Warmist crooks above: Keith "One tree" Briffa; Michael
"Bristlecone" Mann; James "data distorter" Hansen; Phil "data destroyer"
Jones --
Leading members in the cabal of climate quacks
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".
Have any of the AGW people ever said just what is the optimal average world temperature and why that temperature is optimal??
The
AGWers don't have a specific optimum global average temperature, but
they do have a sort of optimum temperature band. This forms the basis of
the idea, widely used by (and specifically invented for) AGW promoting
politicians, that the global average temperature must be limited to not
increasing by more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial temperature
levels. The 2 degree C figure usually appears in statements made by
politicians at the various international climate change summits that
seem to take place every year.
The story about where the 2 deg C
figure comes from, which was invented by some German climate scientists
back in the mid-1990s, is given in this link:
"The story of the two-degree target began in the German Advisory
Council on Global Change (WBGU). Administration politicians had asked
the council for climate protection guidelines, and the scientists under
Schellnhuber's leadership came up with a strikingly simple idea. "We
looked at the history of the climate since the rise of homo sapiens,"
Schellnhuber recalls. "This showed us that average global temperatures
in the last 130,000 years were no more than two degrees higher than
before the beginning of the industrial revolution. To be on the safe
side, we came up with a rule of thumb stating that it would be better
not to depart from this field of experience in human evolution.
Otherwise we would be treading on terra incognita.""
So
from that the above it looks like pro-AGW climate scientists are
assigning an optimum temperature band to what they think the homo
sapiens species has already experienced in its history. The 2 deg C rise
figure would go outside this optimum band. It's an application of the
precautionary principle.
As far as I'm aware climate scientists
don't think a 'catastrophe' would occur if the limit is exceeded (for
example Schellnhuber, who invented the limit, doesn't think that) but
Green-leaning politicians often treat it as though it is a catastrophic
limit.
The Green lobby, it goes without saying, claim that an
apocalypse would occur if the 2 deg C limit is exceeded. For example the
Stop Climate Chaos Coalition in the UK (a coalition of about 100
Green-leaning NGOs) have this on their webpage:
"But
with a rise of 2 degrees C or more, southern Europe will suffer serious
drought every decade; billions of people will not have enough water;
550 million will go hungry; 3 million will die from malnutrition.
In
the UK coastal flooding will impact up to 170 million people. And many
plant, bird and butterfly species will be consigned to the history
books."
The above extract also gives the biggest Greenie
numerical howler I think I've ever seen. They're claiming 170 million
people in the UK would be affected by coastal flooding when the current
total population of the UK is something like 60 million.
A
string of arson fires and material found during an arrest point to
"animal rights" groups now being willing to kill for their goals.
According
to STRATFOR, an open source intelligence firm, on July 22 special
agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)
and the FBI arrested Walter Bond in Denver. He was charged with setting
an April 30 fire which destroyed the Sheepskin Factory, a Glendale,
Colorado, business.
According to STRATFOR, Bond goes by the alias
ALF Lone Wolf, and he apparently bragged to a confidential informant
that he was also responsible for a June 5 fire at a leather factory in
Salt Lake City and a July 3 fire at a restaurant in Sandy, Utah.
Bond
is a member of an extremist group called the Animal Liberation Front
(ALF). They are allied with a similar organization called the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF).
These groups were somewhat in the news a
few years ago, but faded off the radar when it became apparent that
public sympathies were rather with the business owners whose livelihoods
were destroyed and workers who were injured — not the radicals who saw
no moral dilemma in spiking trees or torching housing developments.
So
far, law enforcement has not focused heavily on organizations like the
ALF or the ELF for a couple of reasons. First, because they’re hard to
catch. They use an operational model called “leaderless resistance” in
which small cells or individual operatives function underground without a
command structure. They are in turn given some cover guidance by
above-ground political organizations which are very careful not to do
anything illegal. They also tend to get cover from a sympathetic media
which, when they do report on it, will tend to decry the action and then
proceed to talk about the horrors of animal testing.
The other
reason these cases don’t get a lot of attention is that to date the
terrorists have been very careful not to target people deliberately.
There are some indications this may be changing.
As STRATFOR reports:
According to the ATF affidavit, a search of Bond’s backpack after
his arrest revealed that he had a copy of an ALF publication titled “The
Declaration of War: Killing People to Save the Animals and the
Environment.” The book, which was first published by the ALF in 1991,
contends that nonviolent methods such as those laid out by Gandhi and
Jesus are not productive (especially when applied to animals) and
explains that violence is justified to protect animals, who cannot
protect themselves. The book’s author contends that people who seek to
liberate animals (which the author refers to as “brothers” and
“sisters”) from human oppression and abuse will “use any and every
tactic necessary to win the freedom of our brothers and sisters. This
means they cheat, steal, lie, plunder, disable, threaten, and physically
harm others to achieve their objective.”
In other words, they figure it’s OK to kill people if it will save an animal.
Public
support for tapping America's oil reserves got a tough test over the
last few months with the Deepwater Horizon spill, but the verdict is in:
It's "drill, baby, drill!"
A clear majority continued to support
drilling in American waters even during the height of the spill, when
oil was gushing uncontrollably and dying birds headlined network
newscasts. Pollsters at Rasmussen reported on Aug. 4 that "since the
oil-rig explosion that caused the massive oil leak, support for offshore
drilling has ranged from 56 percent to 64 percent." That's fairly
consistent with the percentages in April of this year, just before the
spill, and not a huge drop-off from the 72 percent that supported it
back in the summer of 2008, when pump prices topped $4 a gallon.
Now
that the leak has been stopped, the number in favor should start
creeping back up. Support was always strongest in Louisiana -- which
bore the brunt of the environmental and economic damage -- where 79
percent of residents remained in favor of drilling in Rassmussen's
numbers, the same as before the spill.
President Obama clearly
overplayed his hand with Louisianians and other Gulf Coast residents
when his administration tried to parlay the spill into a justification
for a moratorium on offshore drilling and other job-killing measures,
such as the cap-and-trade global-warming tax on energy. The bayou
backlash against the moratorium -- including from Louisiana Democrats in
Congress -- was deafening.
Looking forward, the biggest threat
to the Gulf region's economy isn't the spill itself but Washington's
reaction to it. According to a study by Louisiana State University
economics Professor Joseph Mason, the moratorium will destroy 12,000
jobs in the near term and 36,000 if it lasts a year. As the Gulf region
loses jobs, the rest of the nation is losing the energy that would have
been produced.
Gulf Coast residents were right not to overreact.
Despite Obama's best efforts to hype the spill, including a prime-time
speech calling it "the worst environmental disaster America has ever
faced," the damage has proved to be far from catastrophic.
The
scariest claims turned out to be nonsense. Remember those "experts" who
predicted that the oil would make its way around Florida and blacken the
Atlantic Coast?
As cleanup activities and efforts to compensate
those who've been harmed move forward, there is reason for cautious
optimism about the long-term prospects for recovery. The Gulf shrimp is
just as safe to eat -- and as tasty -- as before the spill.
The
administration is still pushing the moratorium, but its gloomy rhetoric
-- echoed by nearly every anti-fossil-fuel environmental group -- may
undercut its own efforts. If the Deepwater Horizon spill really was the
absolute worst that could happen, then the benefits of producing
American oil sure seem worth the risks. Spills of this magnitude occur
only once every few decades. We'll more likely see a return of gas at $4
a gallon -- or higher -- long before we see another spill this big.
Washington
can and should find out what caused the spill and impose reasonable
safeguards, but it shouldn't close the door on tapping the nation's oil
resources. The American people have had it right all along: Drill, baby,
drill!
Earlier this
year, the Environmental Protection Agency issued another one of those
announcements read exclusively by government bureaucrats and green
policy wonks. The EPA decided to delay a decision to increase the
concentration of ethanol legal in gasoline from 10% to 15%. So-called
E15 fuel would have to wait for approval until November.
It was a
little-read regulatory decision that barely made a splash in the media.
But it was also a rock thrown at Washington's hornets' nest of food and
agricultural lobbyists. "We are disappointed," warned food giant Archer
Daniels Midland. "We find this further delay unacceptable" and a
"dereliction of duty," harrumphed ethanol lobbying group Growth Energy.
By
delaying the decision, the EPA punted on a crucial decision. The
pressure brought to bear against the agency by the agriculture industry
has been incredible. It's also been applied well; the EPA will most
likely still approve E15 fuel in the fall.
That's bad news for
any American who likes to drive. In a country powered by the automobile,
E15 is an enormous question mark. Since the 1970s when ethanol was
first regulated by the feds, concentrations of alcohol in fuel above 10%
have been illegal. But the government, lost in a dream world where cars
can run on corn, has tied itself in regulatory knots trying to force
ethanol into the fuel supply.
The history of ethanol is a sad
torrid affair of crony capitalism and green fantasies. By jumping in bed
with the agriculture industry and blindly slapping on new regulations,
the government artificially propped up an industry and put itself in a
bind from which there may be no return.
From Suing Toyota to Subsidizing E15
Across
America, pumps at gas stations are emblazoned with the words, "Contains
10% Ethanol." That's no free market innovation. Since the 1970s, the
federal government has heavily subsidized the production of "gasohol"--a
blend of 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol that reduces tailpipe emissions.
For decades, progressive politicians and environmental groups have
revered ethanol as a miracle additive that will help purify America's
air. "No country has ever gone to war over ethanol," reads one sign on
the Washington, D.C. Metro subway.
There's just one problem:
Ethanol fuel is wildly inefficient. The amount of corn required to soak
the fuel supply is massive. To shift America's car culture entirely from
gasoline to gasohol would require 700,000 square miles of land growing
corn exclusively for ethanol production. That would mean converting
one-fifth of the United States into a sprawling corn farm.
Then
again, the government never found a green boondoggle it didn't love. For
five years now, Congress has been mandating that the fuel supply be
diluted with ethanol. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 required 7.5 billion
gallons of ethanol in the fuel supply by 2012. A Democratic Congress
went a step further in 2007, mandating 9 billion gallons by 2008, 15.2
billion by 2012, and 36 billion by 2022.
Unfortunately, that
whole Economics 101, supply-and-demand thing got in the way. The maximum
amount of ethanol that can be produced to meet demand, called the
"blend wall," is expected to level out at 15 billion. That will make it
impossible to meet the government's mandates.
The agriculture
industry, represented primarily by Archer Daniels Midland and Growth
Energy, spied an opportunity. Why not increase the legal gasohol
concentration from 10% ethanol to 12% or even 15%? That would
immediately ignite ethanol production and allow the government to meet
its mandate. More importantly, it would make Big Agriculture some
serious money.
The EPA looked ready to raise the limit until
science finally intervened. A study surfaced by the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory from 2008 that found E15 ethanol caused a raft of
problems in cars, including a loss of fuel economy and spikes in exhaust
temperatures. Meanwhile the higher concentration of ethanol did nothing
to reduce tailpipe emissions. The study also found problems when E15
fuel was used in lawn trimmers.
The car industry exploded in
outrage. Most car warranties only cover E10, which could leave customers
stuck with hefty bills if their engines were damaged. A study done by
the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers found E15 "made engines run
hot, compromised catalytic converters, and even damaged cylinder walls."
To
its credit, the EPA ultimately delayed its decision in order to review
the science. But in the meantime they'll have an army of powerful
agricultural lobbyists leaning on them. Even supported by its
scaffolding of government subsidies and mandates, the ethanol industry
is collapsing. The recession shuttered several ethanol companies. Others
were gobbled up by oil giants at bargain prices. Some estimates suggest
ethanol producers are losing 10 cents on every gallon of gasoline. This
is all despite the fact that 25% of corn grown in the United States
goes towards ethanol production.
The agricultural industry needs E15. And if history is any indication, it'll probably get what it wants.
Their lack of any real principles other than mindless hostility to the world they live in shows up
Watching
the colossal and implosive decline of the once mighty green movement to
stop global warming has been an educational experience. It’s rare to
see so many smart, idealistic and dedicated people look so clueless and
fail so completely. From the anti-climax of the Cluster of Copenhagen,
when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and
chaotic global gathering ever held, the movement has gone from one
catastrophic failure to the next.
A year ago giddy
environmentalists were on top of the world. The greenest president in
American history had the largest congressional majority of any president
since Lyndon Johnson; the most powerful leaders in the world were
elbowing each other for places on the agenda at the Copenhagen
conference on climate.
It all came to naught. The continued
stalemates and failures of the UN treaty process have fallen off the
front pages; as the Kyoto Protocol sinks ineffectually into oblivion, no
new global treaty will take its place. The most Democratic Congress in
a generation will not pass significant climate legislation before the
midterms pull Congress to the right, and there will be no US law on
carbon caps or anything close in President Obama’s first term, and there
is less public faith in or concern about climate change today than at
any time in the last fifteen years.
Has any public pressure group ever spent so much direct mail and foundation money for such pathetic results?
The
standard rap on the greens is that they failed because they were too
environmentalist. Their pure and naive ideals were no match for the
evil, ugly forces of real world politics. Beautiful losers, they dared
to dream a dream too gossamer winged, too delicate for the harsh light
of day. Bambi, meet Godzilla; the butterfly was broken on the wheel.
Even
in defeat, the greens can’t get it right. The greens didn’t fail
because they were too loyal to their ideals; they failed because lost
touch with the core impetus and values of the environmental movement.
Bambi wasn’t crushed by Godzilla; Bambi turned into Godzilla, and the
same kind of public skepticism and populism that once fueled
environmentalism have turned against it.
The greens have
forgotten where they come from. Modern environmentalism was born in the
reaction against Big Science, Big Government and Experts. The Army
Corps of Engineers built dams that devastated wetlands and ruined
ecosystems; environmentalists used to be people who fought the Corps
because they understood the limits of science, engineering, and simple
big interventions in complex ecosystems.
The case
environmentalists used to make was that modern science was too crude and
too incomplete to take into account the myriad features that could turn
a giant hydroelectric dam from a blessing into a curse. Yes, the dam
would generate power — for a while. But green critics would note that
the dam had side effects: silt would back up in the reservoir, soil
downstream would be impoverished, parasites and malaria bearing
mosquitoes would flourish in the still waters and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile the destruction of wetlands and river bottoms imposed enormous
costs to wildlife diversity and the productivity of river systems.
Salmon runs would disappear. Often, the development associated with
hydroelectric dams led to deforestation, offsetting gains in flood
control.
Environmentalists were skeptics of the One Big Fix.
Science could never capture all the side effects and the unintended
consequences. DDT looked like a magic bullet against malaria, but it
threatened to wipe out important bird species. Books like Silent
Spring, the environmental classic, attacked the engineers of big
interventions as hopelessly out of touch crude thinkers, who tried to
reduce complex social and biological issues and processes to simple
science. Intellectually and culturally, environmentalists came out of
the same movement as critics of crude urban development like Jane Jacob
(The Death and Life of Great American Cities). They celebrated the
diverse local, small-scale adaptations that reflected the knowledge of
communities as opposed to the grandiose plans of the social engineers.
Essentially,
the core environmentalist argument against big projects and big
development is the same argument that libertarians use against economic
regulations and state planning. The ‘economic ecology’ of a healthy
free market system is so complex, libertarians argue, that bureaucratic
interventions, however well intentioned and however thoroughly supported
by peer reviewed science of various kinds, will produce unintended
consequences — and in any case the interventions and regulations are too
crude and too simple to provide an adequate substitute for the
marvelously complex economic order that develops from free competition.
Environmentalists turned this logic against Big Science projects like
dams and more generally built a case that humanity should work to have a
light footprint in the world. Natural systems are so complicated, so
interlinked in non-obvious ways, that any human intervention in nature
has unanticipated costs. The less we intervene, the better.
An
increasingly skeptical public started to notice that ‘experts’ weren’t
angels descending immaculately from heaven bearing infallible
revelations from God. They were fallible human beings with mortgages to
pay and funds to raise. They disagreed with one another and they
colluded with their friends and supporters like everyone else. They
often produced research that agreed with the views of those who funded
their work (tobacco companies, builders of nuclear power plants, NGOs
and foundations).
More, on issues the public follows closely, the
scientific consensus keeps changing. Margarine was introduced as the
healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in
many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat. Should you
eat no fat or the right fat? All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How
much vitamin E should you take? How much sun should you get? How much
fish oil should you swallow? How should you divide your time between
aerobic and non-aerobic exercise? On these and many other subjects,
expert opinion keeps changing. Perhaps the current consensus will last;
quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will
happen.
The rise of the environmental movement reflected the
increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was
becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees. The
public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government
agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers
with big projects in mind.
But when it comes to global warming,
the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists
— who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists
who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants
are safe — who are the pious advocates of science and experts.
Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus.
Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we
uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us
what’s right.
More, environmentalists have found a big and simple
fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one
big fix. It is not just wrong to doubt that a fix is needed, it is
wrong to doubt that the Chosen Fix will work. Never mind that the
leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty
that gains unanimous consent among 190 plus countries and is then
ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95-0) is and always
has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The
experts decree; we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.
The
environmental movement has turned into the Army Corps of Engineers,
even as public skepticism of experts has reached new heights. The
financial experts and economists told us the new financial markets were
perfectly safe. Then the Obama administration’s expert economists told
us the stimulus would work and that unemployment wouldn’t get above 8%.
They told him and he told us the recovery was underway. “Recovery
summer,” anyone?
Coldest year on record for minimum temperatures in the capital of Western Australia
Perth
is shivering through its coldest year for overnight temperatures, but
at the same time bathing in the sunniest winter on record.
Meanwhile,
farmers are battling the second driest year since records began, as the
WA Bureau of Meteorology rewrites the history books for rain, sun and
temperature extremes.
Perth's minimum temperature for winter this
year is 1.9C colder than the average 8.2C, according to the bureau's
climate information officer John Relf.
And the city has received just 402.6mm of rain compared to the January to August average of 648.3mm.
While
daytime temperatures are on average at 18.8C, the number of sunlight
hours are well above the 6.4 hour average with a 7.3 hour average
recorded for August. ``We've literally had an extra hour of sunlight a
day in August this year," Mr Relf said. ``Our weather has been dominated
by high pressure and when you get high pressure for extended periods of
time the lows just run underneath. ``We seem to be going on some sort
of parallel with 2006 at the moment, which recorded the driest year on
record and it's been going like that for a long time."
The dry
conditions spell devastation for many wheat and cattle farmers across
large parts of the state. WA Farmers Federation president Mike Norton
said some farmers in the eastern Wheatbelt stand to lose entire crops
this year because of drought. ``You don't have to go very far inland to
be at half our normal rainfall," Mr Norton said. ``We desperately need a
very, very wet September.
``When you start to talk about
livestock, there is going to be some real problems across a very large
area of the Wheatbelt. Pastures are doing worse than what the crops
are."
Perth dams are also low. At 35.3 percent capacity, dams
are down 52.38 gigalitres compared to this time last year - one
gigalitre is the size of Subiaco oval filled to the brim.
Despite
the dry spell, the Bureau of Meteorology says the outlook for spring
holds some hope. The bureau is predicting a 65 per cent chance that the
median rainfall will be exceeded from September to November in the
South-West, while remaining average across the state in spring. ``The
pattern of seasonal rainfall odds across Australia is dominated by the
recent warm conditions in the Indian Ocean as well as a cooling trend in
the equatorial Pacific Ocean associated with a La Nina," it says.
The
article excerpted below is a bit on the technical side but has a couple
of interesting features I would like to point out. It reports that
there has been a loss of ice cover from Antarctica and Greenland
overall, albeit at a lower level than is usually claimed. But both
poles are VERY cold, way below the melting point of ice. So it is
primarily variations in precipitation (snowfall) that explain
variations in ice mass. Lower snowfalls will mean less ice. But lower
precipitation is a sign of global COOLING -- as all water, including
the oceans, evaporates off less as it gets cooler. So the small amount
of ice loss over the period studied (From April 2002 to December 2008)
actually indicates slight global cooling over that period -- which is
in line with other data for that period
Note also that the effect
was uneven: ice loss in coastal areas slightly outweighed ice gain in
central areas. So nothing "global" there -- JR
Much concern
has been raised by climate scientists regarding ice loss from the
world's two remaining continental ice sheets. Rapid loss of ice-mass
from the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are cited as proof
positive of global warming's onslaught. The latest measurements involve
the use of satellite gravimetry, estimating the mass of terrain beneath
by detecting slight changes in gravity as a satellite passes overhead.
But gravity measurements of ice-mass loss are complicated by glacial
isostatic adjustments-compensation for the rise or fall of the
underlying crustal material. A new article in Nature Geoscience
describes an innovative approach employed to derive ice-mass changes
from GRACE data. The report suggests significantly smaller overall
ice-mass losses than previous estimates.
The storage of water or
ice on land-the presence of large bodies of water or glacial ice
sheets-affect the Earth's gravitational field. This effect is detected
by the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.
Twin satellites were launched in March 2002, to make detailed
measurements of Earth's gravity field. Since then, GRACE has been used
to study tectonic features, estimate ground water volumes and calculate
the amount of ice contained in the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets.
However, other factors can contribute to the GRACE measurements than
just the volume of ice in an ice sheet. These factors include the
response of Earth's crust (the lithosphere) to past changes in ice load.
As
the weight of covering ice varies, the underlying surface rock can be
pushed down or rise up, buoyed by the magma that the crust floats on.
This would obviously impact efforts to measure the height of terrain,
including glaciers. Compensating for the rise and fall of bedrock is
termed glacial isostatic adjustment, and it can have a significant
impact on estimated ice-mass losses. Changes in the spatial distribution
of the atmospheric and oceanic masses can also enter into the picture.
Correctly assessing these different factors is the key to accurately
calculating ice-sheet mass balance. Xiaoping Wu and colleagues have
proposed a new method for untangling these factors from GRACE
measurements.
From April 2002 to December 2008, linear
trends are derived from GRACE gravity data with empirically calibrated
full covariance matrices, and from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's
data-assimilating ocean bottom pressure (OBP) model. These are combined
with three-dimensional surface velocities at 664 globally distributed
sites. Although the durations of the surface geodetic time series are
diverse, most of the data are collected by the global positioning system
(GPS) technique during the 2000s and processed up to August 2007.
Spherical harmonic coefficients of both PDMT and GIA signatures as well
as other relevant parameters are then estimated from the data
combination.
What is really interesting here is the resulting
trend data for the change of bedrock height-the geoid height trend. The
new method found that estimates used in the past were significantly in
error. Antarctica was found to be rising, but not at as fast a rate as
previously thought. Greenland, on the other hand, is actually sinking,
particularly in the center of the ice sheet. Previous change estimates
had Greenland rising everywhere.
In the figure a, shows rates
estimated in the study, and b,those predicted by the ICE-5G/IJ05/VM2
model. While Wu et al. report that both Greenland and Antarctica are
losing ice-mass, they are doing so at a much lower rate than previous
estimates and that both are gaining ice in their interiors. "The mass
loss in Greenland is concentrated along the coastal areas, and is
particularly heavy in the west, and in the southeast with the large
Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim glaciers," they state. "In contrast, the
interior of Greenland shows significant positive mass balance."
So,
when the more exact measurement separation methodology of Wu et al. is
applied to the GRACE geoid data, ice sheet shrinkage, which has been
systematically overestimated, is cut in half. "The differences between
the work by Wu and colleagues and earlier studies may reflect errors in
present deglaciation models with respect to the ice-load history and
response of the Earth's mantle," conclude Bromwich and Nicolas.
According to Wu et al. "significant revision" is required. The general
result-the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets will be with us for a
long time to come.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Is the Southern ocean warming or cooling?
Even
Al Gore has got a bit perturbed by evidence of expanding sea ice in
Antarctica so fell with gladness on a recent paper (by Liu and Curry)
which claimed that the Southern ocean is in fact warming up. As others
have noted, however, the paper concerned is a very rough job, and below
are a few more comments on it.
The author below is more polite
than I am so I will put it bluntly: What he found was a typical bit of
Warmist fakery such as we have come to expect of Phil Jones & Co.
He found that the authors used data up until 1999 only. Why? Because
temperatures FELL after that. Excerpt only below
The Liu and
Curry (2010) paper has been the subject of a number of posts at Watts
Up With That over the past few days. This post should complement Willis
Eschenbach’s post Dr. Curry Warms the Southern Ocean, by providing a
more detailed glimpse at the availability of source data used by Hadley
Centre and NCDC in their SST datasets and by illustrating SST anomalies
for the periods used by Liu and Curry. I’ve also extended the data
beyond the cutoff year used by Liu and Curry to show the significant
drop in SST anomalies since 1999.
Preliminary Note: I understand
that Liu and Curry illustrated the principal component from an analysis
of the SST data south of 40S, but there are two primary objectives of
this post as noted above: to show how sparse the source data is and to
show that SST anomalies for the studied area have declined significantly
since 1999.
Liu and Curry use two Sea Surface Temperature
datasets, ERSST and HADISST. They clarify which of the NCDC ERSST
datasets they used with their citation of Smith TM, Reynolds RW (2004)
Improved Extended Reconstruction of SST (1854-1997). J. Clim.
17:2466-247. That’s the ERSST.v2 version. First question some readers
might have: If ERSST.v2 was replaced by ERSST.v3b, why use the old
version? Don’t know, so I’ll include both versions in the following
graphs.
Liu and Curry examine the period of 1950 to 1999. Sea
surface temperature data south of 40S is very sparse prior to the
satellite era. The HADISST data began to include satellite-based SST
readings in 1982. Considering the NCDC deleted satellite data from their
ERSST.v3 data (making it ERSST.v3b) that dataset and their ERSST.v2
continue to rely on very sparse buoy- and ship-based observations.
ICOADS is the ship- and buoy-based SST dataset that serves as the source
for Hadley Centre and NCDC. Figure 1 shows typical monthly ICOADS SST
observations for the Southern Hemisphere, south of 40S. The South Pole
Stereographic maps are for Januarys in 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 and
2000. Since I wanted to illustrate locations and not values, I set the
contour levels so that they were out of the range of the data. I used
Januarys because it is a Southern Hemisphere summer month and might get
more ship traffic along shipping lanes.
As you can see, there is
very little data as a starting point for Hadley Centre and NCDC, but
they do manage to infill the SST data using statistical tools. Refer to
Figure 2. It shows that the three SST datasets provided complete
coverage in 1950 and 1999, which are the start and end years of the
period examined by Liu and Curry. For more information on the ERSST and
HADISST datasets refer to my post An Overview Of Sea Surface Temperature
Datasets Used In Global Temperature Products.....
The title of
Liu and Curry (2010) “Accelerated Warming of the Southern Ocean and Its
Impacts on the Hydrological Cycle and Sea Ice” contradicts the SST
anomalies of the latitudes used in the paper. The SST anomalies are not
warming. They are cooling and have been for more than a decade.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Global cooling still hitting South America hard
Antarctic cold snap kills millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon
With
high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of
ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere's recent winter,
unusually low temperatures in part of the country's tropical region hit
freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and
thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.
Scientists
who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest
ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden
climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in
recorded history.
"There's just a huge number of dead fish," says
Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research
in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff
Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. "In the rivers
near Santa Cruz there's about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of
river."
