. The timing and depth of the drops differ from model to model. Most climate scientists have regarded these zigs and zags as noise. Their models are designed to project how greenhouse gases will affect the global thermostat over a century, not what temperatures will be in any year or even in any decade. "We care about the climate in the 2080s. We don't care about the climate on Aug. 15, 2084," says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
The models' focus on century-long trends is in part a function of limited data. Predicting short-term temperatures requires more measurements than projecting long-term trends. But such data have been lacking. "These long-term climate projections are a much easier problem than these shorter-term climate projections," says Mr. Dessler. "It's sort of counterintuitive."
Though often overlooked in the debate about man-made warming, natural factors have contributed to record high temperatures. The year 1998, for example, was widely noted as the hottest year on record, intensifying concerns about global warming and people's role in it. But one reason that 1998 set a record is that a strong shift in ocean temperature known as El Niño occurred that year. "1998 was a very hot year because it was an El Niño year," says Mr. Dessler.
The 2007 U.N. report included in its widely read summary a chart of projected temperatures that lacked visible periods of cooling. That is because it was an average of the lines from many different climate models. As averages do, it looked smooth. And it pointed up, indicating rising temperatures. Yet as the report was released, the global average temperature was below what it had been in 2005, which along with 1998 was one of the two hottest years on record. Even so, the average temperature in 2006 and 2007 remained among the 10 highest ever recorded.
About a year of the U.N. report's release, researchers in Germany published a paper in the journal Nature that attributed the cooling to the enigmatic ocean currents. The paper was based on a model that used new ocean-temperature measurements. It concluded that a shift in ocean currents was counteracting the warming from greenhouse gases. And that is causing the planet, on balance, to cool.
The paper argues that intermittent cooling from natural factors such as ocean currents will prove less significant in the long term than continued warming from greenhouse-gas emissions. But climate scientists acknowledge that those natural variabilities aren't fully understood. "This is pioneering work," says Mr. Latif, one of the authors of the authors of the German paper. "I won't say our forecast will be correct."
A separate study by researchers in the U.K., published in 2007 in the journal Science, also says the cooling will soon be outweighed by warming from greenhouse gases.
Unsurprisingly, the research hasn't settled the debate. Scientists who have long questioned man-made global warming cite the temperature drop that began in 2006 as more evidence the models are wrong. "They were predicting warming," says Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Lindzen's work, regarded as leading the research challenging man-made warming, suggests that natural factors such as clouds generally inhibit, rather than intensify, greenhouse-gas warming. He wrote in a recent article that the study from the U.K. admits that the kind of climate model cited in the U.N.'s IPCC report "did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability, thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC's iconic attribution" linking greenhouse-gas emissions to climate change. He added that "even when all models agree, they can all be wrong."
The researchers behind those studies strenuously reject that description. But they disagree among themselves on how long the cooling will last. The British paper says warming will resume as early as this year. The German paper says warming won't resume for perhaps a decade.
Such disagreements aren't unusual in a nascent science. "I don't think anybody is surprised that we're going to get one model that suggests it's going to cool and another that suggests it's going to warm," says Vicky Pope, a scientist at the Hadley Center, the U.K. institute where the research for the British paper was done. "That's consistent with where we are with the science."
SOURCE
EUROPE'S CLIMATE BLUFF: EU OFFERS TO CONTRIBUTE TO CLIMATE FUND ... IF EVERYONE ELSE DOES
The EU has agreed a conditional deal on how to help other nations fight global warming, ahead of a key climate summit, but set no figure on what it would pay. The EU agreed climate change would need 100bn euros ($148bn; £90bn) a year by 2020, and would pay its "fair share", conditional on other nations. UK PM Gordon Brown said the EU was leading the way with bold proposals.
Talks at the EU summit in Brussels had been deadlocked over how EU nations would share its costs. A coalition of nine poorer EU nations had threatened to block a deal unless richer countries paid more. No cost targets for individual EU nations were announced and the initial funding will be voluntary. Details of how the burden will be shared will be sorted out [or not] later by a working group.
Green groups have criticised the EU deal, saying it was not nearly enough.
Mr Brown, announcing the deal, said the EU climate discussions had been a success. "We can look the others in the eye," said the president of the European Commission, "we Europeans have done our job." But to critics, that job may look only half-done. EU leaders have agreed that developing nations would need $150bn a year to tackle climate change and pledged they would pay their fair share. But they haven't said how much. And poorer EU nations like Poland will continue on a voluntary basis or according to their means. It's now up to the other big global players - the US, China and India - to decide if that's enough for them to put an offer on the table and avoid failure in Copenhagen.
"We were aware that if the European Union did not come together to solve some of the impasses, the possibility of a deal at the Copenhagen summit would be a lot less likely." He said: "The EU is leading the way with bold proposals - do not allow years to go by without action."
The EU said the amount to come from public funding from all countries to meet the estimated 100bn euros a year needed by 2020 would be between 22bn and 50bn euros a year. However, it did not fix the EU's contribution, saying it would only pay its "fair share".