The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has
polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent
that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of
drinking water for towns along the rivers' banks. Many fishermen have
lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any
more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.
The
blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that
settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The
prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550
penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay
and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region. Water
temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ˚C
during the day fell to as low as 4 ˚C.
Hugo Mamani, head of
forecasting at Senamhi, Bolivia's national weather centre, confirms that
the air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4 ˚C this July, a
low beaten only by a record of 2.5 ˚C in 1955.
Remember
Audi’s absurd “Green Police” Super Bowl commercial where green cops
arrest citizens for using plastic bags, plastic water bottles and sort
through the community’s trash cans to ensure they’re recycling? Well,
the absurdity is about to hit the streets of Cleveland. Cleveland.com
reports:
It would be a stretch to say that Big
Brother will hang out in Clevelanders’ trash cans, but the city plans to
sort through curbside trash to make sure residents are recycling—and
fine them $100 if they don’t. The move is part of a high-tech collection
system the city will roll out next year with new trash and recycling
carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes.
The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents
roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart
hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort
through the trash for recyclables.
The high-tech
collection system is an expansion of a 15,000-resident pilot program
that commenced in 2007. Proponents of the program argue that not only is
the $2.5 million program good for the environment, but because the city
will collect revenue from the fines and from recycled goods, the trash
police will eventually raise revenue. The article mentions that the city
pays $30 per ton to place garbage in a landfill but would receive $26
per ton for recycling goods. We know that the city will pass the costs
onto the consumer, but the article makes no mention of whether residents
will reap any savings benefits.
Much more problematic is the
intrusion onto individual liberties. Like much of the “Green Police”
commercial—and the environmentalist movement as a whole—the goal is to
change human behavior. But a recent Rasmussen survey “shows that only
17% of adults believe most Americans would be willing to make major
cutbacks in their lifestyle in order to help save the environment. Most
(65%) say that’s not the case.”
Skeptics of catastrophic
temperature increases compare belief in global warming to a religion,
saying that alarmists base their views on faith much more than concrete
science. This could have significant consequences if Congress enacts
cap-and-trade legislation or other policies that aim to increase
Americans’ energy bills. The goal, of course, is to force consumers to
use less energy.
We should allow for choice and respect the
choices of others. If someone chooses not to drink bottled water because
they believe it is bad for the environment, so be it. (Interestingly,
the environmentalist push that tap water is unsafe led to the rise of
bottled water.) Those who choose to drink tap water should respect the
preference of those who enjoy bottled. Conflicts will certainly arise
among people with different preferences, but to advocate that one is
morally right and one is morally wrong is objectionable.
The U.N. "Clean Development Mechanism" delivers the greatest green scam of all
Even
the UN and the EU are wising up to the greenhouse gas scam, "the
biggest environmental scandal in history", says Christopher Booker
It
is now six months since I reported on what even environmentalists are
calling "the biggest environmental scandal in history". Indeed this is a
scam so glaringly bizarre that even the UN and the EU have belatedly
announced that they are thinking of taking steps to stop it. The essence
of the scam is that a handful of Chinese and Indian firms are
deliberately producing large quantities of an incredibly powerful
"greenhouse gas" which we in the West – including UK taxpayers – then
pay them billions of dollars to destroy.
The key to this scam,
designed to curb global warming, is a scheme known as the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and
administered by the UN. It enables firms and governments in the
developed world to buy "credits" which allow them to continue emitting
greenhouse gases. These are sold to them, through well-rewarded brokers,
from firms in developing countries that can show they have nominally
reduced their emissions.
Easily the largest and most lucrative
component in the CDM market is a peculiar racket centred on the
manufacture of CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, classified under Kyoto as
greenhouse gases vastly more damaging than carbon dioxide. The way the
racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are permitted to carry on
producing a refrigerant gas known as HCF-22 until 2030. But a by-product
of this process is HCF-23, which is supposed to be 11,700 times more
potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. By destroying the HCF-23, the firms
can claim Certified Emission Reduction credits worth billions of
dollars when sold to the West (while much of the useful HCF-22 is sold
onto the international black market).
Last year, destruction of
CFCs accounted for more than half the CDM credits issued, in a market
that will eventually, it is estimated, be worth $17 billion. Of the
1,390 CDM projects so far approved, less than 1 per cent accounts for 36
per cent of the total value.
Even greenies have become so
outraged by this ridiculous racket that the Environmental Investigation
Agency has described it as the "biggest environment scandal in history".
Two weeks ago the UN announced that it is suspending payments to five
Chinese firms pending an investigation, with a view to a major reform of
the system. Last week the EU'c climate change supremo, Connie
Hedegaard, said she would be asking her officials to prepare a proposal
whereby these particular CFC payments might be halted after 2013.
The
CDM system itself, however, will still be in place, and we will all
contribute through its chief source of revenue, the EU's
$100-billion-a-year Emissions Trade Scheme (which we pay for in various
ways, not least through our electricity bills). We here in Britain also
have the special privilege of knowing, as I reported in February, that
we are now chipping in £60 million to buy additional CDM credits through
our taxes – so that the politicians and civil servants in government
offices can keep warm by continuing to pump out emissions much as
before.
Australia now has a watermelon in its Federal lower house -- A Trotskyite, by the sound of it
GREENS
MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt has defended comments he made on a Marxist
student website 15 years ago, in which he denounced capitalism and
labelled the Greens a "bourgeois" political party that could be used to
push a socialist agenda.
The comments, made in a two-page memo
written by Mr Bandt on March 4, 1995, while he was a student activist at
Murdoch University, first surfaced on Victorian political blogger
Andrew Landeryou's website VexNews.
As Mr Bandt and Greens leader
Bob Brown continued discussions yesterday with Prime Minister Julia
Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan about the formation of the next federal
government, the memo raised questions about Mr Bandt's student politics
and his views of the Labor Party, which he referred to in the 1995 memo
as "almost as right-wing as the US Democrats".
In the 1995 memo, Mr Bandt said he was "towards an anti-capitalist, anti-social democratic, internationalist movement".
Identifying
himself as a member of the Left Alliance, Mr Bandt said, "the
parliamentary road to socialism is non-existent". He called the Greens a
"bourgeois" party but said supporting them might be the most effective
strategy.
"Communists can't fetishise alternative political
parties, but should always make some kind of materially based assessment
about the effectiveness of any given strategy come election time," he
wrote in the 1995 memo.
The Greens leader said there was absolutely no need for Mr Bandt to publicly distance himself from his remarks in 1995.
Mr
Bandt, a former industrial relations lawyer with Slater and Gordon,
made history last weekend by becoming the first Greens candidate ever to
be elected to the House of Representatives in a general election.
Excerpts from Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
What a difference 5 days can make:
For
those concerned about the environmental impact of oil exploration and
development, perhaps the biggest news are studies of the impact of the
BP spill on the Gulf of Mexico. On August 19,
the New York Times reported that a new study by the venerable Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institute, being published in Science, indicates that
the earlier NOAA studies of the disappearance of the oil plume were far
too optimistic. According to the Woods Hole study, the oil plume was
not breaking down quickly and effects will remain indefinitely. This
confirmed suspicions by other groups.
On August 24,
the New York Times reported a new study by the Energy Biosciences
Institute, a partnership led by the University of California Berkeley
and the University of Illinois, stated that the oil plume is being
depleted quickly by a previously undiscovered microorganism that appears
closely related to Oceanospirillales.
Readers may recall that
TWTW previously reported that the Gulf of Mexico is home to a great
number of microorganisms that thrive in cold water (about 5°C) at oil
seeps and that these microbes depend upon chemosynthesis rather than
photosynthesis. The newly discovered microbe appears to be one such
creature. Very importantly, it appears that the microbe is anaerobic -
it does not consume oxygen. The oxygen levels are remaining high (59%
inside the plume as compared with 67% outside the plume). Thus the
feared dead zone from oxygen depletion is not occurring.
It
should be noted that the Energy Biosciences Institute was created by a
$500 Million, 10 year grant from BP for which Stephen Chu, now Secretary
of Energy, was a grateful recipient. If the research holds, then this
is another example that in science, it is the quality of the work, not
the funding, that is important.
******************************************
In
what appears to be alarming news to the environmental industry, acting
US Solicitor General Neal Katyal, representing the Tennessee Valley
Authority, a federal agency, filed a brief with the US Supreme Court
requesting it throws out a decision by the 2nd Court of Appeals
permitting lawsuits brought by the State of Connecticut and other
northeast states against utilities using coal to generate electricity.
The entire situation is logically bizarre.
The Attorney General
for Connecticut, backed by environmental groups and other northeastern
states, is claiming that public utilities using coal to generate
electricity are public nuisances. According to the article in the New
York Times, the environmental industry thought it had a deal with the
Obama administration to allow the lawsuits to proceed as a means of
forcing Congress to accept some form of cap-and-trade. Now the
environmental industry feels betrayed. Has a bit of logic and reason hit
the administration?
******************************************
The
hot summer weather over Russia, and elsewhere, has broken. But the
chorus of alarmists, particularly politicians, blaming the unusual
weather events on global warming continues. Of course, some of the
politicians, including Rep. Markey and Hillary Clinton, claim these
events demonstrate "climate change" which government regulations such as
cap-and-tax will be able to control.
By contrast,
meteorologists such as Joe D'Aleo and others write that the events,
though not normal (average), are not unique or particularly exceptional -
once again confirming the adage that to those ignorant of history,
every event is unprecedented.
******************************************
The
National Science Foundation announced "powerful new computer software"
by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) called the
Community Earth System Model (CESM) that others can use to make regional
climate projections. If the models were well tested and validated to
discern the difference between natural cause of climate change and human
induced changes, then it would be a valuable addition to our
understanding of climate change. However, based upon the announcements
it appears that the software will do little more than intensify the
errors of the past. Expanding the detail of models that have not been
validated does not expand knowledge.
******************************************
SEPP
Corrections and Amplifications: The August 14 TWTW discussed the
largest iceberg to break off a Greenland glacier since 1962. Alarmists
immediately took this to be a sign of global warming that would cause
sea levels to rise by up to 23 feet. Alert readers immediately picked up
that TWTW committed a typo and misstated the metric equivalent to 23
feet is about 3 meters, rather then the correct 7 meters. Admitted - 23
feet is approximately equal to 7 meters!
Other readers pointed
out that none of the articles they read on the event mentioned that the
larger break in 1962 came more than two decades into a global cooling
period that, later, some alarmists claimed was the start of a new ice
age. There you have it - global warming causes huge icebergs from Greenland and global cooling causes huge icebergs from Greenland.
******************************************
With
only 1.1% of US Electrical Power Generation coming from petroleum,
there is little logical basis those who claim the nation needs to
subsidize electricity from wind and solar to reduce its dependence on
"foreign oil." This revelation leads to:
The Book of the Week: Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce.
An
accomplished journalist, Bryce addresses the important issues of power
in a style that should be readily understood by journalists,
politicians, policy makers, and the reading public. According to Bryce,
the grand schemes created by politicians, and others, to replace coal
fired electrical generating plants with wind and solar demonstrate an
educational weakness among the proponents - innumeracy, numerical
illiteracy. Simply put, they do not grasp the scope of what they are
demanding and the inability of solar and wind to meet the demand. Unless
there are drastic breakthroughs in affordable, commercial scale storage
of electricity, alternative energy mandates from governments promise
only a bleak economic future for younger generations.
Brice
identifies what he terms the "Four Imperatives" to evaluate energy
sources: power density, energy density, cost, and scale. Power density
is the amount of power that can be harnessed per unit; and energy
density is amount of energy that can be contained in a given volume or
mass. Bryce states the key concept is power density which can be
described as energy flow, the ability to do work. Energy in itself is of
little value unless it can be turned into power. Herein is the crucial
weakness of solar and wind. These sources are not dispatchable, that is,
one cannot state, with high confidence, that the necessary power will
be available in, say, New York City at 5 pm on August 26, 2010 - yet,
without it the city stops.
Using easily understood graphs and
charts, Bryce establishes that replacing coal, and oil will be a long,
difficult process. The proposed sources of wind and solar simply fail
due to the enormous cost and the scale of the projects to generate the
necessary power, which remains unreliable. Few appreciate the enormous
quantities of land that wind turbines require and that every where they
have been tried, they increase the cost of electricity rather than
reduce it. Unfortunately, many journalists reporting on solar and wind
confuse nameplate capacity (ideal potential) with power density - what
is actually delivered.
Bryce demonstrates that the US is an
energy giant with enormous resources of coal and natural gas. Private
ventures in hydraulic fracturing of shale rock containing natural gas
and horizontal drilling have made the US an energy giant in natural gas.
[Today, in the eastern US where coal is more expensive than in the
west, the cost of generating electricity from natural gas is roughly
comparable to that of coal.] Yet, the advances in natural gas production
are virtually ignored by alternative energy proponents in Washington,
who seem to be stuck in the mania of the 1970's when the Federal
Government banned the use of natural gas for generation of electricity.
In
the view of Bryce, absent of government edicts, the 21st Century will
see a slow transition from coal to natural gas and finally to nuclear as
the basic suppliers of power for the nation. To support his hypothesis,
Bryce discusses the work of Nakicenovic, Grubler, Ausubel, Marchetti,
and others who have identified a mega trend of several centuries of
decarbonization of fuels shifting from fuels with high ratios of carbon
to hydrogen (wood) to those with low ratios carbon to hydrogen (natural
gas) as consumers demand denser and cleaner fuels.
Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?
Authors
veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed
temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper,
Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception?
The
startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any
significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on
numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the
true level and rate of “global warming”.
That is to say, leading
meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so
systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it
cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global
warming” in the 20th century
Executive summary
1.
Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have
been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with
that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant
“global warming” in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial
surface-temperature databases exhibit signs of urban heat pollution and
post measurement adjustments that render them unreliable for determining
accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4.
Global terrestrial temperature data are compromised because more than
three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once reported are no longer
being used in data trend analyses.
5. There has been a
significant increase in the number of missing months with 40% of the
GHCN stations reporting at least one missing month. This requires
infilling which adds to the uncertainty and possible error.
6.
Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and
inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further increases
uncertainty.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years
have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50%
from heat-island and land use change contamination.
8. An
increase in the percentage of compromised stations with interpolation to
vacant data grids may make the warming bias greater than 50% of
20th-century warming.
9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Changes in data sets introduced a step warming in 2009.
More HERE (See the original PDF for links, graphics etc.)
Southwest Drought?
As we
have covered in previous essays, global warming alarmists insist that
the southwestern United States is getting drier and will get
substantially drier in the future due to the buildup of greenhouse
gases. They bolster their claims by results from a relatively large
number of articles in the professional scientific literature and
countless comments in various UN IPCC reports. Throw in pictures of
declining water levels at Lake Mead, some fountains in Las Vegas and
golf courses in Phoenix, and just like magic, a scary scenario is
produced.
As with virtually every other element of the climate
change issue, the literature produces some surprises, and the drought in
the Southwest claim runs up against some interesting realities. The
latest article on this subject appears in a recent issue of the Journal
of Geophysical Research and once again, the results are at odds with the
popular perception of increased drought in the Southwest.
This
recent work was produced by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey
and the University of Delaware and had to survive the peer-review
process for this respected journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The final two sentences reveal where this is going as McCabe et al.
conclude “El Niño events have been more frequent, and this has resulted
in increased precipitation in the southwestern United States,
particularly during the cool season. The increased precipitation is
associated with a decrease in the number of dry days and a decrease in
dry event length.”
What? More rain and fewer dry periods? We knew right away this would be featured in World Climate Report.
The
authors focused on the Southwest “because (1) it has the highest
consumptive use of water as a percentage of renewable supply in the
United States and (2) dry event conditions in this region during the
early 21st century have increased awareness of its vulnerability to
water shortages.” There is no doubt that a lot of people have chosen to
live in the Southwest and there is no doubt the desert climate of the
region is prone to drought. In many respects, and depending on how one
defines drought, the area is permanently in a state of drought (Phoenix
has 7” of rain a year, Las Vegas averages about half of that amount).
McCabe
et al. gathered data from 22 Weather Bureau-Army-Navy (WBAN) stations
in the region “for water years (October through September) 1951 through
2006”. They explain that “During this period, 22 sites have nearly
complete (99% complete) daily precipitation data. WBAN stations were
selected because of the completeness of data record and the relative
consistency of observational procedures.” They conducted their analysis
for water years (October through September), cool seasons (October
through March), and warm seasons (April through September).
They
report that “trends in the fraction of dry days for water years, cool
seasons, and warm seasons indicate that most trends are negative [i.e.
towards more wet days, -eds.]. For water years, 18 sites exhibit
negative trends in the fraction of dry days, and eight of these trends
are statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. In contrast,
only four sites indicate positive trends in the fraction of dry days for
water years, and none of these trends is statistically significant at p
= 0.05. For the cool season, 19 sites exhibit negative trends (12 are
statistically significant at p = 0.05), and only 3 sites indicate
positive trends (none are statistically significant).”
In this
desert environment, cool season rain is far more important than rain in
the summer. Rain falling in the hot summer season quickly evaporates and
plays a relatively small role in water storage in the region.
Nonetheless, the authors note that “For the warm season, 14 sites
exhibit negative trends (seven are statistically significant), and 8
sites exhibit positive trends (six are statistically significant).” ...
Furthermore,
they conclude “Since the mid-1970s, El Niño events have been more
frequent, and this has resulted in increased precipitation in the
southwestern United States, particularly during the cool season. The
increased precipitation is associated with a decrease in the number of
dry days and a decrease in dry event length.”
As with so many
other articles we feature, had this group found general trends toward
drier conditions, you would have heard about it already. They clearly
did not, and their results are counter to the claims that the region
should be trending to increased drought.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
My Holiday is Being Ruined by Global Cooling. Try Telling That to the 'Scientists'
From James Delingpole in Britain
I’m
writing this in Salcombe, Devon on a rainy, miserable summer’s day
which, I fear, may be all too symptomatic of the climatic rubbish we can
all expect for the next 30 years as – thanks to changes in the Pacific
Decadal Oscillation combined with a solar minimum – we enter a period of
global cooling. Let’s hope I’m wrong, eh?
Well, among those who
seems to be hoping just that is an amiable fellow called Sir Paul
Nurse, the Nobel prize winning geneticist and president-to-be of the
Royal Society, who came round to my house last week to film part of a
BBC Horizon documentary on why it is that people are losing their faith
in scientists.
I told him people aren’t losing their faith in
“scientists”. Just the “scientists” who are behind the junk science
being advanced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s four
increasingly tendentious and misleading assessment reports.
Over
the next three hours, Sir Paul and I had a long, friendly, on-camera
argument in which he tried to make a distinction between “skepticism”
[good] and “denialism” [bad] – an entirely specious distinction, in my
book – while I tried to focus on the details of the Climategate emails
because it’s only on details that an arts graduate journalist is ever
going to win a debate like this with a (feisty, bright, delightful but
not a little combative) Nobel genetics laureate.
A trick I
noticed Sir Paul trying to perform throughout our debate was to move
away from specifics to the general. So, for example, he would keenly
assert that “the majority” of the world’s scientists agreed with a thing
called a “consensus” on man-made global warming, and whenever I got
down to grimy and tedious detail suggestive of the contrary – eg Ben
Santer’s outrageous rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers in the
Second Assessment Report, which seriously exaggerated the unanimity of
scientific opinion on AGW – he’d either politely brush it off as if it
were far too involved to be of much interest or he’d airily cite the
three whitewash enquiries into Climategate as “proof” that the
scientists had done nothing wrong.
Perhaps he was just playing
devil’s advocate. The impression I got that Sir Paul is a thoroughly
decent, very clever man who wants to be as open-minded as possible on
the whole AGW debate. But the impression I also got is that, as you
would entirely expect of a future president of the Royal Society (which
for years has been one of the great cheerleaders for AGW theory, even to
the point of writing an official letter to Exxon demanding that it
cease funding “deniers”) is that Sir Paul’s view of what is reasonable
and balanced has been heavily colored by that of the scientific
Establishment. And, unfortunately, the scientific Establishment’s views
on AGW are about as neutral and unbiased and reliable as, say, the BBC’s
are about Israel. Or the European Union. Or, indeed, “Man Made Global
Warming.”
James
Cameron, king of the box office once more, is speaking out against
critics of his film “Avatar.” It’s clear the director really should
stay quiet.
The man behind “Aliens,” “Titanic” and now the
blue-skinned creatures inhabiting his latest hit, tells Entertainment
Weekly that he digs ecoterrorism. And no, that’s not taken out of
context.
EW asked Cameron to respond to some of the criticisms aimed at “Avatar.” Check out how he responded to this one:
EW: “Avatar” is the perfect eco-terrorism recruiting tool.”
JC: Good, good. I like that one. I consider that a positive review. I believe in ecoterrorism.”
Is he joking (there’s no – laughs – insert included in the text)?
Would
he like it if someone bombed a McDonald’s selling some of his “Avatar”
goodies? Surely they’re clogging the planet’s ecosystem, right?Heck,
some have accused the burger chain of treating its food source
inhumanely, too.
Is a blue-skinned Na’vi toy biodegradable?
What if someone dies during an ecoterrorist attack? Or if people lose their jobs because of it?
Not
all acts of eco-terrorism are created equal. Some are enhanced forms of
civil disobedience. But surely someone as smart as Cameron knows not to
endorse such tactics without a significant disclaimer.
So where is the follow up question? And has success turned Cameron’s mind to mush?
Australia: Vast area to be locked away from development in Queensland
The pretext is to protect farmland but there is no threat to farmland. It is just the usual Greenie hatred of development
MORE
than 70,000sq km of Queensland could be subject to new legislation that
would lock away areas from housing, mining and even forestry, according
to business. Land from the NSW border to Cairns and west to central
Queensland will be investigated under a plan aimed at identifying and
protecting important cropping areas.
One industry source said the
area under review was about as big as Ireland and "enough land to have
its own flag and compete in the Olympics".
The State Government's
draft policy includes restricting the controversial underground coal
gasification on strategic cropping land, adding another hurdle for
trials under way in Kingaroy and other food-producing parts of the
state.
It would mean a paddock-by-paddock assessment that will
delay resource development, cost millions and cause companies to
question whether it is worthwhile, according to the Queensland Resources
Council.
And the resources minister will be given "arbitrary"
powers to grant approval to developments, even on important cropping
land, raising concerns about the impact of vested interests.
Urban
Development Institute Australia chief executive Brian Stewart said the
policy could add to the cost of housing. "Uncertainty adds risk and
risk adds to the cost," Mr Stewart said.
QRC chief executive
Michael Roche said mining projects will need to be assessed to see
whether they sit on the best of the best cropping land or not. "The
maps put a question mark over projects, many of which have already spent
tens of millions of dollars," he said.
A company at the centre
of the issue, Ambre Energy, yesterday rejected suggestions its $3.5
billion coal-to-liquids project at Felton was not put in doubt by the
new policy, but said an assessment would have to be made.
The
Friends of Felton farming group said the policy was a step in the right
direction. FOF president Rob McCreath said he hoped the policy meant
the end to Ambre's scheme. "We can't see any way the development could
possibly be allowed in the Felton Valley," he said.
He said the
most crucial issue from the policy paper was that coal-seam gas mining
would still be allowed on good cropping land and could potentially
affect it by depleting water.
An email from a reader.
He shows what happens when you are consistent and use ratio scales
(i.e. scales with a meaningful rather than an arbitrary zero) to
evaluate both temperature and CO2 levels
Roosters crowing causes the Sun to come up.
'Tis claimed that there being more CO2 in the atmosphere has 'caused' global warming.
'Cause and Effect' presumes some sort of direct association.
Since about 1870 CO2 has increased from 290ppm to about 390ppm, that is a 33% increase.
Since 1870 the world's average temperature(estimated) has increased from about 13 C to 14 C.
13 C = 286 K 14 C = 287 K.
1K is an increase of about 1/2 of 1%.
A 33% increase in CO2 causing a 1/2 of 1% increase in temperature seems a RATHER WEAK association to use to claim 'causality'!!
( Using degrees Kelvin gives one a total increase, using Celsius or Fahrenheit only gives the increase in above 0 degrees.)
Prophecies of environmental doom are perennial -- and perennially wrong
Optimism
is out of favor. But then as Matt Ridley points out in The Rational
Optimist, optimism has never been IN favor. Even in the fastest-growing
booms in human history, "experts" were always sure that doom was
imminent. We were going to run out of wood, then of coal, then of whale
oil, then of petroleum, then of petroleum again, then of petroleum
again. (We were never going to run out of uranium or thorium, but that
was fixed by running out of the permits to build nuclear reactors.)
In
the 1960s, the world was going to be destroyed by fossil fuels, by
running out of fossil fuels, by acid rain, by overpopulation, by
pesticides, by famine, and by Global Cooling. But what actually happened
was that fuel production went up, population growth rates fell in every
nation (except Kazakhstan, thanks a lot you idiot Borat), pesticide use
dropped off with the invention of BT crops, food production went up
until recently (we still produce more crops every year, but they are
drained off to make ethanol and not to feed people), acid rain was
overblown, and you know what happened to Global Cooling (it’s still a
huge threat as far as anyone knows, one good asteroid or volcano and
it’s Fimbulwinter for sure!
Some of the scares:
Overpopulation
The
example of overpopulation is fascinating. Every culture on the planet
has cut its birth rate as soon as infant mortality went down and wealth
went up. The extra population that was generated in the meantime has
allowed an increase in economic specialization and an increase in per
capita wage rates (except in the US and a few other banana republics,
because our government burden has increased while the Indians, Chinese
and Russians reduced theirs).
So the expert predictions of the
1960s were precisely wrong. More population caused more wealth, and more
wealth reduced population growth rates. Even reducing infant mortality
reduced population growth rates. So the experts changed their views,
right? Well, they did change a little… they quit putting dates on their
predictions of doom.
Running Out Of Resources
We have run
out of many resources. Mammoths, passenger pigeons, bison, Lebanon
cedars, guano, and many other "renewable" resources proved to be not so
renewable after all. However, we have never run out of any non-renewable
resource; we still have iron, coal, oil, gas, copper, silicon, uranium,
etc.
Again, this contradicts expert predictions in the 1970s.
The Limits To Growth claimed that we were running out of every
"non-renewable," but instead we ran out of nothing. How could this
happen?
Perhaps whether something is "renewable" or not, depends
more on whether it is privately owned and produced than how much the
starting quantity is. There were lots of passenger pigeons in 1800 and
no uranium at all… Ridley doesn’t even get into the future prospects of
He-3 energy and asteroid mining, but he gets the principle across: it’s
all about markets and "the catallaxy" as he calls the productive sector
of society.
Africa
Of course upper-crust "progressives"
(like the Roosevelts, e.g.) are never racists, but it’s obvious to them
that those bloody fuzzy-wuzzies will never get anywhere, eh what? Except
that it turns out that Botswana is the world’s fastest-growing economy
for the last thirty years (oddly enough, they have a strong tradition of
individual property rights), and even in the foreign-aid hellholes
elsewhere in Africa, capitalism and technology are spreading. Poor
farmers are bootlegging true-breeding BT crops and freeing themselves
from both bugs and pesticides.
Fishermen use cellphones to find
market for their fish, entrepreneurs start informal businesses in spite
of impossible regulation and permit systems. African incomes are going
up. And with any luck, the collapse of the US economy will free them
from the dead hand of aid. As Ridley points out with great insight, it
is foreign aid that has strangled African economies.
Global Warming
If
the planet actually warms, it will be great. First of all, it means we
beat the Ice Ages. Second, it will mean that we kept burning fossil fuel
for another century… which means the world will be unimaginably rich
and technologically advanced. And third, a warmer world with more CO2
will be more agriculturally productive even in the poorer areas.
That
said, Ridley isn’t really over-optimistic about Global Warming…as he
points out, the Earth hasn’t actually been warming since 2000 or so.
Sustainability, aka The Dark Ages
The
one threat that tempers Ridley’s optimism is "Green"
anti-environmentalism. As he points out, the electricity production of
the US can be produced by either:
Solar panels the size of Spain, plus a huge storage system, or
Wind farms the size of Kazakhstan, plus a huge storage system, or
Wood-chip burners fueled by forests the size of India and Pakistan, or
Dams with reservoirs 33% bigger than all the continents put together, or
…
a few nuclear, gas, and coal power stations that leave the majority of
the forest and plain available for wildlife and agriculture. If we phase
out the coal burners and replace them with new nuclear plants, even the
land that is now strip mined for coal can return to forest.
As he says, "sustainability" is unsustainable, but free markets are not.
Ice Core evidence — where is carbon’s “major effect”?
The
ice cores are often lauded as evidence of the effects of carbon
dioxide. Frank Lansner asks a pointed question and goes hunting to find
any effects that can be attributed to carbon.
Where is the data
that actually shows a strong and important warming effect of CO2? If CO2
has this strong warming effect, would not nature reflect this in data?
He
has collected together the data from the last four warm spells (the
nice interglacials between all the long ice ages) into one average
“peak”. The common pattern of the rise and fall has already been
recorded in many scientific papers. Orbital changes trigger the
temperatures to rise first and about 800 years later (thanks to the
oceans releasing CO2), carbon dioxide levels begin to climb. At the end
of a patch of several thousand warm years, temperatures begin to fall,
and thousands of years later the carbon dioxide levels slowly decline.
No
one is really contesting this order of things any more. What is
contested is that those who feel carbon is a major driver estimate that
the carbon dioxide unleashed by the warming then causes major
amplification or “feedback”, making things lots warmer than they would
have been if there was no change in carbon. Since most skeptics (but not
all) agree that there is probably some warming due to extra CO2, the
real question is “how much”.
Lansner points out that counter to
the amplification theory, temperatures return most of the way back to
their starting level (ice age temperatures) even while CO2 levels are
elevated. If the CO2 can’t prevent the temperatures falling, it’s effect
is anything but major.
Estimates of climate sensitivity and
support for the “feedbacks” comes from models which depend on water
vapor increasing high over the tropics. The radiosondes show that the
models are wrong.
Frank graphs the change in temperatures and
CO2, and finds a slight positive trend which is predictable (we know
oceans release CO2 as they warm, so there would be a correlation). But
then he plots the changes in CO2 against changes in the rate of
temperature change, and finds no correlation at all (if CO2 was a major
forcing, it would force or accelerate temperature change, which would
show as the rate of temperature change). The data is limited to 1500
year blocks, so the time-frame is less than ideal, but the best
available in the Petit data.
You can’t buy the truth, but you can buy a committee interpretation of it
One year ago a group of eminent scientists wrote a letter to congress provocatively titled “You are being deceived.”
Now,
in a similar vein, but with all the gory details, John McLean has put
together a 66 page compilation of the modus operandi and history of said
deception. It’s a story of how small committees of activists cite their
own work, ignore contradictory information and dissenting reviewers,
use the peer review system to lock out opponents, and blithely
acknowledge crippling uncertainties (but only in tracts of text that few
will read, and never in summation when it matters).
When your
favourite prancing-horse-committee — the IPCC — is failing to impress
the crowds, it’s time to distract them with dressage from another
source. In this case, the IPCC is being reviewed by the brand new
InterAcademy Council (IAC). Expect their somber pronouncement to
discover some minor flaws of process, posit a few proceedural
improvements, and then declare that above all, the science is sound,
rigorous, and that carbon dioxide will surely kill millions if we don’t
allow the guys at Goldman Sachs to save us all with complex derivative
triple A packages of CDM’s. Amen.
There’s a cyclical nature to
the lifecycle of committees. Long ago The International Science Union
(ICSU) was pushing the greenhouse effect scare, they ran the conferences
and subcommittees and programs that helped create the IPCC.
The hand of the ICSU can be seen in the entire lead-up to the
establishment of the IPCC. It arranged most of the conferences and with
its funding partners – usually the WMO and/or UNEP – it managed numerous
meteorological or climatological research projects, many of which had
Bert Bolin in a lead role.
The IAC and ICSU have a very
similar role. Both seek to fit the square peg of science into the round
hole of politics, to take a field where truth is not determined by
consensus and twist it to fit a field where consensus is everything.
Both have grandiose statements of intent – the IAC’s is “Mobilizing the
world’s best science to advise decision-makers on issues of global
concern” – and both work very closely with UN bodies such as the UNEP, a
co-sponsor of the IPCC. … in fact the IAC seems almost a twin of the
ICSU.
The AIC has 18 board members – three of which head
national science bodies – all of which are members of the ICSU. One of
the three is Kurt Lambeck, who recently declared his not-so-impartial
interest in the matter by launching a document I wrote about a few days
ago…where he announced that humans are affecting the climate, that the
public were getting confused: that clouds could provide negative
feedback, but somehow (defying all logic and reason) it wouldn’t change
the outcome if they did. Can anyone imaging Lambeck digging hard for
faults with the IPCC?
McLean covers the history of the development of the committees, their connections, and their aims.
I
haven’t got time to do it justice, but suffice it to say, science needs
competition: different researchers, different theories, and different
institutions — all trying to one-up each other. When John McLean writes
about the lack of transparency in the ICSU or the IPCC, and the
overlapping names and aims, I see the dark shadow of monopoly science
smothering the competition.
The ICSU (p 16 – 18)
In almost every country the national scientific authority
(“scientific academy, research council, scientific institution or
association of such institutions”) is a member of the ICSU and so too
are many key international organizations for specific scientific fields.
According to ICSU statute 8 of membership rules21 these members are
required to “support the objectives of ICSU”, which gives the ICSU
extraordinary authority across all scientific fields. Members of the
ICSU include the Royal Society in the UK and the National Academy in the
USA and that seriously undermines the standing of the statements of
support for the IPCC that both bodies have released since IPCC 4AR in
2007. There are many disquieting aspects to the ICSU:
(a) The ICSU’s 8-member executive board ultimately decides that a
project will be undertaken. This means that it evaluates for each
project the benefit to society, but the methods that it uses remain a
mystery.
(b) It relies on “selling” an idea to “client
organizations” and having them provide the research funding. If the
project is of no interest to these clients then no funding might be
forthcoming, and when governments and intergovernmental work is involved
we can assume a political dimension to that interest.
(c) It
seems likely that scientists can lobby the executive board into
approving certain programs that are likely to find a research partner.
(d) The ICSU has an interest in ensuring that members of its member organizations are employed (i.e. funded).
(e) It produces no scientific papers that might be exposed to
peer-review but provides policy advice in monograph (i.e. book) form.
The output of research and the resultant policy advice receives no
independent scrutiny, especially regards accuracy and the selective use
of supporting material, and the ICSU is therefore in a position of being
able to manipulate international and governmental policy. (Of course
peer-review might be a waste of time if those reviewers were members of
ICSU member organizations.)
(f) The ISCU is not transparent
in its decision-making or its actions. It discloses little enough
information about its in-house work on current projects and only reports
generated by past projects. No listing of the membership past executive
boards is available, nor is information about the development of past
projects, which means that no information is available to the public
about the formulation of ICSU projects, decisions made in relation to
those projects, the manner in which they were conducted and the basis
for any conclusions. In short it is impossible to identify the
individuals responsible for the decisions to support each ICSU program
and the integrity with which those projects were carried out.
The
death toll from recent “extreme weather events” has been sharply
declining since the 1920s, as my valued colleague Indur Goklany has
valorously pointed out. Air conditioning, flood control, earthquake
proofing and better weather forecasting have all helped. Despite vast
media coverage, extreme weather now causes only a half-percent of global
deaths. A large part of the gains came through crop production
increases using fossil-fueled industrial fertilizers and irrigation
pumps. This meant the world had fossil-fueled food to share with
countries suddenly caught by devastating (but short- term) drought or
flood.
But Indur neglected one aspect of extreme weather
events—the “little ice ages.” They are the flip side of the 1500-year
warming cycle. The last one began in 1300 AD and ended in 1850, recent
enough that many of our great-grandparents had to cope. We don’t know
when the next one will come, perhaps not for another 300 years—but when
it does, “Look out!”
As an example, civilizations collapsed
around the world, simultaneously, 4200 years ago—in southern Green,
Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and China. The nomads on the Asian
steppes gave up their seasonal farming, put their huts on wheels, and
simply followed their herds seeking ever-scarcer grass. This massive
drought—driven by a “little ice age”— lasted 300 years!
Egypt had
more food security through its early history than anyplace else, but it
collapsed in famine and political chaos three times between 4200 and
1000 BC—all of them during “little ice ages.” The Nile floods were also
far below normal during the cold Dark Ages (450-950 AD) and during our
recent Little Ice Age.
How many people would starve if
agriculture failed again, suddenly and simultaneously in Greece,
Palestine, Egypt, India, and China—for 300 years? What future Huns would
come knocking on the city gates? Would plague-infected rats again move
in?
The “little ice age” climates are inherently less stable and
more violent than the warming intervals. The Netherlands was hit by
massive sea floods three times in 50 years as the Little Ice Age began.
Each of these floods drowned more than 100,000 people. Will the Dutch
levees hold in the next “little ice age”? What about New Orleans in a
far less stable climate?
As we today enjoy the stable weather of a
sunlit interglacial global warming, we had best not forget the massive
disasters during the cold phases of the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle. In the
last 160 years, we have not only become, used to the piddling
“disasters” of a global warming phase, but smug that we have been able
to rescue small countries with our technology. Fossil fuels have
competently carried food aid to famine victims during small, short
famines. But, in a future Little Ice Age, the summers will cloudy, cold,
interrupted by early frosts and hailstorms—for several hundred years.
We
invented high-yield farming at the end of the Little Ice Age, to reduce
the death toll from the persistent crop failures. But the world’s
population since 1850 has risen from perhaps 1 billion to 6.6 billion,
and may rise by 2 billion more before it peaks about 2050. Where would
we move the at-risk populations?
Global vegetation has sharply
increased with today’s additional sunshine and favorable rain
patterns—plus the added plant fertilization due to more CO2 in the
atmosphere. What if the climate turns suddenly cold and unstable and
the oceans suck more of the CO2 out of the atmosphere?
We should
take full advantage of the favorable climate we have been granted to
increase research on high-yield agriculture, biotechnology, water
conservation and other advances now only dreamt of. We must make true
improvements in energy technology (not erratic windmills and solar
panels that will be even less effective in a cloudy little ice age than
today).The greatest danger to the future population is to be unaware
that the good period will not last.
For a million years, humans
have been using the warming periods to advance civilization. We are
comfortable, well fed, and not competing for caves because those who
came before us advanced human society each time the climate provided a
few hundred years of safety. Should we do any less for those who will
come after us?
On
every gas and electricity bill that UK households receive, there is a
hidden tax. A tax of more than 8%. It's called the Renewables
Obligation. Energy companies are obligated – that is, they are forced by
the government under pain of fines and imprisonment – to spend a chunk
of their revenues developing and installing non-fossil energy production
systems. That means they are forced to pay for things like wind
factories, photo-electric technology and wave power, whether or not they
think these generation methods have the slightest value, either to
themselves or the nation.
Like all political efforts to make
companies pay for things, the government's plan does not work. The
energy companies do not pay for these generation technologies. The cost
does not come out of their profits, or their shareholders' dividends. It
comes from their customers, naturally. All of us who use energy in the
home – and there may be one or two completely self-sufficient households
in the UK, but the other 28 million or so do have to buy in gas or
electricity – end up paying. We pay this premium on our bills so that
our energy companies can subsidise wind farmers.
Or maybe we
should call them subsidy farmers, because the fact is that these
alternative energy sources are far from covering their own costs. None
of those noisy, unsightly turbines that are marching across the
country's most beautiful hill country (since that is where the wind is)
would exist at all if it were not for the subsidy. Except perhaps the
one on David Cameron's house.
Just think about it. In ordinary
garden soil, there are trace elements that are actually quite valuable.
You might even have a gram or two of gold lurking under your lawn. What
good fortune: you could be sitting on a gold mine. Except that these
things are not valuable at all, because the cost of extracting them
would be enormous in relation to the tiny quantities that you could
isolate. You could get the excavators in, and boil up all the soil in
your garden to find them, sure enough. But it wouldn't be worth the
effort. You could spend £250,000 on digging the holes and refining your
soil, and maybe end up with just a few grams of precious metals worth
maybe £100. It's a no-brainer, isn't it?
So why do we think it is
any better to spend more on non-fossil generation than the value it
brings to our energy network? Well, there may be a strategic benefit
from having diversity, so we are not dependent on Russian oil and gas,
for example. That's a plausible argument, though it still may not
justify paying over the odds for that diversity. Then there's the
argument that we want to develop new 'green' energy technology and be
first in the field. No, we don't. We're better to buy technology from
the world's best producers. We don't make phones for ourselves in the
garage, we buy them from Apple. And in any event, the first people into
any market aren't usually the people who make money from it. Usually it
is the second entrants, who see the idea but improve the way it is
designed and marketed. We'd be better and cheaper letting other
countries develop green technologies, then capitalise on their efforts.
And
what is true of energy is true of all the other things that governments
subsidise. If it was your money, you would buy the cheapest. So why
does government force us to pay for the most expensive?
He hasn't gone anti-green. It's just that he wants all power to reside in his bureaucracy
The
Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals
court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for
their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who
see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.
In the case,
AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a
coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The
decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit
that seeks to force several of the nation's largest coal-fired utilities
to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The defendants --
American Electric Power Co. Inc., Duke Energy Corp., Southern Co. and
Xcel Energy Inc. -- filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court
earlier this month, asking the court to reject the argument that
greenhouse gas emissions can be addressed through "public nuisance"
lawsuits (Greenwire, Aug. 4).
In a brief (pdf) filed yesterday on
behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, acting Solicitor General Neal
Katyal agreed with the defendants, saying that U.S. EPA's newly
finalized regulations on greenhouse gases have displaced that type of
common-law claim.
Katyal urged the court to vacate the decision
and remand the case to the 2nd Circuit for further proceedings, this
time taking into account the administration's push to regulate
greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The 2nd Circuit's
decision rested on the assertion that "EPA does not currently regulate
carbon dioxide," but that has since changed. The Obama administration
has finalized several regulations in response to the Supreme Court's
2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which told the agency to decide
whether greenhouse gases were pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
"Since
this court held in 2007 that carbon dioxide falls within that
regulatory authority, EPA has taken several significant steps toward
addressing the very question presented here," Katyal wrote. "That
regulatory approach is preferable to what would result if multiple
district courts -- acting without the benefit of even the most basic
statutory guidance -- could use common-law nuisance claims to sit as
arbiters of scientific and technology-related disputes and de
factoregulators of power plants and other sources of pollution both
within their districts and nationwide."
Matt Pawa, an attorney
representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected
the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more
than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general's office on June
24, it seemed they had "a lot of friends in the room," he said.
"We
feel stabbed in the back," Pawa said. "This was really a dastardly move
by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With
friends like this, who needs enemies?"
Top attorneys at
environmental advocacy groups are buzzing about the brief, sources say.
Some feel betrayed by a White House that has generally been more
amenable to environmental regulation than its predecessor.
"This
reads as if it were cut and pasted from the Bush administration's
briefing in Massachusetts," said David Bookbinder, who served as the
Sierra Club's chief climate counsel until his resignation in May.
Around
the world, the fight against "cli- mate change" and carbon dioxide e
emissions is costing literally hundreds of billions of dollars - and
this at a time when the Western world is ravaged by recession.
We
can ill afford these sums. Many scientists think CO2 emissions have a
trivial effect on climate, but even those who support the theory of
anthropogenic global warming (AGW) generally agree that the efforts we
are making will result in changes so small that they cannot even be
measured.
Given that China is building a new coal-fired power
station every week, with India not far behind, it's a fair bet that CO2
emissions will increase for decades regardless of what we in the West
do. If the United Kingdom, for example, were to turn off its economy
totally and not burn so much as a candle, China would make up our
emissions savings in about 12 months.
Just 70 years ago, at the
height of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill gave what became
perhaps the most famous political speech in British history. Were he
here today and able to comment on the great climate debate, he might
well be saying, "Never in the field of public policy has so much been
spent by so many for so little."
They say there's "a consensus"
of scientists who support AGW. But science proceeds by hypothesis and
falsification, not consensus. As author Michael Crichton famously put
it, "If it's science, it's not consensus. And if it's consensus, it's
not science."
We are told that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) represents a consensus of 2,500 experts in the
field. Yet when we look at the details, we find that the IPCC process,
and especially the Summary for Policymakers, is in the hands of a small
group, no more than two or three dozen.
The practically
incestuous links among these scientists were revealed in a 2006 report
by a team led by George Mason University statistics professor Edward
Wegman at the request of Congress following a report by the National
Research Council. These people work together, publish papers together
and peer-review each others' work. And we now know from the "Climate"
leaks that they also cobbled together unrelated data sets, sought to
"hide the decline," to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period from the
record, to prevent publication of alternative views and to bring about
the dismissal of editors who took a more open-minded approach.
Science
is supposed to follow the facts and seek the truth. These guys started
with a conviction about climate change and sought to make the data fit
the preconception. They called themselves the "Hockey Team," and they
included Michael Mann - creator of the infamous "hockey stick" graph -
perhaps the most discredited artifact in the history of science, which
nonetheless took pride of place in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report.
To
understand climate hysteria, we need look no further than the Watergate
advice: "Follow the money." Governments, think tanks, institutions and
universities spend huge sums on climate research. Academics can't obtain
work, tenure, grant funding or publication without toeing the line.
Even researchers in unrelated fields can ensure funding by adding the
context of climate change to their proposals. Thousands of jobs in
government, academia, the media and industry depend on the climate
issue.
The East Midlands region of the United Kingdom, which I
represent in the European Parliament, has just committed $1.5 million to
"climate change skills training" (read "propaganda").
And the
propaganda works. Every schoolchild knows about dangerous sea-level
rise. But the children don't know that it's simply a projection of a
virtual-reality computer model. They don't know that in the real world,
sea-level rise (at around six to seven inches in 100 years) is the same
as it has been for centuries, that the Maldives and Tuvalu aren't
sinking beneath the waves. They don't know that successive IPCC reports
have consistently reduced their alarmist estimates for sea-level rise by
2100.
Every schoolchild knows that the ice caps are melting -
but glaciers and ice fields accumulate snow (which compacts to ice) at
high levels, while chunks of ice break off at the margin. Vast blocks of
ice tumbling into the sea make great video footage, but they say
nothing about warming or cooling. That's simply what ice sheets do.
There
has been some retreat of glaciers since about 1800 (long before CO2
became an issue), but geological evidence shows that glaciers regularly
advance and retreat with the Earth's climate cycles. We are simply
seeing a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. And global ice mass
is broadly constant.
In 1942, six Lockheed P-38F Lightning
fighters were lost in Greenland. In 1988, they were rediscovered under
270 feet of solid ice. That's an ice buildup of nearly six feet a year.
Every
schoolchild knows about the plight of the polar bear (the alarmists'
pinup species), threatened by climate change. But how many know that
polar bear numbers have increased substantially in recent decades and
that polar bears are thriving?
In each of these cases, the
alarmists put the projections of virtual-reality computer models ahead
of real-world observation. Yet these models are programmed with a wide
range of estimates and assumptions - including the assumption that CO2
is a major cause of warming. Little surprise, then, that they predict
that outcome.
A
team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic
of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation
into whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann
manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the
Earth's temperature.
Lawyers from the attorney general's office
said the climate scientist might have engaged in fraud by purposely
designing his well-known "hockey-stick" graph to show global warming or
including manipulated research on his curriculum vitae, which he
submitted for grants.
Deputy Attorney General Wesley G. Russell
Jr., who argued the case on Cuccinelli's behalf, said there was a
possibility of a "consistent pattern of manipulation of data."
But attorneys for the university say other investigations found no wrongdoing by Mann, who did not attend Friday's hearing.
Cuccinelli
issued a civil investigative demand, essentially a subpoena, for
documents from U-Va. for five grant applications Mann prepared and all
e-mail between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39
other scientists across the country. U-Va. is fighting back, arguing
that the demand exceeds Cuccinelli's authority under state law and
intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free
from political pressure.
Albemarle Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross took the matter under advisement, saying he would rule within 10 days.
BBC hedging its bets: Actually talking to skeptics!
In
a special Radio 4 series the BBC's Environmental Analyst Roger Harrabin
investigates whether the arguments surrounding climate change can ever
be won. He questions whether his own reporting - and that of others -
has adequately told the whole story about global warming.
Roger
Harrabin has reported on the climate for almost thirty years off and on,
but last November while working on the "Climategate" emails story, he
was prompted to look again at the basics of climate science.
He
finds that the public under-estimate the degree of consensus among
scientists that humans have contributed towards the heating of the
climate. But he also finds that politicians often fail to convey the
huge uncertainty over the extent of future climate change.
At
this crucial moment in global climate policy making, he talks to seminal
characters in the climate change debate including Tony Blair, Lord
Lawson, Sir Crispin Tickell and the influential blogger Steve McIntyre.
Just
six months ago, public trust in climate science looked assured as
nations moved towards the climate summit in Copenhagen. Now a recent BBC
poll suggests that less than half of the British populace accepts that
humans are changing the climate - the fundamental premise of government
policy on energy, transport, planning, construction; and a major
influence on policy in taxation, agriculture and foreign affairs.
This first programme in the series examines what happened to cause this swing in public sentiment. It asks whether the scientific reviews underway - two down, two to go - will restore public faith in climate science.
It
examines the sceptics' argument that mainstream scientists have
under-estimated the role of natural cycles in the recent warm period.
And it considers whether changes in the output of the sun might even be
leading the Earth into a period of cooling.
The
wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the claim
that it will provide major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
There's just one problem: It's not true. A slew of recent studies show
that wind-generated electricity likely won't result in any reduction in
carbon emissions—or that they'll be so small as to be almost
meaningless.
This issue is especially important now that states
are mandating that utilities produce arbitrary amounts of their
electricity from renewable sources. By 2020, for example, California
will require utilities to obtain 33% of their electricity from
renewables. About 30 states, including Connecticut, Minnesota and
Hawaii, are requiring major increases in the production of renewable
electricity over the coming years.
Wind—not solar or geothermal
sources—must provide most of this electricity. It's the only renewable
source that can rapidly scale up to meet the requirements of the
mandates. This means billions more in taxpayer subsidies for the wind
industry and higher electricity costs for consumers.
None of it
will lead to major cuts in carbon emissions, for two reasons. First,
wind blows only intermittently and variably. Second, wind-generated
electricity largely displaces power produced by natural gas-fired
generators, rather than that from plants burning more carbon-intensive
coal.
Because wind blows intermittently, electric utilities must
either keep their conventional power plants running all the time to make
sure the lights don't go dark, or continually ramp up and down the
output from conventional coal- or gas-fired generators (called
"cycling"). But coal-fired and gas-fired generators are designed to run
continuously, and if they don't, fuel consumption and emissions
generally increase. A car analogy helps explain: An automobile that
operates at a constant speed—say, 55 miles per hour—will have better
fuel efficiency, and emit less pollution per mile traveled, than one
that is stuck in stop-and-go traffic.
Recent research strongly
suggests how this problem defeats the alleged carbon-reducing virtues of
wind power. In April, Bentek Energy, a Colorado-based energy analytics
firm, looked at power plant records in Colorado and Texas. (It was
commissioned by the Independent Petroleum Association of the Mountain
States.) Bentek concluded that despite huge investments, wind-generated
electricity "has had minimal, if any, impact on carbon dioxide"
emissions.
Bentek found that thanks to the cycling of Colorado's
coal-fired plants in 2009, at least 94,000 more pounds of carbon dioxide
were generated because of the repeated cycling. In Texas, Bentek
estimated that the cycling of power plants due to increased use of wind
energy resulted in a slight savings of carbon dioxide (about 600 tons)
in 2008 and a slight increase (of about 1,000 tons) in 2009.
Earlier
this year, another arm of the Department of Energy, the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory, released a report whose conclusions were
remarkably similar to those of the EIA. This report focused on
integrating wind energy into the electric grid in the Eastern U.S.,
which has about two-thirds of the country's electric load. If wind
energy were to meet 20% of electric needs in this region by 2024,
according to the report, the likely reduction in carbon emissions would
be less than 200 million tons per year. All the scenarios it considered
will cost at least $140 billion to implement. And the issue of cycling
conventional power plants is only mentioned in passing.
For
a start, biofuels make huge demands on the water suppy -- largely to
feed the vast areas of new cropland that would be required. And it
appears that they would not reduce CO2 levels anyway
Those
amazing Idsos who run the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and
Global Change review a paper recently published in AMBIO: A Journal of
the Human Environment by Mulder et al. (2010), who assess the energy
return on water invested (EROWI) of several renewable and non-renewable
fuels.
In the paper, provocatively titled “Burning Water,” the
Mulder team find that “the most water-efficient, fossil-based
technologies have an EROWI one to two orders of magnitude [10 to 100
times] greater than the most water-efficient biomass technologies,
implying that the development of biomass energy technologies in scale
sufficient to be a significant source of energy may produce or
exacerbate water shortages around the globe and be limited by the
availability of fresh water.”
The Idsos note that these findings
“will not be welcomed” by those who promote biofuels as a means of
combating the alleged national security risks of global climate change.
We
often hear, for example, that climate change will increase the risk of
“water wars” by intensifying summer heat and drought. There’s not much
evidence to support this alarm. About 90% of global fresh water
consumption is for agriculture. As British scientist Wendy Barnaby found
to her surprise when she set out to research a book about the coming
“century of water wars,” nations in water-stressed regions typically do
not come to blows but instead cooperate and import “virtual water” in
the form of grain, leaving more water available for drinking and
bathing.
Even in the water-stressed, conflict-prone, Middle
East, nations do not go to war over water. Nonetheless, to the extent
that water stress undermines stability and peace, government policies
ramping up biofuel production are likely a “cure” worse than the
supposed disease.
In addition, some biofuel policies can increase
food prices and world hunger, fostering instability and strife,
especially if scaled up enough to make a meaningful difference in global
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Princeton researchers Stephen
Pacella and Robert Socolow estimate that avoiding 1 gigaton (gt) of
carbon emissions per year by 2050, by replacing gasoline with biofuels,
would require 250 million hectares of high-yield energy crop planations,
“an area equal to about one-sixth of the world’s current cropland.”