But Mr Brown did announce a "fast track" scheme to reduce carbon emissions, with the richest countries providing development finance to the poorest. This would come in soon after the Copenhagen summit and would cost 5bn to 7bn euros immediately, to come from all richer countries. He insisted that all these funding targets would be conditional on other richer countries making funding offers and on developing countries showing how they would spend the money.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the agreement was "an important breakthrough that brings new momentum". He said the EU nations had "agreed a negotiating mandate" for the Copenhagen climate talks. "Next week, we'll meet the US president and will say 'let's make Copenhagen a success'," Mr Barroso said.
Fredrik Reinfeldt, PM of Sweden, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said: "The EU has a very strong negotiating position. This enables the EU to continue taking a lead in the negotiations and encourages others."
However, the Green bloc in the European parliament criticised the EU leaders for failing to fix the costing, calling the deal "a calamitous result for the climate". "The EU preferred to give into dissension, opacity and internal tactics during the negotiations between the member states," the bloc's leaders said. Joris den Blanken of environmental group Greenpeace, said: "[The EU] failed to use this opportunity to put its money where its mouth is. "President Barack Obama should now step up and break the deadlock in negotiations."
SOURCE
The Verdict’s In: Cap and Trade Will Not Work
Over the summer The Washington Post called Europe’s experience with cap and trade as “Exhibit A” of what not to do on climate. Yesterday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Iain Murray brought evidence to the jury – that jury being Senate Environment & Public Works Committee. Murray detailed the failures of the EU cap and trade scheme. Despite the European Union establishing an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in the year 2000, the United States has had similar or better emissions reductions than most countries:
“According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, the United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 2 by 3 percent. By comparison, the only major economy to reduce its emissions more was France, at 6 percent. The United Kingdom managed a similar performance to the US at -2.9 percent. Most other economies performed much worse.”Murray then refers to a study by the Taxpayers’ Alliance in London to weigh in the costs side of ETS and discusses what it would take to achieve a 20 percent reduction by 2020 - same as the Boxer-Kerry cap and trade bill in the United States:
EU emissions did drop a negligible 1.5 percent in 2008. Being charitable, let’s assume that all of that emissions drop can be ascribed to the ETS. If so, then to achieve the 20 percent reduction target the EU has for 2020, simple extrapolation suggests that will cost the EU a staggering $2.28 trillion that year (and the accumulated costs would be even more massive). In fact, the cost could be way higher than that, because we tend to make the more affordable cuts first; deeper cuts will naturally cost more per unit.”In testimony in July, Heritage Senior Policy Analyst Ben Lieberman brought his own evidence to the table for why Europe’s model is not the one to follow:
We have also seen examples of fraud and unfairness in the process. Given the similar politics here, where big businesses have lobbied for free allocations much more effectively than the little guys–consumers, homeowners, small business owners, farmers–it is quite likely that the inequities would appear here as well.Lost jobs. Lost income. Lost economic activity. Nothing to show for it. The evidence is incontrovertible. Let’s hope the jury listens.
The reason for the failure of carbon cap and trade is simple — reducing carbon dioxide from the existing installed base of energy-producing and -using equipment and vehicles is prohibitively expensive, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Many nations committed to emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol are going to miss the targets (unless the recession lingers) and any talk of tougher targets is empty rhetoric.”
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Save the planet? Kill cap-and-trade
If members of Congress need yet another reason to kill the Waxman-Markey bill, the Obama administration's economy-suffocating, job-destroying energy program, Princeton University's Tim Searchinger and his colleagues have a humdinger: Carbon reduction laws encourage widespread deforestation as trees and other vegetation are harvested to produce energy from biomass to replace oil and gas. The problem is that in long run, this process actually increases greenhouse gas emissions, which cap-and-trade is meant to reduce, according to Searchinger.
The Princeton researcher's paper, published Oct. 23 in Science, points out that almost all prior global warming studies failed to take into account the carbon emissions that result from converting cropland and forests to energy production. This accounting error treats all bio-energy as carbon-neutral, the authors say, despite the fact that burning wood and clearing land actually releases quite a large quantity of carbon into the atmosphere.
"By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years," the Princeton authors say. "Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%." Neither the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nor existing European cap-and-trade programs have taken into account widespread deforestation as farmers worldwide respond to the new economic incentives, Searchinger added.
Those figures might actually underestimate the growth of greenhouse gas production caused by reliance on energy produced from bio-mass sources because cap-and-trade includes $30 billion in subsidies for alternative energy research, development, and commercialization, including bio-mass. In other words: A vote for the House version of cap-and-trade or the companion legislation sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, and Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, actually means a vote for even more greenhouse gases. Who knew? Now, it's the opponents of cap-and-trade bills who can honestly say they are just trying to save the planet from the ravages of greenhouse gases.