Let’s
put this in perspective. One gigaton of carbon = 3.67 gt of CO2.
Achieving the EU/UN emission stabilization target of 450 parts per
million would require global CO2 emissions to decline roughly 38 gt
below the baseline (business as usual) projection by 2050. In other
words, the 3.67 gt reduction in CO2 that Pacala and Socolow say we can
get via biofuels would achieve less than 10% of the reduction required
to meet the target. Not a whole lot of environmental bang for all that
land area buck. Indeed, dedicating 250 million hectares to energy crop
production would likely squeeze many species out of their habitats.
Note
also that significant research indicates that converting grassland and
forest land into biofuel plantations increases net greenhouse gas
emissions over many decades by releasing the carbon stored in forests
and soils. Growing biofuel on 250 million hectares of land might very
well emit more CO2 than the gasoline it replaces.
The larger
point, though, as Dennis Avery explains, is that the world is not
well-fed now, and the demand for food and feed on farmlands is expected
to more than double by 2050. Requiring biofuel production on 250 million
hectares would be a recipe for disaster. Putting the equivalent of
one-sixth of current cropland off limits to food production represents a
much bigger decline in global agricultural productivity than is
anticipated from drought in high-end global warming scenarios.
Warmists
warn that climate change is a “threat multiplier” or “instability
accelerant.” However, the national security risks of climate change
policy likely exceed those of climate change itself.
China, India, Indonesia, Brazil Can’t Estimate Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions—Latest Figures are From 1994
Even
as the Obama administration seeks to negotiate an international treaty
to cap manmade greenhouse gas emissions, many of the world’s most
egregious producers of greenhouse gasses cannot accurately estimate how
much gas they currently emit, according to a recent report from
Government Accountability Office.
The GAO examined the
greenhouse-gas-emission estimates made by seven developed countries
listed as “Annex I” nations under the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia,
the United Kingdom, and the United States) and seven developing
countries listed as “non-Annex I” nations (Brazil, China, India,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and South Korea) under the framework. The
study found that the lack of accurate data and reporting on
greenhouse-gas emissions from non-Annex I nations complicates the
efforts for global climate policies.
“High quality and comparable
information on national greenhouse gas emissions is critical to
designing and implementing international responses to climate change,”
said the GAO. “We found that the inventories from seven selected high
emitting non-Annex I nations were generally outdated, not comparable,
and of lower quality than inventories from Annex I nations. The existing
gap in quality and comparability of inventories across developed and
developing nations makes it more difficult to establish and monitor
international agreements, since actions by both developed and developing
nations will be necessary to address climate change under future
international agreements.”
Even Great Britain, an Annex I
country, can only estimate its greenhouse-gas emissions within a margin
of error (or an “uncertainty” estimate, as the report calls it) of 13
percent, said the GAO.
Russia, also an Annex I country, can only estimate its greenhouse gas emissions within a margin of error of 40 percent.
Yet
Great Britain and Russia did much better than most of the seven
non-Annex I countries whose greenhouse-gas-emission estimates were
reviewed by the GAO.
China, a non-Annex I country, has no idea
how much greenhouse gas it has emitted in recent years. The only year
for which it has ever produced an estimate is 1994, and it did not
determine the margin of error for that estimate of 16-year-old gas
emissions.
India and Malaysia had likewise only made estimates of
their greenhouse gas emissions for 1994 and they did not determine what
their margins of error were either.
Indonesia and Brazil have
produced estimates for 1990-1994. Indonesia’s margin of error was not
determined. But Brazil’s margin of error was 22 percent—considerably
better than Russia’s 40 percent but not nearly as good as Great
Britain’s 13 percent. South Korea had completed an estimate for its
greenhouse-gas emissions for as recently as 2001, but did not include an
estimate of its margin of error. Mexico completed an estimate for as
recently as 2006 and estimated a margin of error of 7 percent.
The
“uncertainty”–or margin of error–in the annual estimates of
greenhouse-gas emission made by the U.S. government ranged from 3
percent to 7 percent. Japan was more precise, producing estimates that
had an “uncertainty” of only 1 percent
The “uncertainty” in
Russia’s estimate was so great it actually was greater than the entirety
of Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions for 2007.
“Russia reported
overall uncertainty of about plus or minus 40 percent,” said the GAO.
“That equates to an uncertainty of 800 million metric tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent, slightly more than Canada’s total emissions in 2007.
Russia’s relatively large uncertainty estimate could stem from several
factors, such as less precise national statistics.”
The inability
of the non-Annex I nations analyzed by GAO to estimate their
greenhouse-gas emissions is significant because these nations are
expected to account for much of the future increase in these emissions.
“China,
a non-Annex I nation, recently overtook the United States as the
world’s largest emitter, according to some estimates,” said GAO.
“According to Energy Information Administration projections, non-Annex I
nations may contribute nearly all of the growth of global fossil-fuel
related emissions through 2030. Because of this expected growth,
emissions reductions will be needed from high-emitting nations,
including non-Annex I nations, to stabilize the concentration of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.),
ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had
originally requested that the GAO report on the quality and
comparability of nations’ estimates of their greenhouse gas emissions in
February of 2009–before the House in July 2009 passed a controversial
cap-and-trade bill that would place limits on how much carbon dioxide
the United States could emit annually.
Barton said the lack of greenhouse gas emissions from major emitters such as China, Brazil and India was “worrisome.”
“We’re
concerned that emissions information from the fastest growing
developing countries, including China and India, were 12 years older
than what the United States and other developed nations had reported,”
said Barton.
“It’s also worrisome that China, Brazil, India and
other major developing nations still refuse to match their reporting
regimes to those of the developed world even as they rapidly surpass
both us and Europe in the amount of greenhouse gases they produce,” said
Barton.
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who was the ranking member of
the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and
Investigations when the GAO report was requested, suggested it made
little sense to move ahead with regulating U.S. emissions when there was
not accurate reporting on the emissions of other nations.
“Before
the Obama administration and Speaker Pelosi clamp down on American jobs
with new global warming regulations, wouldn’t it make sense to make
sure we can trust the measuring regimes of other countries?” asked
Walden.
“Americans want to do the right thing for the
environment,” he said, “but we don’t need to play by one set of rules
while our economic competitors play by another.”
New Jersey Business Owners, Activists Seek Repeal of "Cap and Trade" that Could Reverberate Nationally
Business
owners have joined forces with free market activists in New Jersey who
are calling on state lawmakers to repeal “cap and trade” policies, which
are responsible for boosting energy prices. On Thursday, The New Jersey
Restaurant Association (NJRA), which represents the state’s largest
employment sector, announced its support for a bill that would both
revoke “cap and trade” and rescind New Jersey’s participation in the
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).
“The opposition that
is building up against `cap and trade’ in New Jersey could have national
implications since the program here was crafted as a model for what
President Obama had in mind,” Steven Lonegan, a former mayor of Bogota
explained in an interview. “The American people are opposed to these
environmental regulations but they are still growing right under our
feet at the state level with these regional initiatives. It’s shocking
how few people realize New Jersey already has the program.”
Lonegan,
who is also a former gubernatorial candidate, is heading up the effort
to repeal “cap and trade” in partnership with private citizens and
public officials. Legislation (Bill A3147) has been introduced in the
Assembly by Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (R-25) and Assemblywoman
Alison Littell McHose (R-24). An accompanying bill is expected to be
introduced by Senator Michael Doherty (R-23), and Governor Chris
Christie has indicated he would sign the legislation.
Lisa
Jackson, who now serves as Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
administrator, previously served as the New Jersey environmental
commissioner. Prior last year’s “climategate” scandal that exposed how
politically-motivated researchers manipulated and exaggerated warming
trends, federal lawmakers were eyeing Jackson’s state level program as a
foundation for new regulatory schemes modeled after the Kyoto Protocol.
“There
are profound economic consequences attached to scientifically unfounded
`cap and trade’ programs,” Lonegan said. “Unfortunately, there are
still too many state legislators who don’t understand the issue and
don’t have the backbone to stand up to groups like the Sierra Club. But
the public is behind us and we feel like we have momentum.”
Poor
Al Gore. As if an impending divorce and allegations of sexual
misconduct from an Oregon masseuse weren't bad enough (he has since been
cleared of wrongdoing), the apparent collapse of "cap-and-trade"
legislation in the U.S. Senate has driven the former vice president to
despair.
As reported by Steve Milloy on his blog Green Hell, Mr.
Gore recently admitted to supporters in a conference call, "[T]his
[cap-and-trade] battle has not been successful and is pretty much over
for this year." Mr. Gore blamed everyone and their monkey for the
failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation, including
his former colleagues: "The U.S. Senate has failed us," he lamented,
"the federal government has failed us."
The fortunes of Mr.
Gore's global-warming crusade certainly are in decline: A recent
Rasmussen poll found that just 34 percent of respondents "feel human
activity is the main contributor" to global warming and that the
percentage of those who consider global warming a "serious issue" has
"trended down slightly since last November."
Mr. Gore himself is
to blame for at least some of the public backlash against global-warming
orthodoxy: Using bad science to justify bad policy will inevitably rub
people the wrong way. And Mr. Gore has not helped his cause by
consistently expressing outrageous falsehoods ("the debate is over") and
shamelessly trying to shield his assertions from legitimate criticism
by claiming "settled science." All the while, he has enriched himself
and pushed a left-wing economic agenda.
Take, for example, the
infamous "hockey stick" graph, a version of which was featured
prominently in Mr. Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The graph
appeared to show global temperatures relatively flat for a millennium
and then suddenly spiking upward in the late 20th century - proof,
according to Mr. Gore and his acolytes, of man-made global warming
caused by industrial carbon emissions.
Temperature records for
the past century are based on instrumental data: thermometers,
satellites, etc. For prior centuries, however, scientists rely on proxy
data; in the case of the original hockey-stick graph, researchers relied
on tree rings. But as Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate
studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, writes in "The Great
Global Warming Blunder," "the most recent tree-ring data do not even
show the warming that occurred in the second half of the 20th-century,
but appear to indicate a cooling instead." Because tree rings do not
show the recent warming that we know occurred, it follows that tree
rings are not an adequate proxy by which we can accurately gauge past
temperatures.
The unreliability of tree-ring data has long been
known. Nevertheless, the hockey-stick graph was embraced
enthusiastically by Mr. Gore and the global-warming crowd, for it
conveniently dispensed with two significant climate events: the Medieval
Warm Period (10th to 13th centuries) and the Little Ice Age (14th to
19th centuries). The former saw temperatures in the North Atlantic warm
enough that vikings could settle and flourish in a lush Greenland, the
latter temperatures so low that people routinely ice-skated on a frozen
River Thames. Both of these climate events, for which there are masses
of historical evidence, began before the Industrial Revolution and
therefore are unattributable to man-made carbon emissions.
That's
why the global-warming crowd was so desperate to hide them: If people
realize that temperature fluctuations occur naturally and cyclically,
they are less likely to embrace the draconian, job-killing energy taxes
favored by Mr. Gore and his ilk as punishment for their own carbon sins.
The
hockey stick conveniently hid this natural temperature variation - for a
while. Fortunately, thanks largely to the tireless work of independent
researchers Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, the flaws in the
statistical methodology used to create the various hockey-stick graphs
have received widespread attention, and the once-iconic symbol of global
warming has since been largely marginalized in the climate-change
debate.
As
one who often reads the Newspaper of the Ruling Class, the New York
Times, I tend not to be surprised when the "Newspaper of Record"
distorts the record. Furthermore, one could do nothing but write
comments refuting the various economic fallacies and outright
distortions that accompany each edition of the Grey Lady.
However,
in a recent editorial, the NYT managed to distort the record so much
that I find it hard even to know how to answer, except to say that some
of us have not lost our memories of what happened 30 years ago. Entitled
"Acid Rain 30 Years On," the editorial starts with the following
statement:
Just over 30 years ago, a skeptical Daniel
Patrick Moynihan persuaded his Senate colleagues to approve a major
study to see whether a relatively unknown phenomenon called acid rain
was worth worrying about. The study, completed in 1990, showed that
pollution blowing eastward from coal-fired power plants was killing off
aquatic life. One-quarter of the Adirondacks’ 3,000 lakes and streams
had become too acidic to support fish life, or were headed that way.
Mr. Moynihan became a believer. And the study helped usher in two
decades worth of laws and regulations – most important, the 1990 Clean
Air Act – requiring major reductions in power plant emissions of sulfur
dioxide. Evidence suggests that in the last decade pollution levels have
dropped and that streams, lakes and forests have rebounded.
Actually
not, and I think I know, given that I had a major article in Reason
about this whole affair and also wrote part of my doctoral dissertation
on the subject, and published another paper in the American Journal of
Economics and Sociology about it. I can say what the NYT says in that
editorial is categorically untrue, all the way to Moynihan’s becoming "a
believer." If there is an Orwellian Memory Hole, it definitely lives at
the "Newspaper of Record."
What actually happened regarding the
"major study" and its results, and why were the results so
controversial, with the EPA openly attempting to destroy the career of a
scientist who had a major role in the report’s conclusions? In fact,
why did the New York Times itself openly ignore the report that it now
praises?
This goes back to the origins of the Acid Rain scare,
which, like Global Warming (or "Climate Change") did not even need Al
Gore to hype it. I wrote in my article in Reason:
(In
the late 1970s) scientists in the United States, Canada, and
Scandinavia became alarmed at what they believed was massive
environmental degradation caused by sulfur dioxide-laced rain that came
from coal-fired power plants. The media followed with hundreds of
apocalyptic stories, such as "Scourge from the Skies" (Reader's Digest),
"Now, Even the Rain is Dangerous" (International Wildlife), "Acid from
the Skies" (Time), and "Rain of Terror" (Field and Stream).
In 1980, the EPA declared that acid rain had acidified lakes in the
northeastern United States a hundredfold since 1940, and the National
Academy of Sciences predicted an "aquatic silent spring" by 1990,
declaring in 1981 that the nation's number of acid-dead lakes would more
than double by 1990.
In response to these concerns, Congress
in 1980 commissioned an interagency governmental study – NAPAP
(National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project) – to document the
damage acid rain was causing to lakes, rivers and streams, aquatic life,
forests, crops, and buildings.
However, as scientists
took measurements and assessed the streams, lakes and forests that
supposedly were being ravaged by acid rain, they found out a number of
things. First, lake and stream acidity had very little relationship to
the pH factor of local rainfall. Instead, the acidity of the vegetation
in the watersheds of these aquatic bodies was the significant factor,
with the science firmly established by the time that Edward Krug and
Charles Frink published a paper in a 1983 edition of Science. (More on
that later.)
Second, as is the case with most environmental
scares, so-called acid rain was not having much of an effect on
anything, from what scientists could say. Unfortunately, Congress, the
George H.W. Bush White House, and most of the mainstream media were not
thrilled with the fact that the End Of The World As We Know It and let
it be known that anything less than Apocalypse Now was unacceptable.
In writing about NAPAP’s 1987 Interim Report, I noted:
The assessment concluded that acid rain was not damaging forests,
did not hurt crops, and caused no measurable health problems. The report
also concluded that acid rain helped acidify only a fraction of
Northeastern lakes and that the number of acid lakes had not increased
since 1980. The assessment also agreed that acid rain hampered
visibility in the eastern United States.
The report ignited a
firestorm of protest. Rep. James Scheuer (D-NY), chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agriculture Research, and the
Environment, said the assessment was "intellectually dishonest" and
badgered NAPAP witnesses before his committee. Environmentalists
belittled the document because it came from the Reagan administration.
They were especially angry at J. Lawrence Kulp, whom Reagan had
appointed NAPAP director.
Scientists, however, generally
endorsed the study. Documents from the International Conference on Acid
Precipitation in 1988 show participants agreed with most of NAPAP's
conclusions almost unanimously. In fact, the scientists from Canada
agreed with Krug on the important watershed acidification theory, which
was partly at odds with the Interim Assessment. In other words, NAPAP's
conclusions were scientifically correct, if not politically correct.
The
secondary reaction to the study by the government was indifference, in
that the government could do nothing, and the eastern United States
would not have been any worse off, environmentally speaking. However,
because the NAPAP report was politically incorrect, the Bush
administration (which took office in 1989) suppressed its findings –
with no objection from the NYT or any other mainstream journalistic
outfit – except for one, "60 Minutes."
On December 30, 1990
(after Congress passed the acid rain provisions in the Clean Air Act of
1990), "60 Minutes" broadcast a story that thoroughly debunked the scare
stories, including a recent one by the "Newspaper of Record." Reporter
Steve Kroft
…asked Krug about a then-recent New York
Times story that claimed acid rain had turned forests in the
Appalachia's into "ragged landscapes of dead and dying trees."
Krug replied, "I don't know where they got that from. It appears to be
another assertion, unsubstantiated...We do not see that occurring."
One
of the people interviewed by "60 Minutes" was none other than Moynihan,
and he told Kroft that he was relieved by the results of the report.
After all, he said, at the beginning of the scare, New Yorkers had been
told that they would be losing "all of their lakes" and forests. The
Apocalypse had not materialized, and Moynihan, while saying he would
support the law, nonetheless was not a "believer" in the sense that the
NYT characterized him 30 years later.
Not surprisingly, the EPA
objected to the report and the NYT and most mainstream publications
followed suit. Acid rain was destroying the country, and even if it was
not, it still was, period. Instead, the newspapers either ignored the
science or were used as conduits for the EPA to attack Krug and destroy
the career of a promising scientist.
At the end, I wrote:
The EPA's performance on acid rain – and how it dealt with a
respected scientist who told the truth – is not comforting when one
considers how important the federal government now is in funding
scientific research and how politicized current environmental issues
such as global warming and depletion of the earth's ozone layer have
become. One NAPAP scientist, who for obvious reasons wishes to remain
anonymous, warns that in the future the EPA will not go through the
pretense of research and debate: "There is no NAPAP for global warming."
So,
once again we see an editorial in the "Newspaper of Record" that
outright distorts the record and ignores some good science. This is the
same newspaper that claimed that the George W. Bush administration was
"corrupting" science because it was not quick enough to join Gore’s
Global Warming bandwagon.
In his excellent essay, "America’s
Ruling Class," Angelo M. Codevilla writes regarding the modern
"Progressives" and science that "identity always trumps" the truth.
Indeed, in the case of acid rain, Codevilla’s assessment is on the mark.
Americans were bullied by political elites and their amen media and
academic corners into having new restrictions placed on their lives in
order to deal with a non-existent threat. And it will happen again and
again and again. But it will happen.
Stern argues that New York's bedbug problem is nothing compared to the millions dying from malaria in Africa
Howard
Stern, radio personality and host of The Howard Stern Show, one of the
most popular and influential radio programs in America, is calling for
the insecticide DDT to be brought back to battle the bedbugs in New York
and the malarial mosquitos in Africa. "It's time for this nonsense to
stop," Stern declared. He cited CFACT's Paul Driessen to support his
case.
CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen recently wrote
about the drastically different consequences the ban on DDT is having in
America and Africa. "Growing infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers
have New Yorkers annoyed, anguished, angry about officialdom’s
inadequate responses," says Driessen. In the past, DDT was used
effectively to deal with bedbug infestations.
Howard Stern agreed
with Driessen that Africa's malaria problem dwarfs the bedbug issue,
saying, "You're talking about the difference between life and death.
They gotta have some insecticides." Stern continued, "forget about a
bunch of city-dwellers with their emotional distress with bedbugs.
You're talking about malaria!"
South Africa, one of the few
African nations wealthy enough to fund its own anti-malaria campaign,
has used insecticides and DDT to achieve 95% reductions in disease and
death rates, Driessen reports. The rest of Africa is not so fortunate,
due to many aid agencies' refusal to fund DDT programs. As a result,
Driessen says, malaria "kills over a million annually, most of them
children and mothers, the vast majority of them in Africa. It drains
families’ meager savings, and magnifies and perpetuates the region’s
endemic poverty."
Howard Stern read extensively from Paul's
article and gave his verdict: "they gotta bring back DDT. Stop being a
bunch of pussies."
HUGE
overnight snowfalls have delivered Victoria's best skiing conditions in
years. Falls Creek had the biggest dumping, with 54cm of fresh snow
recorded in the 24 hours to 6am. Mt Hotham had 46cm, Dinner Plain 30cm,
Mt Buller 29cm and Lake Mountain 25cm. There was 10cm of new snow at
Mt Baw Baw and Mt Buffalo.
Falls Creek resident Chris Hocking
said 226cm of snow had fallen in the area so far this month, already
higher than any August figure in at least a decade. "The volume of snow
we have seen in August is just staggering,’’ Mr Hocking said. "I
haven’t seen anything like this in so many years.’’
It's already
been the wettest winter since 1996, with Melbourne's rainfall almost
10mm above average for the season. And if you've been cranking up the
heater on a daily basis, it's probably because the mercury hasn't made
it past 18C in Melbourne, forcing us to shiver through an average
maximum of 14.6C.
Weather bureau senior forecaster Terry Ryan
said there had been a return to the icy winters of more than a decade
ago. "It's been a return to average temperatures, which we haven't had
for a while," Mr Ryan said.
The wet weather had been great news
for our dams, currently about 40.2 per cent and growing by 0.2 per cent a
day, according to Mr Ryan. "There's no reason why we can't be up to 45
per cent by the end of spring, and there's an outside hope to touch 50
per cent," he said.
And, while the weather has kept most of us
inside it has also been a boon for snow bunnies, with conditions among
the best in several years. Falls Creek is leading the way and, with
more snow expected overnight, it could break records.
Local
resident Chris Hocking said last night the snowfall had been amazing.
"It's already the best in six years, minimum," he said. "And it's
likely to go into the 20-year margin before the end of the month."
Declining trees spell gloom for planet -- say Greenie nuts
Since
global temperature changes over the last decade have been in tenths of a
degree only, whatever is happening to trees is not the result of
global warming. There IS no global temperature change to speak of.
Besides, any ocean warming would INCREASE overall rainfall, which is
good for trees -- and increased CO2 is good for them too.
The
study below blames the decline in trees that they saw on drier weather
overall -- but drier weather overall is a sign of global COOLING!
Pesky! How come these so-called scientists know nothing of the most
basic physics of evaporation or the chemistry of photosynthesis?
LESS
rainfall and rising global temperatures are damaging one of the world's
best guardians against climate change: trees. A global study,
published in the journal Science, shows that the amount of carbon
dioxide being soaked up by the world's forests in the past decade has
declined, reversing a 20-year trend.
It diminishes hopes that
global warming can be seriously slowed down by the mass planting of
trees in carbon sinks. Although plants generally grow bigger as a result
of absorbing carbon-enriched air, they need more water and nutrients to
do so, and they have been getting less.
A fierce drought that
dried out vast areas of the Amazon Basin in 2005 is seen as a key to the
global decline in carbon sinks in the past decade, but Australia is not
immune. "Australia is a significant contributor to the global pattern,
and the findings are consistent to what we have seen here," said a
senior CSIRO researcher and director of the Global Carbon Project, Dr
Josep Canadell.
"There has been a measurable decline in the leaf
area of plants this decade, though we don't have all the data for
Australia yet. What we have seen is strongly consistent with projected
patterns of climate change."
The Science study, Drought-induced
Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 through
2009, used data from a NASA satellite that orbits Earth every 15 days
to build up a global map of changing leaf density and forest cover. It
estimated net primary production, a measurement of how much CO2 is taken
in by plants and stored as part of their biomass.
The study
found that in some areas of the world, higher temperatures had driven
more plant growth. But these gains have been cancelled out by drier
conditions in rainforests, leading to the overall decline in total
amount of CO2 the forests are soaking up.
The findings reinforce
work being done at the Australian Bureau of Rural Sciences, which is
researching how much carbon can be stored on a long-term basis in the
landscape.
Scientists say that a sustained decline in the amount
of carbon being stored in forests risks locking in a vicious cycle, in
which trees absorb less carbon because the world is warmer and drier,
while the rising carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to trap heat.
"There
is no single silver bullet answer to this, but one of the partial
solutions is the protection of old-growth forests, which store a lot of
CO2, and the replanting of those that have been removed," said Professor
Andy Pitman, the co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at
the University of NSW. "This doesn't actually get to the heart of the
problem though, which is rising CO2 emissions from human activity."
Rainfall
patterns in Australia are expected to alter significantly over the next
few decades as average temperatures increase, with more rain likely to
fall in the north and north-west and less precipitation likely in
southern Australia. This means that many of Australia's existing
old-growth forests, which are located in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, can
be expected to become less efficient carbon sinks.
Richard
Alley, a glaciologist and climate researcher at Pennsylvania State
University in Philadelphia, calls the findings a "nice advance". He
notes, however, that it is only the beginning of trying to determine how
glaciers might react to geoengineering.
"We don't really have an ice-sheet model that we trust,"
says Alley, noting that, in addition to global warming, glaciers react
to local and regional changes in winds, ocean temperatures and ocean
circulation. "In many ways," he says, "this large advance serves to show
how far we have to go before climate modelling of geoengineering is
really good enough that useful regional projections could be made to
guide decision-makers."
Alan Robock, a geophysicist from Rutgers
University in New Jersey, agrees, but says that one finding that does
come through strongly is that geoengineering has only a relatively minor
effect on sea-level rise. "Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases will
have a much larger impact," he says.
Moore concurs. "Anything
that isn't reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is
like putting [on] a bandage rather than actually solving the problem,"
he says.
The fact that global warming has been decisively exposed as a global
hoax hasn't deterred the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram from running four
Global Alarming articles over the past two weeks.
Floods, fires,
melting ice, heat waves and rainstorms are all touted in one article as
proof of runaway global warming rather than eons-old common occurrences.
Another
story tells us how British Columbia adopted California's "landmark
greenhouse gas reduction law" and created "more than 20,000 new
[taxpayer-funded, bureaucrat-run, politically-connected] clean-tech
jobs."
And two others mentioned how the Senate scrapped a bill to
curb carbon emissions "responsible for global warming" because of
"opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats," proving that
global warming is all about politics, not science.
The Global Warming scam appears to be business as usual.
It's
as though solar sunspot activity that causes the same global warming on
Mars as it does on Earth doesn't exist. It's as though a meteorological
phenomenon called "blocking events" related to the jet stream doesn't
exist. It's as though the IPCC "Climategate" scandal of rigged data
doesn't exist. It's as though doctored climatological numbers from UK
and US universities don't exist. It's as though the flawed and deceptive
climate figures from NOAA don't exist. It's as though countless faulty
weather stations and malfunctioning weather satellites and manipulated
computer modeling don't exist.
It's as though the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age never existed.
The
Earth's climate is "too vast, too chaotic, and too unpredictable to
rationally suggest that a little bit of carbon dioxide is driving the
whole thing," retorts an article from the libertarian LewRockwell.com
titled "Why It's Too Darn Hot" which was not published in the
Star-Telegram.
Ordinary people know global warming is a phony
excuse for turning the entire planet into a totalitarian
socialist-corporatist third world slum for the benefit of the ruling
classes and their suck-up toadies.
The Al Gores of the world are
motivated by an insatiable greed for power, wealth, and ego
gratification. If those obsessions can be gained from global warming
they will advocate global warming; if they could be had by promoting
flat earth hysteria they would ballyhoo flat earth.
Normal people
don't have to be professional environmental scientists to smell a hoax,
any more than they need to be professional rodent hunters to smell a
rat.
The 2010 'Global Warming' Summer Apocalypse: A New Movie Blockbuster or The Usual Hollywood Flop?
A lot of work went into the post below from C3 Headlines so I am reproducing it in full below
As most observers of the world's climate/weather realized earlier this year, the 2010 summer was going to be a 'hot one' due to El Ni¤o
conditions out in the Pacific. Sure enough, there were some hot
temperatures that came to fruition this summer. Yet, despite the
foreknowledge that it was to be a hot summer, this summer's warmth drove
the media to become gloriously stupid, and of course, the famous Hollywood "climate scientists" to become all-a-flutter, with even a spectacular incident of mentalfailure - all for the purpose of turning the natural El Ni¤o into man-made global warming fiction.
As the leftist-liberal-progressive elites continue being unhinged from what is normal summer weather and El Ni¤o
temperatures, they might want to put 2010 into context so as to avoid
looking even dumber. To do so, they might compare the 2010 El Ni¤o summer temps with those of the last major El Ni¤o during the summer of 1998, in order to gain perspective.
First, it's been really hot in some places and pretty damn cold
in others this summer (winter for the Southern Hemisphere), none of
which has anything to do with CO2. As for hot, Washington D.C. has had a
hot 12-month period ending in July, as the graph on the left depicts.
It's the same for the north-east region of the U.S., as shown on the
right graph. But look carefully at that chart on the right, despite a
hot last 12-months, the trend since the '98 El Ni¤o is at a minus 3.4 degrees per century rate for the north-east region. (click on each image to enlarge)
How
about the Atlantic coastal south-east region, below the Washington D.C.
area? Well the feared global warming didn't seem to really impact that
area over the last 12-months, as it continues a cooling trend since the
1998 El Ni¤o summer(see left chart below). What about
the last 12 months for the entire continental U.S.? Actually, as the
below chart on the right reveals, U.S. temperatures over the last twelve
months have cooled, and has now pushed the country's cooling trend down
to a minus 8.5 degrees per century rate. (click on each image to
enlarge)
As
the above evidence clearly points out, the U.S. has had some urban
areas and larger regions warming over the recent past, but overall, the
nation's temperatures are down since the last major El Ni¤o.
Most certainly, the nation's cooling runs totally counter to what the
media and celebrities are always telling us. It's a sad fact that the
U.S. elites are either completely ignorant of the real facts or are
purposefully misleading the public - it has to be one or the other
(okay....there's a third explanation....leftist/liberal "elites" tend to
be fairly stupid and gullible - "hey there Mr/Ms Elite Moonbat, how are your Bernie Madoff investments doing?").
Now,
how do global temperatures over the last 12 years compared to the U.S.
temperature experience? Below is a chart with all 12-month period global
temperatures ending in July. As we did above, we are comparing
temperatures from the last major El Ni¤o to the one we've experienced in 2010.
On
close examination, the chart shows that since 1998 there has not been a
single period when global temperatures exceeded the 12-month period
ending in July 1998, with one exception: 2010. For all the hysterics
about CO2-induced global warming, not a single period bested 1998 until
another large El Ni¤o arrived on the scene.
With that
said, note that the 2010 absolute increase over the 1998 period was a
"staggering," "mind-boggling," an "unprecedented" +0.03 degrees (three
one-hundredths of a single degree). This is the "gigantic," "immense"
global warming increase that goads Hollywood celebrities into
continuously making fools of themselves, and incites hysterical
journalists to write idiotic the-world-is-going-to-end articles about
summer severe weather events. (click on image to enlarge)
To
further put global temperatures in their context, we've marked on the
chart the temperature level (15 degrees Fahrenheit higher) that various
climate experts and their models predict temperatures will be at 2100.
Look
carefully. If massive CO2 emissions caused only +0.03 increase over 12
years, is it really possible they are going to cause a 15 degree jump by
2100? I don't think so....based on a simple average increase
experienced over the last 12 years, the temperatures by 2100 would be
+0.23 degree higher at best; or, extending a simple linear trend from
the past 12 years produces a +1.1 degree warming for the world by 2100.
Whether
it's a 0.23 or a 1.1 degree Fahrenheit increase, this is not the
climate catastrophe that elites keep predicting will happen but never
does.
Here's the moral of this summer's "global warming" story:
when elites claim the planet is dying, or facing a climate Armageddon
because of a hot weather incident or a severe summer storm, it always
pays to stop and ponder what has been said. Temperatures are always
going up and down due to natural cycles and any current event always
needs to be put into context of what reality is, not what the elites
claim.
For modern temperature context, visit here. Or for historical temperature context, visit here and here.
And since leftist's think climate change is causing more death and destruction, they're wrong on boththese points also.
Reflected Sunlight Shines On IPCC Deceptions And Gross Inadequacies
By Dr. Tim Ball
Moonlight
is not light generated by the moon, but reflected sunlight. First
astronauts on the moon were amazed by the brightness of Earth when it
appeared over the lunar horizon. What they saw was Earthlight, which is
also reflected sunlight. It's sunlight that does little to heat the
Earth because it goes directly back out to space. The amount reflected
varies with changes to the surface and atmosphere. These changes are
significant yet poorly measured or understood and pushed aside by the
fanatic focus on CO2.
Global warming due to humans is based on
the hypothesis that our addition of CO2 has changed the balance of
energy entering and leaving the Earth's atmosphere. There are a
multitude of factors that can change this balance, many ignored or
underplayed by climate science. They get away with this because the
public is unaware.
It begins with measures of the amount of
energy entering the Earth's atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) only consider changes in the irradiance portion of
incoming solar energy (insolation). They claim that up to 1950 it
explained over 50 percent of temperature variation then CO2 became 90
percent of the cause of change.
Part of the reason for
downplaying irradiance is the low percentage of change in modern
records. The earliest record from outside the atmosphere from a manned
observatory was Skylab (1973 - 1979). Skylab showed a change of 0.14% in
the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). An average over time shows a
variation of 0.1% for an 11 - year sunspot cycle. This seems like a very
small number and therefore of little consequence. The difficulty is by
varying TSI by 6% in a computer model you can `explain' all temperature
change for the entire history of the Earth.
There is also no
agreement about the TSI at the top of the Atmosphere (TOA). As Raschke
explained, "Solar radiation is the prime source for all processes within
our climate system. Its total amount, the total solar irradiance (TSI)
reaching the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), and its variability are now quite
accurately known on the basis of multiple satellite measurements and
extremely careful calibration activities (Fr”hlich and Lean, 2004).".
"Computations, therefore, should be relatively easy."
However,
he shows there is no agreement. He compared 20 models and their input
values for TOA. (Figure 1) He concludes, "It can be speculated that such
different meridional profiles of the solar radiative forcing at TOA
should also have impact on the computed atmospheric circulation pattern,
in particular when simulations over periods of several decades to
several centuries are performed. Therefore, related projects within the
World Climate Research Program should take appropriate steps to avoid
systematic discrepancies as shown above and to estimate their possible
impact on the resulting climate and circulation changes." IPCC are
projecting climate change for the next 50 years or more.
So we
have problems with the amount of incoming energy, but there are more
problems with what happens to the energy once it enters the atmosphere.
One
of these is change in albedo. Some believe it's more important than CO2
in affecting balance. "The most interesting thing here is that the
albedo forcings, in watts/sq meter seem to be fairly large. Larger than
that of all manmade greenhouse gases combined."
When sunlight
strikes a surface the color, texture and angle of the light (known as
the angle of incidence) determines how much is reflected or absorbed.
The difference between them, as a percentage, is called the albedo from
the root Latin word albus for white. With a pure white shiny surface 100
percent of the light is reflected so the albedo is 100. On a matte
black surface 100 percent is absorbed and the albedo is zero (Figure 2).
A solar collector needs to absorb as much solar energy as possible so
is matte black and set at right angles to the solar rays.
The
moon's albedo is 7, which means 93 units of 100 are absorbed and 7 units
reflected. Earth's albedo is 30 on average for the entire globe. The
amount varies from a high of 75 to 95 percent for fresh snow down to 8
or 9 percent for coniferous forest. Seasonal variation in snow and ice
cover is important as it affects global energy and therefore the weather
from year to year. However, the major factor is variability in the type
and amount of cloud cover. Thick cloud varies from 60 to 90 and thin
cloud from 30 to 50. This variability explains most of the change in
albedo shown in Figure 3. The right side scale shows changes in energy
with a range of about 9 watts per square meter. Compare this with the
2.5 watts per square meter change estimated to be due to human
activities.
IPCC reject irradiance as a cause of temperature
change since 1950, but they also reject variations in sun/earth
relationships, known as the Milankovitch Effect and the relationship
between sunspots and temperature hypothesized by the Svensmark Cosmic
Theory. The latter shows a relationship between changes in solar
magnetism evidenced by sunspots. As the magnetism varies it determines
the amount of galactic cosmic radiation reaching the Earth, which
creates low cloud. As low cloud varies albedo varies.
The
Earthshine project of the California Institute of Technology that
produced Figure 3 concluded in 2004. "Earth's average albedo is not
constant from one year to the next; it also changes over decadal
timescales. The computer models currently used to study the climate
system do not show such large decadal-scale variability of the albedo."
Sadly, there are many factors affecting climate change that the IPCC
ignore or underplay to achieve the political result that human CO2 is
the sole cause.
They only acknowledge "cloud albedo effect"
(Figure 4), but correctly admit their level of scientific understanding
(LOSU) is low. It is low or medium low for seven of nine items. Low
means 2 out of 10 confidence level, medium - low is less than 4 out of
10. They incorrectly claim a high LOSU for CO2, or 8 out of 10, but that
is politically necessary.
So they ignore many variables and
admit they know little about the ones they study. It is a total
abrogation of scientific and social responsibility to let these results
form the basis for draconian and destructive energy and environmental
policies. They shouldn't have won a Nobel Peace Prize. They couldn't
have won a Science Prize.
One
of the claims that the renewable energy groups continue to make, as
their tax credits approach the chopping block, is that the U.S. is still
unfairly subsidizing fossil-fuel energy sources. This is being used to
justify the extension of the renewable energy tax credits, as renewable
sources cannot compete on price with oil. (Of course, to a large extent
they don't need to compete on price because their use is mandated by
law.)
See here, and here.
A few things:
(1) Many of
the groups arguing against the ethanol tax cuts are also in favor of
eliminating tax subsidies to oil companies. (Two wrongs don't make a
right)
(2) Both blogs disingenuously references studies that have
calculated global fossil fuel subsidies, presumably so they can drop
the large $500 billion number. This number is useless - the U.S. doesn't
control foreign energy tax policy, and using foreign tax policies as a
justification for further subsidizing domestic renewable energy is
dubious.
(3) The ethanol industry ignores the fact that the world
receives a miniscule amount of energy from renewable sources compared
to fossil fuels. If the subsidy amounts were equal, the renewable
industry would come out far ahead on subsidies per unit of energy basis.
Furthermore,
some of the tax expenditures received by oil companies exist to prevent
double taxation. If these weren't in place, these companies would be
paying taxes twice, on income earned abroad taxed by the U.S.
government. It is also worth noting that these dual capacity tax credits
are general tax provisions that do not apply to just the fossil fuel
industry - repealing these laws would put the U.S. at a competitive
disadvantage. (Note: I have seen this claim disputed by certain groups,
insisting that these oil companies are not paying income tax abroad, see
here. The specific amount of subsidies the oil industry receives isn't
really important to the point I'm making.)
The renewable fuel
industry doesn't benefit from many of these because biofuel production
facilities are located in the United States (which the biofuel industry
doesn't hesitate to remind us).
According to a report by the
National Taxpayers Union, future subsidies for renewable energy sources
will be much larger than subsidies received by the oil and gas industry.
This (I believe this assumes that most tax credits will remain in
place) is because of mandated usage of biofuels is expected to increase.
The
numbers above, from a report compiled by the Joint Tax Committee,
calculate an average of $12.5 billion in subsidies for the renewable
industry, and $0.9 billion for oil and gas. Even if the amounts are much
closer, the renewable industry comes out way ahead on a per unit basis.
Bigmouth Warmist crumbles when he had to put up or shut up
by Ann McElhinney
Last
March James Cameron sounded defiant. The Avatar director was
determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was
important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the
radical "solutions" being proposed.
Cameron said was itching to
debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they
were wrong. “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high
noon and shoot it out with those boneheads," he said in an interview.
Well,
a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word. His
representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc
Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media
entrepreneur.
Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental
conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to
end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two
scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on
the internet.
They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media
coverage. "We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington
Times and anyone else you'd like. The more the better," one of James
Cameron's organizers said in an email.
It looked like James
Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the
skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.
Everyone on our
side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the
AREDAY agenda. But then as the debate approached James Cameron's side
started changing the rules.
They wanted to change their team. We
agreed. They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to "a
roundtable". We agreed. Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the
debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed. Bizarrely,
for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that
no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We
agreed
Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that
he "wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and
shoot it out," decided to ban the media from the shoot out. He even
wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to
those who attended the conference. No media would be allowed and there
would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to
record it in any way. We all agreed to that.
And then,
yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an
email that Mr. "shoot it out " Cameron no longer wanted to take part.
The debate was cancelled.
James Cameron's behavior raises some
very important questions. Does he genuinely believe in man made climate
change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be
debating the issue every chance he gets ?
Or is it just a pose?
The man who called for an open and public debate at "high noon" suddenly
doesn't want his policies open to serious scrutiny.
I was
looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward
to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward
that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed
world.
But that is not going to happen because somewhere along
the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the
World to being King of the Hypocrites.
Greenie hatreds bubble over -- open minds conspicuously absent
After
the prearranged debate at the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day was
cancelled, Marc Morano was at least given time to have his say in the
form of a talk. Below is his report of the occasion
My
presentation at Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit on
Sunday August 22, 2010 at 5:30 was met by a rude moderator and hostile
audience. I was offered the 90 minute time slot to present the skeptical
view of man-made climate change after Hollywood director James
Cameron's cowardly final cancellation of a pre-planned and agreed to
global warming debate.
My PowerPoint presentation was repeatedly
interrupted by ARDAY moderator Richard Greene and the audience was not
receptive to me continuing my presentation. Instead, the bulk of my
presentation turned into a disjointed moderator and audience rant
session. I attempted several times to return to my presentation, but the
crowd and moderator refused to cooperate and seemed completely
uninterested.
One participant confused carbon dioxide with carbon
monoxide. She suggested I kill himself by driving my car into my garage
and then close the doors with the engine running. I twice attempted to
explain to the ARDAY conference participant that there was a difference
between carbon dioxide -- a harmless trace essential gas we exhale from
our mouth-- and toxic carbon monoxide, but to no avail. I sadly shook my
head and told the audience: "Wow, what a warm welcome I have gotten
here."
In the end, the ARDAY's offer of 90 minutes for me to
present the skeptical view of man-made global warming after Cameron's
debate cancellation revealed itself to be essentially disingenuous.
Has the Mainstream Media Trusted Enviro-activists for Advice on Listening to Skeptic Scientists?
A chronology of the smear campaign against AGW opponents
by Russell Cook
Anthropogenic
Global Warming (AGW) is a concept supported by only two legs, a
so-called consensus of climate scientists claiming it is proven, and the
idea that skeptic scientists aren't worth listening to. Almost any
internet article or blog written by an AGW believer boils down to that.
Skeptic scientists, and those citing their research, are yanking out the
first leg. Few focus on the other leg, except perhaps to note the bias
given by the mainstream media to the AGW side. This is understandable, I
also overlooked the accusation about big coal & oil corrupting
skeptic scientists.
We know skeptic scientists did their
research, and were later paid speaking fees by coal & oil companies
because the companies agreed with them. How simple is that to
understand? However, skeptics let this unrelenting accusation go
unquestioned for far too long. What we fail to see is the sheer extent
of AGW believers repeating the opposite: anti-AGW science reports and
opinions are all fabricated under the direction of coal & oil
companies.
Last November, I inadvertently to stopped my usual
routine of comparing skeptic vs AGW viewpoints, to look directly into
the accusation. What I discovered caused me to write two American
Thinker articles and a few blogs there and elsewhere about the
accusation's huge problems. A person reading my most recent blog pointed
out how hard it was to follow, though.
Indeed, the explanation
of this is greatly offset by the simplicity of the campaign behind the
accusation. Its narrative has been so effectively pounded into
practically every AGW believer that it can be regurgitated by the
dumbest of believers in three points:
1. a scientific consensus says the debate is settled; Fact, end of story.
2.
skeptic scientists corrupted by big coal & oil industries seek to
'reposition' the public into believing AGW is not a fact.
3.
journalists don't have to give equal weight to skeptic scientists
because of the previous two points; they're corrupt, and few in number.
That's
it. You are not to question it, and the word "reposition" is the
central-most part of it. But, when I did an internet search of the
oft-repeated complete phrase, "reposition global warming as theory
rather than fact", I didn't find simple explanations, I found unanswered
contradictions....
This not the end by any means. Every time I
dig into a name association or a new quote of the "reposition" phrase,
it leads down more paths that prompt questions, not answers.
Professional unbiased journalists need to start finding answers, while
also asking the tougher "what did you know and when did you know it"
questions. If they prove the skeptic scientists aren't corrupt and
should have been listened to, then just how big of a problem do we have
with the IPCC, various national academies of science, the mainstream
media and any others who said it was imperative that we solve global
warming?
The
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has just put online a
review paper (peer reviewed) by Laurens Bouwer, of the Institute for
Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, titled, "Have
disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?".
Readers of this blog already know the answer to this question, and here is Bouwers' conclusion:
"The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that
economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as
storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such
as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The
studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in
population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to
anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it can be concluded that
anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on
losses from natural disasters."
Bouwers rightly acknowledges that
there are uncertainties in such studies, and in particular, there will
be a need to refine efforts to evaluate changing vulnerability and
exposure in future such work, especially as the signal of greenhouse gas
driven climate change is expected to become larger. However, such
uncertainties are not presently so large as to undercut Bouwers'
conclusion, e.g.:
"A rigorous check on the potential
introduction of bias from a failure to consider vulnerability reduction
in normalization methods is to compare trends in geophysical variables
with those in the normalized data. Normalized hurricane losses for
instance match with variability in hurricane landfalls (Pielke et al.
2008). If vulnerability reduction would have resulted in a bias, it
would show itself as a divergence between the geophysical and normalized
loss data. In this case, the effects of vulnerability reduction
apparently are not so large as to introduce a bias."
Russian heat wave due to dramatic changes in solar activity
Interview with forecaster Piers Corbyn
This
year Russia was hit by a record-breaking heat wave that led to
wildfires which killed dozens and left thousands homeless. Weather
forecaster Piers Corbyn says this is a result of weather cycles, not
global warming.
“What we have is a tremendous amount of activity
on the sun and that affects the rush of particles from the sun to the
earth and that changes the ionosphere and that also changes the
circulation patterns of the globe in what is known as the jet stream,”
Corbyn explained. “And that caused a shifting of the weather patterns so
the south wind in Western Russia terminated and instead we got a
northwestern flow of thunderstorms and cooling.”
See below for the 12 min interview (inc. comments about SatelliteGate)
The
article below was written by a Greenie so he sees a conspiracy where
there are only outraged fishermen who resent being locked out of places
where they have been accustomed to fish
In case it passed you
by in the recent, just cleared, political blizzard, there's been a
shift in our domestic environmental battlefronts, to the sea. After
decades as an election cutting point, forests were absent on Saturday.
Instead the resource versus protection barney moved to Australia's
marine domain. This contest has far to go.
In the past year, a
politically sharp, well-funded recreational fisheries lobby has emerged
for the first time to take on, and beat, scientists and
environmentalists.
It snapped up support from both major parties,
and by the campaign's climax had put marine protection on the radar of
many politicians whose closest previous dealings with a fish were on a
plate.
At the extremes of this argument, some fishers reject any
blame for overfishing, while animal activists are opposing cruelty to
sentient creatures. But the main game focuses on a national set of
marine reserves that until now had bipartisan, if tediously slow,
support.
Australia's ocean domain is, at 19 million square
kilometres, more than twice as large as its landmass. Our seas range
from tropical reefs loved by tourists to frigid deeps.
When
Liberal environment minister Robert Hill released the National Oceans
Policy in 1998, it claimed to make Australia "the first country in the
world to deliver a comprehensive national plan to protect and manage the
oceans".
The initial template covering south-eastern waters from
Bermagui on the New South Wales south coast, around Victoria and
Tasmania to South Australia was finalised years late in 2007. About 7
per cent of this two-million-square-kilometre region is closed to
fishing.
Along the rest of the coast other "bioregions" are being
studied, but so far the grand total of marine protected areas (not
necessarily fisheries exclusion zones) is 765,000 square kilometres,
including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
States also set up
their own marine protection. In NSW, 34 per cent of waters is in
"parks", and 6.7 per cent in no-fishing sanctuaries, according to a 2009
count by the Australian Marine Conservation Society. In Victoria, 9 per
cent of coasts is in parks and 5 per cent in sanctuaries.
Sound
reasonable? Not to recreational fishers alarmed by the "no take"
concept. The first sign that this lobby was mounting a serious effort
came last summer, over mako sharks.
A ban on fishing for these
internationally depleted fish fulfilled Australia's obligation under the
Convention on Migratory Species. It's reversal by Environment Minister
Peter Garrett met electoral imperatives.
Evidence that the debate
was polarising came when shadow fisheries minister Richard Colbeck
began to rail against the influence of "extreme" environment groups,
such as the Pew Foundation.
Come the election campaign, the
Australian Fishing Trade Association also popped up with a boatload of
funding, warning fishing voters their children's right to hold a rod was
under threat. "Fishing may never be the same again if the Greens or
Labor get into power!" said their full-page advertisements.
AFTA
is composed of recreational fishing trade suppliers who claim to be at
the heart of a $1 billion industry. Executive director Doug Joyner said
they had up to $450,000 to spend on countering the "Green grab" for 30
per cent plus of the seas.
The Greens do indeed argue for 30 per
cent of the seas to go into no-take zones, claiming this is the best
insurance policy for fishing in a future where over-fished stocks also
face threats from climate change.
The Australian Marine Science
Association has much lower ambitions, calling for effective protection
of at least 10 per cent in no-take zones. Labor rejected arbitrary
targets in the campaign, and pointed out that Commonwealth reserves
began five kilometres offshore, beyond the reach of the average shore
fisher.
But Liberal leader Tony Abbott immediately grasped the
political value of a fishing rod, and now wants to shelve all marine
reserve plans. Last week in Narooma on the NSW south coast he said: "I
think that it's very important that we immediately suspend this marine
protected area process. The fact is that it is needlessly threatening
not just the livelihoods of people who live off the sea but it's
immediately threatening the entire economy of the south coast."
Whether
Labor survives in government or the Coalition prevails, clearly the
setting has changed. "I fish and I vote" has become more than a car
sticker. Expect to see more of the fishers, and their opponents, from
now on.
Where I
live in sub-tropical Brisbane, Australia, we are have our winters in
July and August. And our winters are "aspirational". We have bright
sunny days with blue skies, a few white clouds and midday temperatures
that often need no warm clothes at all.
But winters are also
generally dry. Brisbane gets a lot of light falls of rain throughout
the year which keep the place green regardless of restrictions on
watering our gardens -- restrictions made necessary by Greenie
opposition to dam-building.
So our greenery does tend to wilt and
brown up to some extent during winter. But this August has been very
good. We have had several falls of significant August rain and it is
raining as I write this. So everything has remained green during
winter. If I were religious, I would say that the Good Lord has taken
matters in hand.
23 August, 2010
Canadian Greens may push to decriminalize polygamy
The
Australian Green Party has a great array of policies that go well beyond
the environment -- usually in a far-Left direction. It would seem
that the Canadian Greens are similar. These are people who viscerally
hate the society they live in and will do anything they can to tear it
down.
They are not even lovers of trees. Their opposition to
plastic bags and polystyrene leads to lots of trees being cut down --
to provide paper and cardboard substitutes
The Green Party of
Canada will consider a motion Sunday on whether or not they will push
to decriminalize polygamy. Party members in a workshop on Saturday
evening voted to send the motion to the full-Party plenary, where
they'll debate and vote on it.
Speakers in the workshop were
careful to define polygamy as a marriage between multiple spouses. They
made a clear distinction between polygamy between consenting adults and a
polygamist sect in Bountiful, B.C., where domestic abuse has been
alleged, though charges were thrown out in 2009. "It's a human rights
issue," said Trey Capnerhurst, a Green Party candidate in Edmonton East,
noting that she is a poly-advocate.
Polyamory is the process of
having more than one intimate relationship at the same time, according
to the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association.
Capnerhurst says
in cases where police suspect domestic abuse against multiple wives and
children, that should be the subject of criminal charges. "We should be
not be charging people with polygamy," she said.
Several Green
members in the workshop argued the policy is impossible to sell to
voters and could mean losing support at a time when they hit record
numbers in the last election.
Those who spoke in favour said the
party should treat it as a human rights issue, just as they did with
same-sex marriage rights.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May says
the party is open and democratic, allowing any motion with enough
support to be discussed. "It certainly isn't a motion I voted for," she
said. "It's something I continue to oppose." A spokeswoman for May
says she doesn't expect the motion to pass the full party plenary on
Sunday.
Capnerhurst says there's a bias against those in
polyamorous relationships, of which she estimates number in the tens of
thousands in Canada. She compared it to the status of same-sex marriage
rights a decade ago, and says being in a polyamorous relationship is
sometimes used as a reason to deny child custody to parents in divorce
cases. She also pointed to hospital rules that don't allow more than
one spouse to visit patients.
A group of 20 families in B.C. are
challenging the law at the province's supreme court. The maximum penalty
for polygamy is five years in jail, but it hasn't been prosecuted in 60
years, according to media reports.
How odd that we hear much more about Russia's summer than this!
It continues to be the summer that never came for many of the coastal areas of California.
AccuWeather.com
Meteorologist Bernie Rayno said that the closer you get to the ocean,
the more likely you are to see below-average temperatures for much of
Southern California. Rayno said an excellent example of this phenomena
is Santa Ana, Calif. Less than 20 miles from the beach, Santa Ana
typically sees high temperatures of about 84 degrees in the month of
August. So far this month, Santa Ana has only had two days crack the
80-degree mark: Aug. 3 and Aug. 17.
Overall, the average overall
temperature for Santa Ana is typically in the mid 70s in August. So far
this month, temperatures have been almost 4 degrees below that average.
The
trend of cooler-than-normal temperatures continues in downtown Los
Angeles. Here the average daily temperatures typically hit 75 or 76 F.
So far this August, the average temperature has been about 4 degrees
lower.
Highs for Los Angeles in August can typically be found in
the mid-80s. Only about half of the high temperatures recorded so far
this month have climbed into the 80s.