And one more consideration: Kerry contends global warming presents a national security problem for the U.S. This is because, according to Kerry, global warming "injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system." The Princeton study suggests that it's cap-and-trade that poses the national security threat.
SOURCE
Lisa Heinzerling: An attack-dog Greenie
Are their cases of environmental pollution that are so egregious that the polluters should be punished as murderers? Absolutely, says Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Heinzerling. And she is willing to wipe out half of the world's population to prove her point. Given her way, she would turn into murderers every manufacturer in America who had any inkling of an idea ahead of time that their actions had even the remotest statistical chance of causing a pollution-related death. And she is determined to give her view the force of law.
For example, she strongly opposes allowing any cost-benefit analyses into the evaluation of environmental risk because, for her, doing so amounts to "a pre-killing weighing of the choice to kill." In such analyses, "economic costs of pollution-reducing strategies are balanced against the value" in dollars of those whom they will kill. Such deliberation for her, "makes the killing worse, not better, from a legal and moral perspective."
To make her point, she uses an example of an imaginary reality TV show where, every week, some unlucky contestant is not only voted off the show but is executed. She claims that we would not allow this killing even if the show were a huge monetary success. And neither should we allow companies, on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, to "set themselves on a course of conduct that they know will result in human death."
Her analogy is flawed for a number of reasons. On the show, we know that someone will be killed by our actions. In the real world, what is actually known by a company when it decides not to install the expensive new scrubbers is simply that it may result in the death of one extra person per million. Or, of course, it may not.
Any time I put the key in the ignition and drive away I realize that there is some real statistical probability greater than zero that my actions will result in the death of an innocent person. Even if I am obeying all laws, a child who is not paying attention to traffic may rush out in front of my car. In these types of cases, motorists are often absolved both legally and morally of any wrongdoing.
But, wait a minute, I did know when I left the house that morning that there was some remote statistical chance that my actions might result in someone else's death, and yet I drove away in spite of this. By Lisa Heinzerling's unorthodox reasoning, I would instead be guilty of murder.
Another disingenuous feature of her reality show analogy is that while, in the show, we specifically set out to kill someone, in the real world corporations are normally not out to harm, much less kill. Her response to this is that unintentionally causing a death in pursuit of some other end — like profit — is still a "knowing killing." And she full well acknowledges that this extreme view "makes killers out of the people who produce the things—electricity, oil, chemicals—that bring good things to life."
And so, if, in the final analysis, we end up destroying the very commodities that "bring good things to life" – and, in fact, save millions of lives a year – well, to Ms Heinzerling's way of thinking, that's just too bad. In short, she is absolutely determined to save individual lives – even if she has to wipe out mankind to do it.
But to the medieval philosophers who first formulated views of just conduct in war, it was all-important that a good end was aimed at—this was what morally justified any killings of non-combatants that came about as the result of collateral damage. One was not targeting them. One was aiming at the good end of targeting combatants in a just war. Heinzerling seems utterly unable to appreciate this crucial distinction.
SOURCE
Australia: National Party at war with wishy-washy conservatives over Warmist laws
Australia's rural-based National Party is one of the few in the world to reject outright the global warming theory
Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce says he is frustrated by personal criticism from within the Liberal Party and has threatened to quit the Coalition. Senator Joyce's strong stance against an emission trading scheme has angered some Liberal Party MPs.
Senator Joyce told Channel Seven his critics should have the courage to state their views in public. "If after about four years you continually deal with unnamed sources in the paper and those unnamed sources say that the source of all their problems in life is you, then you say if you want to make yourself public and you are at the appropriate level, I'll leave," he said.
The Coalition is in negotiations on an emissions trading scheme with the Federal Government. However, talks have been stalling over Government claims the Coalition is not negotiating in good faith. Several Coalition members have made comments about the emissions trading scheme that seem to be at odds with Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's stance.
On Friday, Senate Leader Nick Minchin said the Coalition would not necessarily vote for an emissions trading scheme even if the Federal Government accepted the Coalition's amendments. Senator Minchin's comments came amid a report in The Australian newspaper that Liberal frontbenchers were getting cold feet about supporting a scheme because the party's research shows voters are becoming hesitant about the idea.
Mr Turnbull has said he will recommend supporting an emissions trading scheme if the Opposition's amendments are accepted. Senator Joyce has been outspoken in his opposition to an emissions trading scheme and has said he would vote such a scheme down.
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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 are mirrors of this site here and here
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PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
After much reading in the relevant literature, the following conclusions seem warranted to me. You should find evidence for all of them appearing on this blog from time to time:
The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.
The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny.
Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott
Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)
The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".
For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston.
Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.
The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").
"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken
Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?
I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.
Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed
The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?
For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.
Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.
There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".
The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory
SOME MORE BRIEF OBSERVATIONS WORTH REMEMBERING:
"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley
Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.
"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?
Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.
Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?
Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.
There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)
The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).
In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.
The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!
If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue
A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.
Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein
The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?
A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.
There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here
The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.
As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.
Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."