The reports from Los
Angeles International Airport (LAX) show an even more significant
departure from the norm in terms of temperature this month. The average
temperatures recorded at LAX in August are usually in the low-70s.
However, the average temperature this month has been almost 6.5 degrees
cooler. Only five days this month have been 70 degrees or hotter.
Huge Snowfalls in the Swiss Alps, Argentina & New Zealand
Switzerland's
two open glacier ski areas have seen remarkable August snowfalls with
Saas Fee reporting 45cm of new snow on Sunday, with more falling since,
including another 5cm yesterday. Neighbouring Zermatt, the only area
open 365 days and home to Europe's highest lifts, reported healthy
snowfalls too. Saas Fee describes current conditions as "packed powder"
and has a 1.6m base with Terrain Park and half pipe open. Both resorts
set off Powder Alarms on Skiinfo.com, triggered for snowfall of 20cm or
more, obviously a rare event in August. Zermatt triggered another powder
alarm on Tuesday with another 28cm of snow reported.
The heavy
snowfall spilled over in to Italy where Zermatt's Italian neighbour,
Cervinia, received a 20cm fall. Val Senales has also been receiving more
snow, with another 5cm on Tuesday, the latest of about 10 days of
regular snowfalls there. It currently has a one metre base with Passo
Stelvio also open.
In France, the glacier ski areas at Tignes and
Les 2 Alpes are both entering their last fortnight of summer
operations. Les 2 Alpes has the better snow cover with a metre depth
while Tignes has 30cm. Both areas received a little new snow at the
weekend.
The snow has been falling in South America, where
temperatures are generally a few degrees below zero at most ski areas.
The continent's largest ski area (in terms of uplift) Catedral in
Argentina has received 30cm of new snow on its upper runs in the past 12
hours and now has a 1.6m base. Las Lenas has had 7cm of new snow too
while Chapelco's base is up to 1.2m following fresh snow there.
Over
in Chile, Portillo has receive 13cm of new snow in the past week but
base depths remain lower than normal at around a metre on upper slopes
with packed powder and 67cm at the base. Valle Nevado, part of the
largest ski area in the continent in terms of terrain area, has an
average 50cm base from a 3.7m snow fall so far this season. Chapa Verde
has a similar base depth.
Conditions are mostly good at
Australia's resorts where snow has continued to fall over the past week
with more predicted in coming days. Mt Hotham reports average snow depth
is 89cm but is a foot deeper where there's snow making. The resort has
received 42cm of snow in the past week, 8cm of it in the last 48 hours.
The numbers are similar at Thredbo, which has had 38cm of new snow in
the past week. Falls Creek currently has a 77cm base of natural snow and
all but one lift operating with snow depth up to 177cm in snowmaking
areas.
In New Zealand there has been an exciting week of weather.
Mt Hutt saw over 1000 guests stranded overnight last Thursday/Friday by
200kph winds but in the past 24 hours has received 19cm of new snow
taking upper slope depths up to two metres. At Coronet Peak the figures
are a little less impressive with 5cm of snow at the weekend taking
depths to 1.1m where as the Remarkables got 10cm yesterday and has a
similar base depth.
CO2 blamed for both rain and lack of rain in Pakistan
Another
panel member, Christine Todd Whitman, said the cataclysmic flooding
besieging Pakistan demonstrates the connection between climate change
and U.S. national security. While scientists are generally loathe to tie
a specific weather event to climate change, it's different with the
catastrophe in Pakistan. Extended drought made it difficult for the
hardened soil to absorb rain. And the deluge came in epic proportion.
"On
this one they're almost all coming together saying, `This is what we're
talking about,'" said Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under
President George W. Bush. She resigned in 2003 and later acknowledged
difficulty with some administration policies.
The flooding
threatens to further destabilize the country and make it ripe for the
terrorist groups the United States are fighting.
According
to experts, it would appear that the average size of plants tends to
decrease in recent years, when compared to the mean sizes they had in
past decades. The researchers believe that this effect may be attributed
to global warming.
TREES
and plants are growing bigger and faster in response to the billions of
tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans,
scientists have found.
Early
in 2010, all signs pointed toward a warmer summer in the middle
Mississippi region [1], and this would be related to the weakening El
Nino [2],[3]. The forecast, however, did not go far enough because we
did not anticipate how quickly La Nina conditions would take hold [4].
When asked about the possibility of a warm summer, I reminded people
that the last few summers have been relatively cool, so even a normal
summer may seem warm.
As the summer moves into late August, I
have heard many in the media and in the local general public wonder
aloud about this summer being the consequences of anthropogenic global
warming, and that this summer has been the hottest in recent decades
[5]. Putting this summer into context locally* would demonstrate that
while it is the hottest summer of the decade, and the warmest since
1980, it is only the 11th warmest overall in 120 years. Of the ten
warmest summers nine of them occurred before 1960. Summers as of late
have been cooler in our region.
While the years 2005-2007 were
warmer than normal, these summers did not rank in among the top 20 for
our region. This current summer follows a stretch of summers that have
been cooler overall as four of the last eight have been below normal,
some of these by quite a bit. The summer of 2004 and 2009 ranked as the
3rd and 9th coolest overall in our region, respectively.
Adding
to the woes of this summer locally have been the relatively high dew
points brought on by excessive precipitation in our region in the early
part of the summer. Additionally, it has not been the maximum
temperatures that have been the problem (we have failed to reach 100
degrees for the third consecutive year), it has been the consistently
high minimum temperatures. While it is too early to tell what has
happened nationwide, my guess is the story is much the same in other
regions as well....
Is this really the hottest summer globally?
While some have reported that it is [8], an examination of the global
weather as a whole would suggest it is not [9]. Lost in much of the
noise has been the fact that in the Southern Hemisphere, especially
South America, conditions have been much colder during their winter with
unprecedented snows in many areas not used to them. There is also some
speculation that this summer's global warmth has been exaggerated by
those with an agenda.
So, while this summer has seemed to be
miserable compared to the last few, it has been much worse in the past,
is due to natural phenomenon (not anthropogenic climate change), and
thankfully the heat should be winding down as August wears on and
September comes in. Additionally, it is hoped that the Russian heat wave
will draw more attention to the weather phenomenon of blocking that is
difficult to forecast [6], [7] but largely overlooked.
Shock: Climate Depot takes skeptics' message to major Warmist summit!
Granted 90 min. to present global warming alternative view
Climate
Depot's Marc Morano will be a featured speaker at the Aspen American
Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit on Sunday August 22, 2010 at 5:30 -
7pm MDT.
In the interests of fostering greater understanding of
the skeptics' position and to foster meaningful dialogue, Morano will
speak for 60 minutes and then take questions from environmentalists from
around the country. The green summit in Aspen has featured T. Boone
Pickens, Ted Turner, James Cameron and Thomas Friedman.
Morano
was a senior aide to Senator James Inhofe and Climate Researcher for
Senate Environment & Public Works Committee. Morano is currently
Executive Editor, For "Climate Depot", a website dedicated to exposing
the "manufactured 'Climate Con'". Newsweek magazine dubbed Morano the
“King of the skeptics!” and Rolling Stone declared him number 6 on the
list of 17 “climate killers.”
When and Where:
5:30 pm to
7pm MDT on Sunday, August 22, at Paepcke Auditorium on the Aspen Meadows
campus of The Aspen Institute. Free and open to the media and public.
What do Warmists actually believe? A list with many absurdities
An email below from John Droz, Jr., [aaprjohn@northnet.org] physicist & environmental advocate. Droz welcomes comments
I have dialogued with many pro-AGW parties, and have tried to ferret
out their underlying (often unstated) assumptions. Below is my current
list. AGW proponents have the following stated or embedded beliefs:
1) We currently have the ability to measure and report on an average annual global temperature to .01 degree Celsius
2)
We have the ability to empirically calculate the average annual global
temperature, with this same degree of accuracy, over the last few
thousand years
3) Based on the data from #1 & #2, the earth has recently (100± years) been warming
4) Based on historical records (#2), the earth is warming to an unusually high degree
5) This increase (in the last 100 years) has been .74± degrees Celsius
6) Assuming business as usual, this warming will continue (or increase) for the foreseeable future
7) This warming will soon have profound negative environmental and economic consequences to all of the earth’s inhabitants
8) The mechanics of the earth’s recent warming are essentially entirely explained by the Greenhouse Gas theory
9) CO2 increases is the primary greenhouse gas driver that explains earth’s recent warming
10) That 350 PPM of CO2 is a critical concentration that we should not exceed
11) Other greenhouse gasses (e.g. water vapor) are discounted as consequential causes of recent warming
12) Most CO2 increases are man-made
13) The fact that we don’t understand a significant amount about CO2 sinks has been deemed to be irrelevant.
14) The solution of restricting man-made CO2 has passed an objective cost-benefits analysis
15) That proprietary computer models produce results equivalent to empirical testing
BBC puffery about Pachauri punctured by ECU Ruling
The
ECU is the BBC's internal complaints unit. I have yet to find out what
the abbreviation ECU stands for. CU obviously stands for "complaints
unit" but what does the E stand for? Surely not "external"!
Complaint
In
a report on calls for Dr Rajendra Pachauri to resign as Head of the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the
BBC's Environment Correspondent referred to him as "the UN's top climate
scientist". A viewer complained that this was inaccurate and
misleading, as Dr Pachauri's scientific qualifications and credentials
were in a field unrelated to climate science.
Outcome
Although
the phrase was intended as journalistic shorthand for the occupant of
the most prominent international post connected with climate science,
the implication that he was himself a climate scientist was materially
misleading in the context of this report.
Upheld
Further action
The Editor of BBC News at 10 is reiterating to his team the importance of accuracy in the introduction of our contributors.
Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?
By
Denis G. Rancourt (Rancourt is a bit of a loose cannon in some ways --
he calls himself an anarchist -- but he is an accomplished physicist
and knows what he is talking about below)
After all, the
Earth is a planet. Is even the presence of humans significant on the
rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
We certainly make
every effort to see ourselves as significant on this spinning ball in
space. We like to point out that the lights from our cities can be seen
from our extra-atmospheric “spaceships” at night and that we have
deforested continents and reduced the populations of large wild mammals
and of fishes but is all this really significant in the planetary web
known as the biosphere?
INSIGNIFICANCE OF FOSSIL FUEL BURNING ENERGY RELEASE
The
present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans)
fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP)
(both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the
rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole
planet. And of course all biomass can in principle be considered fuel
that could be burned with oxygen (O2) to produce CO2 gas, H2O water,
energy, and an ash residue.
This shows the extent to which
anthropogenic energy production from fossil fuel burning is small in
comparison to the sun’s energy delivery to Earth, since biomass primary
production results from the sun’s energy via photosynthesis.
The
sun’s rate of raw energy delivery to the planet is, in turn, much
greater (more than one thousand times greater) than the energy captured
by GPP because most of the sun’s light energy is not used for
photosynthesis but instead is either sent directly back out into space
or produces fluid convection, wind, rain, water currents, erosion, etc.,
and because photosynthesis itself, even for the light directly striking
a plant’s photoactive surface, is highly inefficient (less than 2% of
incident light energy is converted to biomass chemical bond energy).
So, on the global scale of things fossil fuel burning energy release is miniscule (8% of 0.07% = 0.006%).
Given
all the fuss that is made about the present rate of fossil fuel burning
(2010; 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y where 10^13 = 10,000,000,000,000 with
thirteen zeros), it is important to keep in mind that this represents an
amount of CO2 release comparable to or somewhat less than the CO2
released by simple breathing from humankind and its domestic animals.
The combined biomass of humankind and its domestic animals (cattle,
sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, pets, etc.) is in turn estimated to be
only 0.04% of Earth’s living biomass (all expressed as kilograms of
carbon, kg-C), which is a lot more CO2-producing breathing. (Ants, for
example, are estimated to represent ten to one hundred times the biomass
of humankind and ants can be argued to have “transformed” the planet
and its ecology far more than humans.)
The
corporate-finance-military-empire interest in fossil fuel is that it is
concentrated, extractable and compositionally homogeneous enough to be
amenable to industrial processing, that its demand can be created and
its supply controlled, and that new and existing alternative
transportation technologies or strategies can be sabotaged and are not
presently competitive on the geopolitical military battlefront (although
hydrogen-based fuels are presently used for rocket propulsion).
INSIGNIFICANCE OF FOSSIL FUEL AS A CARBON POOL
The
total pool of fossil fuel carbon itself, which has been burned to date
(2010), is not large compared to organic and non-mineral carbon on the
planet. It is 3.7 x 10^14 kg-C.
By comparison, the present total
mass of CO2 as carbon in the atmosphere is 8.6 x 10^14 kg-C where CO2 is
a trace gas with present concentration 390 ppmv (parts per million by
volume) and where the atmosphere is the smallest global reservoir of
carbon on the planet.
Even as Earth’s atmosphere goes the present
concentration of CO2 is historically low compared to biomass highly
productive periods during which CO2 concentrations where as high as 20
times the present level. Past bio-productive periods are part of the
reason we have fossil fuels today.
The present low concentration
of CO2 is growth limiting for plants under conditions where other
essential nutrients do not first limit growth. Indeed, experiments have
shown that today’s plants grow up to 50% faster than under present
conditions when the CO2 concentration of the ambient atmosphere is 1000
ppmv, all other factors remaining the same and non-growth limiting.
Beyond
the atmospheric carbon reservoir, the present planetary biomass alone
(1 x 10^15 kg-C) is approximately three times the amount of total
post-industrialization fossil fuel burned to date where even this
biomass carbon is only carbon in living organisms.
In addition
there is at least 10 times more carbon contained in non-living organic
matter than in biomass – in organic detritus, soils, bogs, natural
waters, lake sediments, marine sediments, and so on. For example, from
my own research, the boreal forest (the largest ecosystem on Earth)
contains millions of lakes that have not even been counted. These
virtually unstudied lakes have accumulated organic-rich bottom sediments
(preserved by anoxia) that have not yet been included in global carbon
accounting studies.
Furthermore, there is approximately fifty times more dissolved carbon in ocean water than contained as CO2 in the atmosphere.
These
bio-available carbon pools (biomass, organic matter, atmosphere, ocean
water) do not include geological stores and sources from volcanoes and
active geothermal sites. Volcanic activity, in particular, is
unpredictable and has been highly variable in intensity since life burst
onto the planet (billions of year ago), with often dramatic impacts on
global ecology.
In summary, the total amount of post-industrial
fossil fuel burned to date (and expressed as kilograms of carbon)
represents less than 1% of the global bio-available carbon pools.
More
importantly, bio-available carbon is a minor constituent of the Earth’s
surface environment and one that is readily buffered and exchanged
between compartments without significant consequences to the diversity
and quantity of life on the planet. The known history of life on Earth
(over the last billions of years) is unambiguous on this point.
Left
progressive First-World elitist and disconnected policy consumers and
service intellectuals need to recalibrate their sense of self-importance
and correct the blindness that this sense produces.
Discussing:
Dawson, J.L. and Smithers, S.G. 2010. Shoreline and beach volume change
between 1967 and 2007 at Raine island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia.
Global and Planetary Change 72: 141-154.
Background
The
authors note that low-lying reef islands are widely perceived to be
particularly sensitive to ongoing and projected sea level increases; but
they add that "a number of geomorphologists have argued that rising sea
levels do not always cause reef islands to erode." For example, they
state that "a rise in sea level may promote reef island growth by: i)
increasing accommodation space for new sediment; ii) reinvigorating
carbonate production on reef flats where further reef growth has been
inhibited by a stable sea level; and iii) increasing the efficiency of
waves to transport new and stored sediment to an island depocentre
(Hopley, 1993; Hopley et al., 2007; Smithers et al., 2007; Woodroffe,
2007)."
What was done
Working on Raine Island (11°35'28"S,
144°02'17"E) at the northwest end of a planar reef on the outer edge of
Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- which is one of the world's most
important nesting sites for marine turtles -- Dawson and Smithers
employed three historic survey maps and five topographic survey datasets
of earlier researchers, supplementing them with digital elevation data
collected in 1998, 2006 and 2007, to reconstruct a 40-year (1967-2007)
shoreline history of the island.
What was learned
The two
Australian researchers report that their "detailed quantitative surveys
and analyses demonstrate that Raine Island increased in area (~6%) and
volume (~4%) between 1967 and 2007," and that "in the 40 years between
1967 and 2007 Raine Island underwent a net accretion of 68,400 ± 6,700
m3."
What it means
In summing up their findings, Dawson
and Smithers write that "contrary to perceptions, Raine Island did not
erode but instead modestly accreted during the 40-year study period,"
and they therefore conclude that "future management strategies of Raine
Island and other islands of the Great Barrier Reef should recognize that
perceptions of reef island erosion can arise from large short-term
seasonal and storm-derived sediment redistribution from one part of the
island to another or to a temporary storage on the adjacent reef flat,"
but that these phenomena do not necessarily lead to "a net permanent
loss from the island sediment budget."
And considering the
similar positive findings of Webb and Kench (2010), it can be concluded
that the most likely effect of a rising sea level is to actually add to
the area and volume of low-lying reef islands.
Media Use Crazy Weather to Hype Global Warming, Despite Admissions Weather Isn't Climate
From
Associated Press to national newspapers, coverage of floods, fires,
droughts, sinkholes make 'case' for global warming alarmism
Last
winter, as blizzard snowfalls piled up into several feet in the
nation’s capital, conservatives mocked global warming alarmists for
trying to link weather incidents to global warming. But as summer heat
waves, volcanoes and sinkholes have appeared recently, climate alarmists
proved they missed the point.
A top Obama administration
scientist attacked global warming skeptics during the winter by pointing
out that “weather is not the same thing as climate.” ABC’s Bill
Blakemore argued the same thing in order to defend the existence of
manmade global warming on Jan. 8, 2010.
But Associated Press, USA
Today, The New York Times and The Washington Post have all promoted a
connection between the extreme heat and weather around the world this
summer and global warming. One CNN host asked if the events were the
“apocalypse” or global warming. The Huffington Post proposed naming
hurricanes and other disasters after climate change “deniers.”
“Floods,
fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to
water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a
midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come,
scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under
way,” the AP wrote, sounding more like Al Gore than an objective news
agency.
AP cited the World Meteorological Organization, NASA and
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that
“extremes” were expected in a warming scenario. But its report didn’t
include any other viewpoints or propose other possible reasons for the
weather events. And it failed to point out the scandals connected to
IPCC, NASA and the warming movement as a whole.
The 2009
ClimateGate scandal and subsequent scandals undermined the very
credibility of the climate alarmist movement, but were underreported by
the network news media.
AP left out meteorologists who explained
some of those events based on jet stream activity. According to New
Scientist magazine, the jet stream is being blocked right now and has
consequently slowed down. Meteorologists say that the jet stream’s
slower movements are responsible for the deadly fires in Russia, the
floods in Pakistan and other rare weather events. “The unusual weather
in the US and Canada last month also has a similar case,” New Scientist
wrote.
Discover Magazine expounded on the New Scientist article
saying “this happens from time to time, and it sets the stage for
extreme conditions when weather systems hover over the same area.”
Despite
other explanations and viewpoints, The New York Times also linked
weather to climate saying, “the collective answer of the scientific
community [whether global warming is causing more weather extremes]” is
“probably.”
Like the Times, many news outlets promoted the
connection between warming and weather, but were careful to briefly note
that individual weather events cannot be proven to have been caused by
global warming. Out of the Times’ 1,302 word article, only 113 words
were used to offer a caveat saying it is difficult to link “specific
weather events” to climate change and to quote a NASA scientist who
admitted he hasn’t “proved it” yet.
Semantics aside, those
mainstream stories were nearly as biased in their coverage as blatantly
left-wing websites like the Huffington Post.
Huffington Post
argued that “global weirding” incidents such as landslides, sinkholes
and volcanoes are “consistent” with global warming.
The site
interviewed David Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics
at Oberlin College, who said, “you ask is this evidence of climate
destabilization, the only scientific answer you can give is: It is
consistent with what we can expect." The complete list of “weird” stuff
was heat waves, floods, landslides, wildfires, ice islands, sinkholes,
volcanoes, dead fish and oyster herpes.
Dead fish and oyster
herpes? Huffington Post said, “These are certainly stories to be filed
under weird: Although climate change can't necessarily be held
responsible, some scientists are suggesting it as the instigator of
strange ocean occurrences.”
The fact is that the alarmists and
the news media will find someone to support claims that just about
everything is correlated to man-made global warming. MSNBC host Dylan
Ratigan even claimed that Snowpocalypse (the nickname for the blizzard
activity on parts of the East Coast) was consistent with global warming.
Perhaps
under the strain of working at CNN, meteorologist Chad Myers actually
switched views since 2008, when he said “to think that we could affect
weather all that much is pretty arrogant.”
But on Aug. 10, Myers
said “Yes,” when asked if the weather phenomena were manmade. Myers,
however, offered this qualification: “Is it 100 percent caused by man?
No. There are other things involved. We are now in the sunspot cycle. We
are now in a very hot sun cycle. We are, we are – many other things
going on …”
CNN host Fareed Zakaria also used the crazy weather
to promote legislative action on emissions – pushing Cato Institute’s
senior fellow Pat Michaels to accept the idea of a carbon tax.
After
another guest warned of devastation if we fail to act on the issue of
global warming, Zakaria turned to Michaels and said: “You hear all this.
Doesn’t it worry you? I mean, I understand your position, which is, you
know, we don’t have a substitute for fossil fuels right now. But surely
that isn’t an argument for stand pattism?”
MICHAELS: What I
worry about more is the concept of opportunity cost. We had legislation,
again, that went through the House last summer which would have cost a
lot and been futile. And when you, when you take that away, or when the
government favors certain technologies and politicizes technologies,
you're doing worse than nothing. You're actually impairing your ability
to respond in the long run, and that's my major concern along this
issue.
Rep. Steve King Unloads On Climate Change Scientists during Iowa town halls
Indignant report from a Leftiust site below
King
began by contending that the 97% of scientists who support the evidence
behind manmade climate change are “frauds.” He then proceeded to call
the notion of manmade climate change “not rational” but “a religion”
like “the modern version of the rain dance”:
KING: Every
civilization, according to this Professor Brown, has not only always
paid attention to the weather. Every civilization has tried to affect
and change the weather. So whether it’s the Chinese seeding clouds,
whether it’s some of the industrialized nations in the world trying to
get together for cap-and-trade to try to reduce the CO2 emissions. You
know, this might be the modern version of the rain dance.[...] It’s not
rational, it’s a religion that we’re up against. I mean that from the
broadest sense of the word. It’s something you can’t necessarily prove.
King
later admitted that he doesn’t just disagree with taking steps to
combat climate change, but he fundamentally opposes climate change
science. King recoils at the fact that most GOP leaders agree with the
science, arguing instead that “you don’t ever give up a premise unless
you happen to believe that they’re right. And we should not concede the
science of this.” He proceeded to put his minimal scientific
understanding on full display, agreeing with a constituent who was
“amazed” that people faulted carbon dioxide when it’s the main
ingredient plants use to produce oxygen:
KING: They have not
made that scientific case. I have always argued against the science.
Some of our leadership have said “don’t argue the science.” They get
pollsters in and coach us. I’m not very coachable…(laughing)…But I’ve
said “you don’t ever give up a premise unless you happen to believe that
they’re right.” And we should not concede the science of this. And they
say, “you should just argue the economics, not the science.” Well, no.
They were wrong on the science[...]
CONSTITUENT: Do you
realize that carbon dioxide is the main ingredient plants use with
sunshine to make oxygen and sugars for us to eat and for animals. What’s
the matter with carbon dioxide? It’s amazing to me the way some of
these people think.
KING: I agree with you. There have been
many times in the history of the planet that we’ve had higher
concentrations of CO2 than we have here today. There are a couple of
German engineers that took that theory apart and proved it wrong in a
lab. I’ve read through that, but I’d have to go back to school for a
half a year or a year to tell you I followed every bit of their
rationale. But the presumption of the Greenhouse Effect is at least,
from what I saw, was pretty convincingly rebutted.
However,
instead of using science to predict and fight climate change, King
advised instead that we turn instead to the Bible. Given that rising sea
levels are threatening to swallow up entire nations, that may not be
such bad advice:
CONSTITUENT: It’s got nothing to do with
carbon dioxide. It’s got to do with socialization [sic]. Just like their
tax on energy. That’s got nothing to do with our benefit. Where’s this
tax go to that they’re wanting to spend for their supposedly bad things
we got ahold of? Where does it go to? And who’s blamed?
KING:
I think you make an important point. I know that there is a good number
of them that believe that the science says that the earth is getting
warmer and we can control it. Some of them really believe it. Control is
a big part of it. I finally found a book that I’d been looking for –
one to help me figure out what’s going on – and the answers are in the
Bible.
An Independent review of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by John McLean. McLean is an
IT specialist with a particular interest in analysing climate data
SUMMARY FOR POLICY MAKERS
The
IPCC is a disgrace to science. In its desire to fit the square peg of
science into the round hole of politics it has abandoned the "scientific
method" and replaced it with a desperate search for data and other
material that might support a specific hypothesis.
Its reports
are not an honest assessment of climate because they omit, dismiss or
distort research findings that do not conform to a certain belief, and
if those reports are supposed to focus only on any possible human
influence on climate then why are they even mentioning other forces and
where is the corresponding organization that will report on those
forces?
The IPCC was established on the basis of alarmist claims
that were given a political dimension by organizations that, if they
had any integrity, would have demanded better evidence than the output
of primitive climate models (Chapter 1).
The IPCC's key product,
the various Assessment Reports, are the personal opinions from a cadre
of selected authors and contrary to marketing spin, each passage of text
is the consensus of a mere handful of people many of whom quote their
own papers or selectively omit information that does not support their
bias. In one instance supporting material was not available so IPCC
authors, accompanied by a few others, wrote a paper that the IPCC report
could cite even though the paper had merely been submitted to a journal
rather than published (Chapter 2).
The peer-review system used
by the IPCC is a travesty because it is nothing like the review prior to
publishing scientific papers but only a means of soliciting further
supporting information. Of course any suggestions that wider material be
included are rejected, even if it means citing an IPCC's author's
unpublished paper to do so (Chapter 3).
The IPCC omits and
distorts information to suit its agenda. We are not told, for example,
that it seems likely that the Earth is currently cool compared to mean
temperature of the last 10,000 years and that the 650-year cold spell
ending around 1850, which is when the IPCC's temperature data commences,
was likely the longest sustained cold spell in 10 millennia.
The
IPCC hides, in a throwaway line, buried deep in a long paragraph, the
critical fact that amount of warming caused by increasing levels of
carbon dioxide is logarithmic (i.e. will decrease as per unit of carbon
dioxide increase).
In the IPCC's latest report the discussion of
the European heatwave of 2003 is a joke because chapter 3 provides a
clear meteorological explanation but chapter 9 claims, on the basis of
modelling by one of its authors, that human activity made the heatwave
worse, and later the IPCC cites this modelling as if it was both
accurate and credible when it is neither (Chapter 4).
The
temperature data cited by the IPCC is derived from thermometer readings
just above the Earth's surface or just below the surface of the oceans.
The data is so flawed and inconsistent, because the circumstances in
which it is gathered are so dynamic, that it should be rejected. One
wonders if the IPCC audited this data prior to citing it, but given that
the agencies supplying it are supporters of the IPCC claims perhaps it
felt no need to do so (Chapter 5).
The IPCC's greatest scam is
in its use and citing of climate models. The Assessment Reports show
very clearly that knowledge of many climate factors is poor, which means
that accurate models can't be created, but later chapters of the report
ignore those deficiencies and cite the predictions of models as if they
were unchallengeable.
Worse yet, these same models are used
attribute blame for variation in climate under the risible notion that
if observations agree with models that include a certain factor but
disagree with the models if that factor is omitted, then it is evidence
that the factor was the cause of climate variation.
This line of
reason, with the incomplete climate models, is not merely a rejection
of commonsense but blatant dishonesty. What's more, the rationale behind
this attribution means that blame can only be attributed to climate
forces that are accurately modelled, and the IPCC mentions just one
force that it considers to be in that category - manmade emissions of
carbon dioxide (Chapter 6).
The IPCC's so-called evidence
for man-made warming was never strong to begin with but now it's
completely undermined by the compromised integrity of the IPCC, the
dubious temperature data and the climate models that are known to be
inaccurate (Chapter 7).
The IPCC has no integrity and therefore
no credibility. It is recommended that it be disbanded, along with its
cohort the UNFCCC, and all responsibility for climate matters be handed
over to the World Meteorological Organization.
While the WMO is
somewhat tainted by co-sponsoring the IPCC it has expertise in
meteorological matters and has shown a willingness to consider a wider
range of climate forces than the IPCC (Chapter 8).
It is
understandable that among an impartial audience only the ignorant,
gullible and ill-informed would accept the biased word of the IPCC.
Unfortunately the IPCC has given rise to a host of people with vested
interests of various forms and I hope that this review encourages them
to reconsider their position.
More HERE (See the original PDF for links, graphics etc.)
NOAA says the Russian heatwave was just a natural fluctuation
An
excerpt below from a report by the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of
the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the Department of Commerce of the
United States Government:
Key sentence: "Greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over Western Russia"
The
Russian heat wave of 2010 has been an extreme and abrupt event. The
July heat did not simply follow on the heals of a sequence of
progressively warmer summers over recent decades, but stands out as a
discrete event that is reminiscent of the often sharp year-to-year
swings in this region's July surface temperatures during the last 130
years. In many ways,the heat wave is a "black swan" event in that it is
well beyond the normal expectations in the instrumental record---it is
an outlier that is having an extreme societal impact.
Whereas an
event of this magnitude was unexpected for the summer of 2010, and
indeed there was little if any advance warming from long lead seasonal
forecasts, it is nonetheless important to assess the factors that may
have been responsible for such an extreme heat wave.
There is
strong evidence that the immediate cause can be placed at the doorstep
of an extreme pattern of atmospheric winds---widely referred to as
blocking. In the situation of anticyclonic blocking such as developed
over western Russia in early July 2010, the normal west-to-east movement
of weather systems is inhibited, with the center of a blocking
experiencing persistently quiescent weather.
Blocks are not an
uncommon occurrence over Eurasia in summer, with a episodes of July
blocking in the region between 0-60°E evident during the past half
century. This region is vulnerable to episodes of blocking owing to
physical factors related to the region's location downstream of the
Atlantic westerly jet.
The sector exhibits high climatological
frequency of blocking during July, with an average of 15% of summer days
experiencing a blocking conditions. During the first 42 days of the
summer of 2010 (thru 11 August) this region has experienced 60% blocking
days. This event is the most prolonged blocking event over Western
Russia for the period since 1948. The duration of this blocking event
has been particularly long, and the intensity of the high pressure
anomaly itself has been unusually strong.
The intensity of the
positive 500mb height anomalies averaged over the geographic region of
eastern Europe and western Russia during July 2010 exceeds any prior
occurrence of anticyclonic blocking. Preliminary estimates indicate that
the strength of the height anomaly at 500mb during July 2010 is equal
to nearly 4 times the standard deviation of July heights---a departure
amplitude similar to that in the region's July surface temperatures.
Typically, there is little persistence of the circulation pattern from
July to August, although the current block that formed in early July has
continued with great strength through the second week of August.
The
extreme surface warmth over western Russia during July and early August
is mostly a product of the strong and persistent blocking high.
Surface
temperatures have soared as a result of the combination of clear skies,
sinking motion within the environment of the high pressure causing
compressional heating of air, the lack of any temporary relief owing to
the blocking of the typical cold fronts that cool the region
intermittently in summer.
Add to this scenario the cumulative
effect of drought that began in early summer which has caused soils to
dry and plants to desiccate to wilting point, thereby causing additional
surface warming via land feedbacks as the blocking condition persisted.
These are all well-known and studied physical processes that have
accompanied summertime blocking and heat waves in the past.
Much
of the intensity of the current heat wave, and also the pattern of
surface temperature conditions across Eurasia during July 2010, can be
recreated from the atmospheric blocking event itself. The diagnostic
procedure involves standard methods applied to the historical record of
analyzed 500 mb heights and surface temperatures during the prior period
of 1900-2008. The method of statistical regression is used to
understand how surface temperature changes during a typical blocking
occurrence over Russia during July, and is a method that can be used to
infer causal relationships.
The comparison of the above
reqression map with the observed temperature anomaly map for July 2010
clarifies the cause for this heat wave. The strong agreement between the
July 2010 observed pattern of Eurasian surface temperatures and that
pattern attributable to the impact of upper tropospheric blocking
provides key evidence that the block is the immediate cause for the heat
wave (and related temperature conditions over adjacent countries).
Blocking events are typically of 1-2 week duration, and by contrast the
2010 situation is highly unusual in that blocking has existed over
western Russia on virtually every day form the beginning of July until
the middle of August. The cumulative impact of such prolonged blocking
has led to the extreme nature of the surface impacts on temperature,
soil conditions, and rainfall.
What has been the role of
human-induced climate change in the Russian heat wave of 2010? As
indicated at the beginning of this report, globally averaged surface
temperatures during the first 6 months of 2010 were the warmest since
about 1880 based on NOAA and NASA analyses.
A time series of
12-month running mean globally averaged surface temperatures anomalies
from NASA data further indicates that the latest 12-month period is
likely warmer than the prior record warmest year of 1998 (relative to an
1880-2009 period of analysis).
Despite this strong evidence
for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010
heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric
blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the
principal cause for this heat wave.
The indications are that the
current blocking event is intrinsic to the natural variability of
summer climate in this region, a region which has a climatological
vulnerability to blocking and associated heat waves
South Pacific sea levels - Best records show little or no rise!!
Are
the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug,
under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants
be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New
Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of
CO2?
By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the
much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on
anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El
Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute
has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island
records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the
trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or
less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993.
Take
the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as
5.7 mm/year back in 2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look
at the Seaframe Graph – its flat. It is universally forecast to
disappear by 2050. New Zealand has even agreed to accept the
“inevitable” rush of refugees, yet the best records available show that
sea levels have not risen at all since 1993. It’s not that it will take
decades, or hundreds of years to submerge, there’s no reason to suppose
it will submerge at all (asteroid strikes excepted). It’s a place that
naturally is reshaped and reformed as the ocean moves sand from one part
to another, and the corals shift and grow with the changes.
There may indeed be legitimate refugees from some areas, but it’s most likely due to subsidence, rather than sea-level rises.
ABSTRACT
The SEAFRAME sea-level study on 12 Pacific islands is the most
comprehensive study of sea level and local climate ever carried out
there. The sea level records obtained have all been assessed by the
anonymous authors of the official reports as indicating positive trends
in sea level over all 12 Pacific Islands involved since the study began
in 1993 until the latest report in June 2010. In almost all cases the
positive upward trends depend almost exclusively on the depression of
the ocean in 1997 and 1998 caused by two tropical cyclones. If these and
other similar disturbances are ignored, almost all of the islands have
shown negligible change in sea level from 1993 to 2010, particularly
after the installation of GPS levelling equipment in 2000.
The
study includes the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji,
Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon
Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
One of the big problems with
measuring sea-levels is that everything is in motion. The tides shift,
the sand moves, and even the bedrock can subside. The Seaframe stations
are state of the art, and regularly checked to compensate for all these
changes.
The Seaframe equipment used to measure sea levels is
carefully recalibrated every 18 months to take these factors into
account....
The bottom line
No matter what was heating the
Earth, sea levels would rise, the rise in and of itself tells us
nothing about the cause of the warming. What’s amazing is that so much
of our CO2 has been unleashed since 1993, yet at least in the South
Pacific, it’s not clear that sea levels have risen.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
A fanatic speaks
Excerpt below
from an article headed "Time To Terminate Western Civilization Before It
Terminates Us". It's just amazing how pervasive Green/Left hatreds of
our society are. Note that he quotes not a skerrick of evidence for
global warming and ignores all the evidence against it -- such as the
tiny degree of warming (two thirds of one degree Celsius even according
to the Warmists) observed over the 20th century
The author is a
retired professor of ecology and in 2009 he "left the university to
prepare for collapse. He now lives in an off-grid, straw-bale house
where he puts into practice his lifelong interest in sustainable living
via organic gardening, raising small animals for eggs and milk, and
working with members of his rural community".
Global climate
change threatens our species with extinction by mid-century is we do not
terminate the industrial economy soon. Increasingly dire forecasts from
extremely conservative sources keep stacking up. Governments refuse to
act because they know growth of the industrial economy depends (almost
solely) on consumption of fossil fuels. Global climate change and energy
decline are similar in this respect: neither is characterized by a
politically viable solution.
There simply is no comprehensive
substitute for crude oil. It is the overwhelming fuel of choice for
transportation, and there is no way out of the crude trap at this late
juncture in the industrial era. We passed the world oil peak in 2005,
which led to near-collapse of the world’s industrial economy several
times between September 2008 and May 2010. And we’re certainly not out
of the economic woods yet.
Unchecked, western civilization drives
us to one of two outcomes, and perhaps both: (1) Destruction of the
living planet on which we depend for our survival, and/or (2) Runaway
greenhouse and therefore the near-term extinction of our species. Why
would we want to sustain such a system? It is immoral and omnicidal. The
industrial economy enslaves us, drives us insane, and kills us in
myriad ways. We need a living planet. Everything else is less important
than the living planet on which we depend for our very lives. We act as
if non-industrial cultures do not matter. We act as if non-human species
do not matter. But they do matter, on many levels, including the level
of human survival on Earth. And, of course, there’s the matter of
ecological overshoot, which is where we’re spending all our time since
at least 1980. Every day in overshoot brings us 205,000 people to deal
with later. In this case, “deal with” means murder.
Shall we
reduce Earth to a lifeless pile of rubble within a generation? Or shall
we heat the planet beyond human habitability within two generations? Or
shall we keep procreating as if there are no consequences for an already
crowded planet? Pick your poison, but recognize it’s poison. We’re dead
either way.
Although it’s all coming down, as it has been for
quite a while, it’s relatively clear imperial decline is accelerating.
We’re obviously headed for full-scale collapse of the industrial
economy, as indicated by these 40 statistics. Even Fortune and CNN agree
economic collapse will be complete soon, though they don’t express any
understanding of how we arrived at this point or the hopelessness of
extracting ourselves from the morass.
Credibility?
Respectability? It’s time to stop playing by the rules of the
destroyers. We need witnesses and warriors, and we need them now. It’s
time to terminate western civilization before it terminates us.
It's
not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of
millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The
Obama administration's neon green radicals are also training their
sights on the deep blue seas. The president's grabby-handed bureaucrats
have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented
control from states and localities over "conservation, economic
activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and
the Great Lakes."_
Democrats have tried and failed to pass
"comprehensive" federal oceans management legislation five years in a
row. The so-called "Oceans 21" bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sam
Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan
concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to
recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists
another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of "ecosystem
management." Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply
circumvented the legislative process altogether.
In late July,
President Obama established a behemoth 27-member "National Ocean
Council" with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: "We already have a
Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today's executive order,
President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act." And not a single
hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a
single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the
deliberative process? The oceans are dying!
The panel will have
the power to implement "coastal and marine spatial plans" and to ensure
that all executive agencies, departments and offices abide by their
determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish
regional advisory committees that overlap with existing regional and
local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.
No
wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are
cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle
science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about
eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother
Earth and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in
the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich)
and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best
known as the immediate boss of disgraced green jobs czar/self-avowed
communist Van Jones).
Also on the new ocean panel:
--
Socialista and energy/climate change czar Carol Browner, last seen
bullying auto company execs to "put nothing in writing, ever" and
threatening to push massive cap-and-trade tax hikes during the upcoming
congressional lame duck session.
-- Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former
high-ranking official at the left-wing Environmental Defense Fund, which
has long championed drastic reductions of commercial fishing fleets and
recreational fishing activity in favor of centralized control.
--
Attorney General Eric Holder, who will no doubt use his stonewalling
expertise to shield the ocean council's inner workings from public
scrutiny.
-- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who apparently
doesn't have enough to do destroying jobs through his offshore drilling
moratorium, blocking onshore development and wreaking havoc on the
energy industry.
Given Salazar's fraudulent book-cooking in
support of the administration's offshore drilling moratorium (Remember:
Obama's own appointed scientists blasted the Interior Secretary for
unilaterally contradicting and misrepresenting their conclusions.), his
comments on the new ocean grab are more threat than promise: "With two
billion acres we help oversee on the Outer Continental Shelf, Interior
is a proud partner in this initiative, and we look forward to helping
coordinate the science, policies and management of how we use, conserve
and protect these public treasures."
"Helping coordinate the
science," as interpreted by Obama's Chicago-on-the-Potomac heavies,
means doctoring, massaging and ramming through whatever eco-data is
necessary "to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts,
facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to
meet economic, environmental, security and social objectives."
Translation: drastically limiting human activity from coastal areas to
seabeds to achieve the "social objective" of appeasing the enviros and
their deep-pocketed philanthropic funders.
Even New York Sen.
Charles Schumer slammed the administration's junk science-based fishing
limits at a meeting this week between NOAA's Lubchenco and Long Island
recreational fishermen. Draconian regulations, he said, according to the
New York Post, "put the industry on death's door." Now, the same forces
behind such job destroyers will have free reign over a national ocean
policy established by administrative fiat. Viva la Summer of Wreckovery.
Some people in Australia's major
Leftist political party still put the jobs and wellbeing of the
workers ahead of "Green" obsessions
A rather mournful comment from a Leftist writer below
Will
Michael O'Connor, powerful forestry division secretary of the
Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, block an effective
Australian response to climate change?
It's a worry for our
economy because O'Connor is a key figure behind the Prime Minister,
Julia Gillard, and soft left factional allies Martin Ferguson and Penny
Wong - who, for one more day at least, control the portfolios that
really matter: energy, water and climate.
O'Connor helped both
Gillard and Ferguson into Parliament. In her maiden speech, Gillard
acknowledged him as her "closest confidante", the "most committed of
them all" to her Labor values, going back to her student days.
O'Connor
should not be underestimated. If the secret of the Ferguson Left is its
willingness to do deals with the Right, O'Connor has a record of going
further and abandoning the ALP to support the Coalition. He helped bring
down Paul Keating, organising (with the National Association of Forest
Industries) the loggers blockade of Parliament House in January 1995 - a
bitter protest during the regional forest agreement negotiations.
In
an article for The Australian at the time, headlined "Green agenda full
of myths", O'Connor railed against the environment movement's campaign
to "cripple the forest and forest products industry by denying it access
to native forests".
The 350-truck blockade took place just as
John Howard was ushered in as opposition leader and helped establish his
image as the battlers' friend, according to Australian National
University forest economist Dr Judith Ajani, author of The Forest Wars
(2007): "Australian voters witnessed the first display of Howard's
battlers versus Keating's 'special interest elites': the core of a
meticulously crafted election strategy."
O'Connor features
heavily in Ajani's book, although he would not be interviewed for it.
Others would. At one point, a bitter Keating calls O'Connor a "Labor
rat" who should be "excommunicated" from the party.
Asked why he
wasn't kicked out, Keating said: "Because people are too gutless, that's
why. And nobody these days likes the fights. They all want consensus
results. Well you don't get big issues resolved like this, just by
consensus."
O'Connor also helped sink Mark Latham's tilt at
federal office in 2004, swinging the CFMEU behind John Howard as the two
main parties went toe-to-toe on Tasmanian forests policy. "It is clear
that the jobs of workers, the welfare of families and the future of
timber communities are to be sold off to appease Bob Brown and the
Wilderness Society," O'Connor said of Latham's forest policy.
It
was a spectacular betrayal of the party, but Gillard later lined up with
O'Connor, saying she was "devastated" by Latham's stance on Tasmanian
forests, calling it a "dreadful policy" and a "shocking, shocking
error". O'Connor is the type of Laborite who sees the environment as a
fashionable obsession of inner-city elites … job-destroyers hostile to
the interests of workers. O'Connor calls it "real Labor". "Real Labor
doesn't sell out workers," he said once.
In Ajani's telling,
O'Connor is one of the forestry union's "economic troglodytes",
endlessly perpetuating a false industry-versus-environment movement
conflict.
Behind that conflict, according to Ajani, is a deeper
struggle of industry versus industry, between native forest logging and
the plantation sector which grew so fast between the 1960s and the 1990s
that it can now provide all of Australia's sawn timber and pulp and
paper needs.
Ajani argues O'Connor and the CFMEU, by fighting
trenchantly to protect the old native forest logging sector, have
sacrificed workers' long-term interests, which lie in the growth of a
sustainable plantation industry. That's the win-win solution - more
jobs, and our remaining native forests saved (with all the greenhouse
and other immeasurable benefits that entails) - if the CFMEU could see
it.
Instead of pushing for the win-win solution, O'Connor fights a
rearguard action to preserve native forest logging. For example he
fought against the Green Building Council's star ratings system, which
gave extra points for use of timber accredited under the internationally
recognised Forest Stewardship Council scheme.
He wanted points
to be given for timber accredited under an industry-backed scheme, the
Australian Forestry Standard, which allows native forest logging. Late
last year he got it, calling the decision a "great breakthrough".
His
quotes were instructive. "This took four years to achieve. I have
little faith in the covenant of the Green Building Council and they have
no credibility with us," he told The Australian Financial Review.
O'Connor cannot abide a market-based scheme for tenants who want to
occupy a green commercial building - or landlords who want to build one -
which stipulates no timber from native forests.
O'Connor also
has been deputy chairman of the Innovation Minister, Kim Carr's, pulp
and paper industry strategy group, which wants to promote burning waste
from native forest logging as renewable energy, and is arguing to ensure
international carbon accounting rules do not count emissions from
native forest logging.
The forest wars have a parallel in the
energy sector, where the fossil fuel industry faces competition from an
emerging renewables sector. Under Martin Ferguson, over the course of
Labor's first term a stream of decisions have favoured the incumbents
over the challengers. The saving grace was that the government finally
established the 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020.
Ferguson
sees the parallel, accusing the Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, of
"seeking to demonise the coal industry in the same way he has sought to
demonise the forest industry".
The pity is that, despite the
rhetoric about saving jobs, when these Labor figures are duchessed by
the captains of old industry, the result is public handouts to
employers, and no focus on retraining or assistance for employees, as we
saw during emissions trading scheme negotiations.
O'Connor and
his allies will fight tooth and nail for the industries of the past.
They do not see the potential of the green industries of the future.
So
Gillard has gone out of her way to avoid a mandate for action on
climate change, with a deeply cynical platform comprising the citizens
assembly (a joke), misleading slogans about "no new dirty coal-fired
power stations" and bitsy ad-hockery on renewables, energy efficiency
and "cash for clunkers". Her best mandate comes - almost in reverse -
from Coalition warnings that Labor under Gillard would bring in a carbon
tax "as night follows day".
Leading US Physicist Labels Satellitegate Scandal a ‘Catastrophe’
"NOAA Proven to have engaged in Long-term Cover Up". It's not only Britain's UEA that has been crooked
By John O'Sullivan
Respected American physicist, Dr Charles R. Anderson has waded into
the escalating Satellitegate controversy publishing a damning analysis
on his blog.
In a fresh week of revelations when NOAA calls
in their lawyers to handle the fallout, Anderson adds further fuel to
the fire and fumes against NOAA, one of the four agencies charged with
responsiblity for collating global climate temperatures. NOAA is now
fighting a reargaurd legal defense to hold onto some semblance of
credibility with growing evidence of systemic global warming data flaws
by government climatologists.
NOAA Systemically Excised Data with ‘Poor Interpolations’
Anderson, a successful Materials Physicist with his own laboratory,
has looked closely at the evidence uncovered on NOAA. He has been
astonished to discover, “Both higher altitudes and higher latitudes have
been systematically removed from the measured temperature record with
very poor and biased interpolated results taking their place.”
Like other esteemed scientists, Anderson has been quick to spot
sinister flaws in official temperatures across northern Lake Michigan as
revealed in my earlier articles.
I had proven that the
website operated by the Michigan State University had published
ridiculously high surface water temperatures widely distributed over the
lake many indicating super-boiling conditions. The fear is that these
anomalies have been fed across the entire satellite dataset. The
satellite that first ignited the fury is NOAA-16. But as we have since
learned there are now five key satellites that have become either
degraded or seriously compromised.
In his post "Satellite
Temperature Record Now Unreliable" Anderson’s findings corroborate my
own that NOAA sought to cover up the “sensor degradation” on their
satellite, NOAA-16. The U.S. physicist agrees there may now be thousands
of temperatures in the range of 415-604 degrees Fahrenheit
automatically fed into computer climate models and contaminating climate
models with a substantial warming bias. This may have gone on for a far
longer period than the five years originally identified.
Anderson continues, “One has to marvel at either the scientific
incompetence this reveals or the completely unethical behavior of NOAA
and its paid researchers that is laid open before us.”
Indian Government Knew of Faults in 2004
I have further uncovered proof that the Indian government was long
ago onto these faults, too. Researcher, Devendra Singh, tried and failed
to draw attention to the increasing problems with the satellite as
early as 2004 but his paper remained largely ignored outside of his
native homeland.
Indian scientist, Singh reported that
NOAA-16 started malfunctioning due to a scan motor problem that caused a
'barcode' appearance. Singh’s paper, ‘Performance of the NOAA-16 and
AIRS temperature soundings over India’ exposed the satellite’s growing
faults and identified three key errors that needed to be addressed.
Singh writes, “The first one is the instrument observation error.
The second is caused by the differences in the observation time and
location between the satellite and radiosonde. The third is sampling
error due to atmospheric horizontal inhomogeneity of the field of view
(FOV).” These comments from India thus endorse Dr. Anderson’s findings.
NOAA Proven to have engaged in Long-term Cover Up
My investigations are increasingly proving that such data was
flagged by non-NOAA agencies years ago, but NOAA declined to publish
notice of the faults until the problem was publicized loudly and widely
in my first ‘satellitegate’ article, US Government in Massive New Global
Warming Scandal – NOAA Disgraced. Official explanations initially
dismissed my findings. But then NOAA conceded my story was accurate in
the face of the evidence.
My second article, shortly
thereafter, exposed that a succession of record warm temperatures in
recent years may be based on contaminated satellite readings. But NOAA
spokesman, Program Coordinator, Chuck Pistis declined to clarify the
extent of the satellite instrument problem or how long the fault might
have gone undetected.
Thereafter, in my third article,
Official: Satellite Failure Means Decade of Global Warming Data Doubtful
we saw the smoking gun evidence of a cover up after examining the
offending satellite’s AVHRR Subsystem Summary. The official summary
shows no report of any ‘sensor degradation’ (NOAA’s admission) since its
launch in September 2000.
Subsystem Summary Details Censored Between 2005-10
But even more sinister is the fact that the official online summary
now only shows events recorded up to 2005. All subsequent notations,
that was on NOAA’s web pages last week and showed entries inclusive to
summer 2010, have now been removed. However, climatechangefraud.com is
displaying a sample of the missing evidence copied before NOAA took down
the revealing web pages after it entered into 'damage limitation mode.'
As events have unfolded we are also learning that major systemic
failures in the rest of the satellite global data-collecting network
were also not reported. Such serious flaws affect up to five U.S
satellites as reported in an excellent article by Susan Bohan here.
NOAA Tears Up its Own ‘ Data Transparency’ Policy
But rather than come clean NOAA has this week ordered their lawyers
to circle the wagons. Glenn Tallia, their Senior Counselor, wrote to
advise me, “The data and associated website at issue are not NOAA's but
instead are those of the Michigan State Sea Grant program. Thus, we have
referred your e-mail to the Michigan State Sea Grant program.”
Yes, Glenn, clearly the final data output was published by Michigan but the underlying fault is with your satellite!
With NOAA now hiding behind their attorneys we appear to see a
contradiction of NOAA’s official pledge that “ The basic tenet of
physical climate data management at NOAA is full and open data access”
published in their document, NOAA/National Climatic Data Center Open
Access to Physical Climate Data Policy December 2009.
Sadly,
we may now be at the start of yet another protracted delay and
concealment process that tarnished NASA’s and CRU’s reputations in
Climategate. We saw in that scandal that for 3-7 years the US and the UK
government agencies cynically and unlawfully stymied Freedom of
Information requests (FOIA).
NASA’s disgrace was affirmed in
March 2010 when they finally conceded that their data was in worse shape
than the much-maligned Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the UK’s
University of East Anglia. CRU’s Professor Phil Jones only escaped
criminal prosecution by way of a technicality.
The attorney
credited with successfully forcing NASA to come clean was Christopher
Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Horner is
now advising me as to how best to pursue a possible FOIA of my own
against NOAA if they continue their obfuscation.
American Physicist Picks Out Key Issues
Meanwhile, back on his blog Anderson points to the key issues that
NOAA tries to cover up. He refers to how Charles Pistis, Program
Coordinator of the Michigan Sea Grant project, tried to pass off the
dodgy data as being an accidental product of the satellite’s malfunction
sensors taking readings off the top of clouds rather than the surface
temperatures.
By contrast, Anderson cogently refutes this
explanation showing that such bogus data was consistently of very high
temperatures not associated with those detected from cloud tops. He
advises it is fair to assume that NOAA were using this temperature
anomaly to favorably hype a doomsaying agenda of ever-increasing
temperatures that served the misinformation process of government
propaganda.
As Pistis admitted, all such satellite data is
fed automatically into records and apparently as long as it showed high
enough temperatures to satisfy the catastrophic anthropogenic global
warming (AGW) advocates of those numbers were not going to make careful
scrutiny for at least half a decade.
Anderson bemoans, “One
has to marvel at either the scientific incompetence this reveals or the
completely unethical behavior of NOAA and its paid researchers that is
laid open before us.”
“Charles Pistis has evaded the repeated
question of whether the temperature measurement data from such
satellites has gone into the NOAA temperature record. This sure suggests
this is an awkward question to answer.”
Now Satellites NOAA-17 and 18 Suffer Calamities
While NOAA’s Nero fiddles ‘Rome’ continues to burn and the satellite
network just keeps on falling apart. After NOAA-16 bit the dust last
week NOAA-17 became rated ‘poor’ due to ‘scan motor degradation” while
NOAA-18’s gyro’s are regarded by many now as good as dead. However,
these satellites that each cross the U.S. twice per day at twelve-hour
intervals are still giving “direct readout”(HRPT or APT) or central
processing to customers. So please, NOAA, tell us - is this GIGO still
being fed into official climate models?
NOAA-17 appears in
even worse condition. On February 12 and 19 2010 NOAA-17 concedes it has
“ AVHRR Scan Motor Degradation” with “Product(s) or Data Impacted.”
Beleaguered NOAA customers have been told, “direct readout users are
going to have to deal with the missing data gaps as best they can.”
On August 9, 2010, NOAA 17 was listed as on ‘poor’ with scan motor
problems and rising motor currents. NOAA admits, “Constant rephase by
the MIRP was causing data dropouts on all the HRPT stream and APT and
GAC derivatives. Auto re-phase has now been disabled and the resulting
AVHRR products are almost all unusable.”
NOAA continues with
tests on ‘17’ with a view to finding a solution. On page 53 we find that
NOAA-17 has an inoperable AMSU Instrument. The status for August 17,
2010 was RED (not operational) and NOAA is undertaking “urgent gyro
tests on NOAA 18.” For further details see here. More evidence proving
NOAA is running a “degrading” satellite network can be read here.
Dr.
Anderson sums up saying; “It is now perfectly clear that there are no
reliable worldwide temperature records and that we have little more than
anecdotal information on the temperature history of the Earth.”
Global warming killed off the mammoths? Pull the other one!
Mammoths
were just a type of elephant and the closely-related elephants of
Africa and Asia seem to be doing just fine on a diet of warm-climate
vegetation -- but you can't expect a Warmist to notice that!
An
extraordinary article at Nature's Great Beyond blog, reporting on a new
paper by Judy Allen et al from the University of Durham: "Human
hunters off the hook? Climate change caused wooly mammoths' extinction,
say scientists".
Uh huh. So how do they know this?
Climate change, rather than human hunters, drove the wooly mammoth to
extinction. That’s the claim from scientists who say that the hairy
beasts lost their grazing grounds as forests rapidly replaced grasslands
after the last ice age, roughly 20,000 years ago. The researchers used
palaeoclimate and vegetation models to simulate the plant cover across
the mammoths’ habitat around that time.
Yes folks, it's a
modelling study. Another one. From the paper's abstract, the researchers
took output from the Hadley Centre's Unified Climate Model and pumped
it into another model which purports to simulate how a variety of plants
react to temperature changes. So even if the vegetation model works it
still relies on the Hadley Centre model being something one can rely on.
Is it just me that finds this all rather unconvincing. I mean is the
Hadley Centre Unified Model something you'd want to bet the house on?
Well,
according to this article, the Unified Model is: "the same model that
is used to produce every weather forecast you see on British terrestrial
television."
The
above article is from Britain and the "Oh dear"! refers to the dismal
predictive accuracy of forecasts from Britain's Met Office
Is GOP opposition to cap-and-trade self-contradictory?
Betsy
Moler of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and Phil Sharp of
Resources for the Future would like Republicans to think so. After all,
if GOP opposition to cap-and-trade is self-contradictory, then it is
unstable, hence reversible.
Few Republicans will be gulled by
this line of chatter, but just to make sure, I posted a column debunking
the Moler-Sharp argument on MasterResource.Org, the free-market energy
blog.
Republicans like markets (or say they do), and
cap-and-trade is “market-based,” according to Moler and Sharp. In fact,
cap-and-trade is politics-based. The demand for the traded commodity
(the emission allowances) is entirely a creature of the cap, which is
itself created not by the market but by politicians.
People
posting comments on my column made astute observations, which suggest
the following definition. Cap-and-trade: Government creation of a market
in a commodity that everyone makes and nobody wants; from which a
rent-seeking few gain windfall profits at consumers’ expense; and in
which opportunities for corruption and creative accounting abound.
BOOK REVIEW of "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley
For
the vast majority of human beings, life has never been better. We’re
healthier, longer-living, less exhausted, and more nutrient-packed than
any of our ancestors. Yet there’s an epidemic of pessimism. Barely a day
goes by when we are not told that life was better in some distant,
pastoral, pre-modern era, when men hunted for meat, women cooked it, and
they spent the rest of their time banging drums and dancing around
fires.
We’re forever being informed that as a direct consequence
of our creation of a comfortable, convenient society, the world will
come to an end. The technology-frying Y2K bug didn’t get us. Neither the
avian flu nor swine flu outbreaks—which, we were warned, would spread
like wildfire, thanks to the modern evils of manmade flight and
globalization—killed anywhere near as many millions of people as the
World Health Organization predicted.
But climate change will
surely finish us off. Brought about by our gluttonous exploitation of
fossil fuels, designed to sustain our unsustainable lives of flying,
city-building, and conspicuous consuming, the warming of the planet will
be nature’s ultimate revenge against what the granddaddy of modern
environmentalism, James Lovelock, labeled a “serious planetary malady.”
That’s us: human beings.
Why are we so down on the spectacular
world we have created—and so convinced that it could all come crashing
down at any minute? Why do so many influential thinkers, who are
surrounded by the kind of luxuries previous generations could never have
envisaged—running water, fresh fruit out of season, constant light,
telephones, mobile telephones—spend their days telling us how terrible
everything is?
Matt Ridley, in his stirring new book The Rational
Optimist, teases out the contradiction between our increasingly
comfortable lives and the intellectual climate of deep, dark pessimism.
With simplicity, clarity, and verve, he stands up for “the bright side
of human endeavor” in a book that feels like an act of intellectual
rebellion against the tyranny of misery gripping this young century.
Eschewing
both the “don’t worry, be happy” self-help approach and the angry,
graph-obsessed nitpicking of climate-change skeptics (who can be just as
annoying as climate-change alarmists), Ridley’s “rational optimism” is
based on an historic analysis of what is unique about human beings and
why we have been able to improve our living standards so vastly.
His
contrast between how we live today and how people lived just a few
decades ago should, by all rights, be enough to perk up even the most
miserable of miserabilists. Yes, there’s still poverty, he writes,
especially in Africa, but overall “this generation of human beings has
access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes,
megahertz, light years, nanometers, bushels per acre, miles per gallon,
food miles, air miles, and of course dollars than any that went before.”
There
are more people (or “mouths to feed,” as the pessimists insultingly
refer to us) than ever, yet we are better fed and healthier than ever,
too. Since 1800, Ridley points out, the world population of human beings
has risen sixfold—from 1 billion to over 6 billion—yet in the same
period, average life expectancy has more than doubled and average real
income has risen ninefold. In just the past 50 years, the average human
“earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate
one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her
children, and could expect to live one-third longer.”
Life
expectancy—the surest measure that we are doing something right—has
risen exponentially over the past 200 years. It was static for
millennia. In classical Greece and Rome, average life expectancy was 28.
In pre-Columbian North America, it was 25 to 30. In medieval Britain,
it was 30. In the early 20th century, the global average life expectancy
was 30 to 45. In the 1920s, Ridley points out, demographers confidently
predicted that average life expectancy could never exceed 65 “without
intervention of radical innovations or fantastic evolutionary change in
our physiological make-up.” To those demographers, the thought of
millions or even billions of human beings, worker and wealthy man alike,
living into their 70s and 80s was unthinkable. But it has happened—and
then some. Today, life expectancy in Japan is 82.6. In Iceland, it is
81.8. In Spain, it is 80.9, in Britain, it is 79.4, and in the U.S., it
is 78.2.
Yet such is the depth of pessimism today that even
mankind’s successful delaying of the Grim Reaper’s visit is seen as a
Bad Thing. It has led to an “aging crisis,” we are told, or an “aging
timebomb,” whereby Western societies will soon be packed with sick,
feeble old people who drain social and economic resources. This is a
mean-spirited and inaccurate generalization, says Ridley. For example,
one American study found that disability rates in people over 65 fell
from 26.2 percent to 19.7 percent between 1982 and 1999. The risk of
cancer, heart disease, and respiratory disease still increases with age,
but these illnesses now occur later in life—on average ten years later
than they did in the 1950s—and they are not as necessarily fatal as they
once were.
We are wealthier than ever before, too. “Stuff” might
be a dirty word these days. Oprah Winfrey, billionaire, even talks
about the disease of “stuff-itis.” But this stuff has made our lives
more pleasant and fun. Even the poor have benefited. In 1958, when J.K.
Galbraith wrote about “the affluent society,” he was mainly talking
about the American middle classes with their cars, washing machines,
maybe even TVs. Today, Ridley points out, among Americans officially
designated as “poor,” 99 percent have electricity, running water, and a
fridge; 95 percent have a television; 71 percent have a car; and 70
percent have air conditioning.
Some people—usually well-off
commentators, people like Oprah—scoff at the little guy’s desire for
more and more stuff. Yet we underestimate how these things have improved
human life. How much backbreaking female drudgery was wiped out by the
invention of the washing machine? How many man-hours have been saved by
the availability of cars for shopping, school-drops, and visiting
relatives? How much healthier is our food, and longer-lasting, now that
virtually everyone in the Western world has a refrigerator?
But,
say the pessimists, these leaps forward have come at a high price: human
happiness and environmental integrity. A “small cottage industry” of
intellectuals now warns that increased wealth is making us sad and even
sick, says Ridley. And today’s veritable army of Green activists never
tires of telling us that we have raped Gaia and polluted the planet
through our creation of this stuff that we’re all so desperate to get
our grubby hands on.
Ridley convincingly argues that both camps
are wrong. With academic rigor, he picks apart the studies upon which
the “affluenza” theories are based, with their small samples and
contradictory findings, and cites larger, more thoroughly critical
studies into wealth and happiness. He concludes, “All told, [there
appears to be] an important relationship between economic growth and
growth in subjective wellbeing.”
In short, being better off does,
generally speaking, make us happier. And, says Ridley, while the
environment might be taking some serious body-blows in China right now,
in the longer developed West, it is improving. “In Europe and America,
rivers, lakes, seas, and the air are getting cleaner all the time. ...
American carbon monoxide emissions from transport are down 75 per cent
in twenty-five years.” And so on. The more developed a society is, the
more resources that can be devoted to cleaning up the environment. Once
China and India reach the West’s level of development, the better their
air and water quality will become.
But what about those
developing nations and the not-even-remotely developing nations in
Africa—life hasn’t improved very much for them, has it? In fact, says
Ridley, there has been improvement—not enough, but improvement
nonetheless. Even in urban China, “90 percent of people now have
electric light, refrigerators, and running water.” Today, life
expectancy in India is 69.89—still way too low for the liking of anyone
who considers himself a humanist, but better than the brutish,
desperately short lives that many Indians lived a century or two ago.
And
Africa? Ridley admits that for the “rational optimist,” African poverty
is an “acute challenge.” So, he says, is climate change. But
contemporary pessimism, with its profound disdain for the gains of human
history, is possibly the biggest barrier to facing these challenges and
overcoming them. He passionately argues that while aid has brought some
benefits to Africa, it cannot possibly “start or accelerate economic
growth”—and what Africa really needs is “better living standards, and
these come chiefly from economic growth.”
Yet today’s
intellectual outlook is so hostile to growth that few would dream of
arguing for industrial revolutions and economic breakthroughs in Africa,
even those are the very things it needs if it is to become “more like
us.” Likewise, the challenge of climate change requires more and better
technology in order to offset those aspects of human behavior that have a
polluting impact on the environment. Yet contemporary curmudgeons have a
powerful anti-technology streak, which means that those wringing their
hands over climate change are also likely to say dismiss
techno-solutions.
Ridley’s important book shoots down the culture
of doom that stands in such stark contrast to the generally optimistic
arc of human history. Indeed, the biggest block to progress today might
just be pessimism itself—the fashionable, self-indulgent, misanthropic
mindset of the comfortable opinion-forming classes of the West.
Labor, business, environmentalist alliance sneaks in new trade barriers
Under
environmental disguises, industry and labor unions are running parallel
campaigns with environmentalists seeking to roll back free trade. For
years, "green" groups have been pushing for environmental trade
restrictions in developed countries such as the United States. Carbon
tariffs, forestry import bans and certification requirements on the
origin of products have become regular fixtures of environmentalists'
demands.
Now their cause is being adopted increasingly by labor
unions, which have found environmentalism a back door for protecting
their members' jobs from competition, and by industry, which has found
them a way to cut import competition to help make a buck.
A
regular player is the Blue Green Alliance: a collusion of labor unions -
from steelworkers to service-sector employees - and green groups such
as the Sierra Club. They're pushing for government support to create
"green" jobs by stopping forestry imports. They're also becoming
particularly activist. This week, Blue Green launched a 17-state tour
from California, arguing "The Job's Not Done" to push for the greater
adoption of renewable-products and climate-change legislation. But the
snag is that the groups also want carbon tariffs introduced.
Regardless
of progress with government, green groups are pushing their agenda down
the business supply chain. They pushed the office-supply retailer
Staples to introduce a "sustainable paper" procurement policy that
highlights the campaigns of the World Wildlife Fund and the Rainforest
Alliance and sets tight restrictions on where paper products can be
sourced and on certification requirements. Office Max has signed on as a
member of green groups such as Greenpeace and the Rainforest Alliance
and also requires certification of its paper products.
Not that industry's hands are clean.
Despite
protests on the impact of imports from China on its industry, the paper
giant Kimberly-Clark "has announced that they will expand their
manufacturing facilities in China," according to a briefing paper from
the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, "No Paper Tiger."
Yet in Australia, Kimberly-Clark's subsidiary KCA has taken the
Australian government to court to force the introduction of green-trade
restrictions on imports from Indonesia and China.
They're trying to have it both ways.
There
is a reason to believe the greens, labor unions and industry converted
to the green cause are starting to get the ears of lawmakers. In 2008,
campaigns to amend the Lacey Act, requiring obligations on importers to
identify the source of wood products, succeeded. Since then, the Obama
administration has shown sympathy for going further.
Now the
Australian equivalents are working in tandem to replicate U.S. groups'
Lacey Act success through the Labor government. Before the last federal
election, the forestry union donated $25,000 to the Labor Party around
the same time the party committed to "greater policing and enforcement
of an effective national ban on the sale of illegally logged timber
imports."
The Labor government is seeking re-election, and the
minister for forestry, Tony Burke, announced this week that he would
implement trade bans and heavy regulation on timber imports if
re-elected. Following his announcement, industry, unions and green
groups all rushed in with applause and called for the minority Liberal
Party to announce the same commitment.
In pushing its campaign,
the forestry union argued openly for consumers to buy Australian-made
paper products "[so] thousands of Australian workers [are] paid properly
[and] more of your money stays in Australia."
But green protectionism will come with heavy costs.
If
green trade barriers are erected to limit imports from high-growth,
developing-country markets, the loss of consumer markets will also
diminish their attractiveness as investment destinations for
developed-country capital. The risk of escalation also exists, with
developing countries seeking avenues to retaliate against
developed-country exports.
Then there's the impact on consumers.
Australian
Customs concluded that the downward pressure from Indonesian and
Chinese products could cut prices between 5 percent and 42 percent. Such
downward pressure isn't good for companies seeking fat profits - but it
is good for everyone who needs to buy paper. Similar downward price
pressure is likely in the United States.
But if green groups,
labor unions and industry have their way, their green regulation won't
be designed to make prices cheaper. It will be designed to make you pay
more.
Wood to Coal to Oil to Natural Gas and Nuclear: The Slow Pace of Energy Transitions
In
the wake of the Macondo well blowout, we are hearing renewed claims
that we must quit using oil, that we must win “the oil end game.” In
addition, there are the continuing calls for drastic reductions in
carbon-based fuel consumption, and those calls are being amplified
thanks to the drought and record-setting heat that has affected parts of
the globe in recent weeks.
Those calls may be heartening to some
of the true believers that oil is bad, coal is bad, and natural gas is
only slightly less bad. But here’s the reality: energy transitions are
protracted affairs, occurring over decades, or even centuries. [...]
The
transition away from oil, coal, and natural gas will be a decades-long
process because the companies that produce those commodities are getting
ever-better at finding and exploiting them. The oil and gas industry
provides a clear example of this. For about a century, analysts have
been forecasting an end to the supply of petroleum. And they have
consistently been proven wrong. Why? Because the companies that produce
oil and gas continue innovating.
While environmental groups and
energy analysts publicize the inventiveness of entrepreneurs working to
improve wind, solar, and other alternative sources of energy, they
seldom mention the ongoing innovations that are occurring on the
hydrocarbon side of the ledger. And in doing so, they frequently forget
the sheer size of the industry that is constantly searching for
techniques that can get oil and gas out of the ground and do so faster
and cheaper. [...]
While the oil and gas industry continues to
improve the techniques that allow companies to drill wells deeper,
faster, with greater precision, at ever-lower costs, the coal industry
continues to show its resilience. Although oil passed coal as the most
important source of US energy back in 1950, coal hasn’t gone away. In
fact over the past few years, thanks to soaring global demand for
electricity, coal has enjoyed a resurgence. Although we now live in the
Age of Oil, the Age of Coal hasn’t yet passed. The reason for coal’s
enduring popularity is that it provides huge quantities of the essential
commodity of modernity: electricity.
Over the past two decades,
global electricity consumption has grown faster than any other type of
energy use. Since 1990, electricity use has increased about three times
as fast as oil consumption. In their thoughtful 2005 book, The
Bottomless Well, Peter Huber and Mark Mills declare that “Economic
growth marches hand in hand with increased consumption of electricity –
always, everywhere, without significant exception in the annals of
modern industrial history.”(18)
Electricity is the energy
commodity that separates the developed countries from the rest.
Countries that can provide cheap and reliable electric power to their
citizens can grow their economies and create wealth. Those that can’t,
can’t. The essentiality of electricity takes us back to coal. Love it or
hate it, coal provides the cheapest option for electricity generation
in dozens of countries around the world. In heavily populated developing
countries like China, India, and Indonesia – all of which have large
coal deposits – the need for increased electric generation capacity is
acute. And those countries (India and China in particular) will continue
using coal until they can ramp up their nuclear power sectors.
So,
yes, the calls to move away from carbon-based fuels are loud and
frequent. But facts are better than dreams. And a look back at history
shows that coal, oil, and natural gas are going to be with us for a long
time to come.
The earth’s southern
hemisphere is now in the winter season, and it is proving to be a severe
one. There have been many deaths of people, animals, fish, and crops.
But you haven’t heard about that from the northern hemisphere media.
As
far as the media is concerned, there is no southern hemisphere. All the
media coverage is about fires in Russia, Arctic ice melting, glaciers
calving icebergs, heat waves on the U. S. east coast, and other
“weather” occurrences up north. So let me bring you up to date on the
highlights from down south.
June 17, 2010, “500 African penguins
freeze to death in South Africa”.“Nearly 500 rare African Penguins have
died in the past 24 hours as a result of extremely cold weather in
South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.” Here
July 19, 2010, “South Africa, Freezing Cold destroys several 100 (sic) Solar Thermal Systems”. Here
August 5, 2010, “Snow in Brazil, below zero Celsius in the River Plate and tropical fish frozen”. Here.
August 6, 2010, “Chilly in Chile: South America Hit by Cold Snap”. Here, Here, and Here
Temperatures
in eastern Bolivia fell to 0° Celsius. Fish in rivers that normally
flow at 20° C froze to death in water temperatures down to 6° C.
Millions of fish, turtles, reptiles, and birds have died, the river
waters are undrinkable, and the government closed them to fishing for at
least a year. Normally these winter cold snaps last for a few days at a
time. This “Surazos” (a cold wind from Argentina) lasted for 8 days.
The
total death toll among people and animals across Argentina, Uruguay,
Paraguay, and southern Brazil is rising. A meter of snow across
Patagonia and along the Andes is hampering communications. Many people
have died across southern South America, and the livestock toll is in
the millions. True numbers won’t be known until the snow melts.
Citrus and avocado crops in Chile have been damaged by frosts, and fruit exports may be reduced by 40%.
August 9, 2010, “Australians shiver through the coldest winter morning in 30 years.”
“Sydney
was blanketed in frost on Wednesday as the city shivered through the
coldest June morning in nearly 30 years, with temperatures at just 4C
(39F).” Here
Meanwhile, the Southern Ocean ice cover is 1.3
million square kilometers above the mean value (1979 to 2008, since
measurements began), and growing. This balances out the Arctic ice
cover, giving us a global ice cover of almost 20 million square
kilometers. See WUWT Ice Page Here.
These reports are from local
sources. The mainstream media rule seems to be “If it doesn’t support
our agenda, don’t report it.” For their practical purposes, the globe
stops at the equator. Not only do they shut out scientific dissent, but
also the cold hard facts from half the globe.
America’s New Coal Boom -- in spite of the Greenies
Utilities
across the USA are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will
cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of
climate-changing gases for years to come. An Associated Press
examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information
provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30
traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under
construction.
The construction wave stretches from Arizona to
Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing
public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil
fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf
oil spill and wars in the Middle East.
The expansion, the
industry's largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that
highly touted "clean coal" technology is still a long ways from becoming
a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that
proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month
scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition
from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.
"Building a coal-fired
power plant today is betting that we are not going to put a serious
financial cost on emitting carbon dioxide," said Severin Borenstein,
director of the Energy Institute at the University of
California-Berkeley. "That may be true, but unless most of the
scientists are way off the mark, that's pretty bad public policy."
Federal
officials have long struggled to balance coal's hidden costs against
its more conspicuous role in providing half the nation's electricity.
Hoping
for a technological solution, the Obama administration devoted $3.4
billion in stimulus spending to foster "clean-coal" plants that can
capture and store greenhouse gases. Yet new investments in traditional
coal plants total at least 10 times that amount — more than $35 billion.
Utilities
say they are clinging to coal because its abundance makes it cheaper
than natural gas or nuclear power and more reliable than intermittent
power sources such as wind and solar. Still, the price of coal plants is
rising and consumers in some areas served by the new facilities will
see their electricity bill rise by up to 30 percent.
Industry
representatives say those increases would be even steeper if utilities
switched to more expensive fuels or were forced to adopt
emission-reduction measures.
Approval of the plants has come from
state and federal agencies that do not factor in emissions of carbon
dioxide, considered the leading culprit behind global warming.
Scientists and environmentalists have tried to stop the coal rush with
some success, turning back dozens of plants through lawsuits and other
legal challenges.
As a result, current construction is far more
modest than projected a few years ago when 151 new plants were forecast
by federal regulators. But analysts say the projects that prevailed are
more than enough to ensure coal's continued dominance in the power
industry for years to come.
Sixteen large plants have fired up
since 2008 and 16 more are under construction, according to records
examined by the AP. Combined, they will produce an estimated 17,900
megawatts of electricity, sufficient to power up to 15.6 million homes —
roughly the number of homes in California and Arizona combined.
U.S. Elections: Republican Candidates Knock Global Warming
Fueled
by anti-Obama rhetoric and news articles purportedly showing scientists
manipulating their own data, Republicans running for the House, Senate
and governor’s mansions have gotten bolder in stating their doubts over
the well-established link between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and
global warming.
GOP climate skeptics have held powerful positions
on Capitol Hill in recent years, including the chairmanship of the
House Energy and Senate Environment panels. But they’ve typically been
among the minority. Now, they could form a key voting bloc, adding
insult to injury for climate advocates who failed to pass an energy bill
this year.
Environmental groups fear that adding more voices to
the skeptic camp could further polarize the debate and make it more
difficult at all levels of government to pass legislation curbing carbon
dioxide emissions, especially if coupled with the defeat of
standard-bearers such as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
Ron
Johnson, running against Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D), is the latest
in a line of Republicans to take a shot at the validity of global
warming. “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused
climate change," Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday.
"It's not proven by any stretch of the imagination."
Johnson told
the newspaper that the climate change theory was “lunacy” and blamed
changes in the Earth’s temperature to “sunspot activity or just
something in the geologic eons of time."
Similar remarks have
been heard from GOP candidates in all parts of the country even as
mainstream climate scientists defend their work from a steady line of
attack.
Four independent reviews have concluded that the
so-called “Climategate” e-mails stolen last fall from a United Kingdom
research unit showed nothing more than a frank discussion (sic) among
scientists working through large and complicated sets of data. And while
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted it erred in
its 2007 report by citing a report concluding Himalayan glaciers could
disappear by 2035, the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. organization said the
mistake didn’t undermine its larger body of work.
Former
Republican Rep. Steve Pearce, running for his old seat in southern New
Mexico, told POLITICO that climate scientists should be questioned more
thoroughly because of the stolen e-mails. “I think we ought to take a
look at whatever the group is that measures all this, the IPCC, they
don’t even believe the crap,” Pearce said in Artesia, N.M. “They’re the
ones who say in the e-mails we’ve got to worry about this, keep these
voices quiet. If they don’t believe it, why should the rest of be
penalized in our standard of living for something that can’t be
validated?”
Sharron Angle, the GOP opponent for Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid in Nevada, said on her website in June that she
thought legislation to curb greenhouse gases “is based on an
unscientific hysteria over the man-caused global warming hoax.”
Australian conservative leader still doubts planet is getting hotter
TONY
ABBOTT has restated his sceptical views on climate change, and
suggested the world may be getting cooler, as the Australian Academy of
Science released a new report warning of the future impact of global
warming.
The Opposition Leader said he accepted "that climate
change is real", but he did not back away from his view, based in part
on the work of the Australian climate sceptic Ian Plimer, that the world
is getting colder.
Asked by the ABC's Four Corners if he still
disputed that humans are responsible for climate change, Mr Abbott said:
"Sure, but that's not really relevant at the moment. We have agreed to
get a 5 per cent emissions reduction target." Graph
He
suggested he harboured doubts about the work of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body charged with collating
global warming research.
"I certainly think that there is a
credible scientific counterpoint but, in the end, I'm not going to win
an argument over the science, I'll leave that to the scientists," he
told Four Corners. "I have pointed out in the past that there was that
high year a few years ago, and … if you believe the various measuring
organisations, [the temperature] hasn't increased, but again the point
is not the science, the point is how should government respond and we
have a credible response that will achieve a 5 per cent reduction by
2020 and the government doesn't."
Mr Abbott was referring to
global temperatures in 1998, which coincided with a heat-inducing El
Nino cycle, and by some measures was slightly hotter than 2005.
Neither
the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, nor Mr Abbott, could say when
Australia's greenhouse gas emissions needed to peak if the country was
to achieve its minimum agreed emissions cut of 5 per cent by 2020.
The
Coalition has pledged to meet the commitment principally by paying
farmers to absorb more carbon dioxide into the soil, though it insists
that its payments do not constitute a "carbon price".
The Labor
Party will also attempt to soak up more carbon in the soil, but says its
preferred mechanism for cutting emissions is still an emissions trading
scheme, which it will consider introducing in 2013.
The renewed
argument over the science of climate change comes as a study of 300
federal, state and local government political leaders, by the University
of Queensland, suggests sharp differences in beliefs and understanding
around global warming between the Coalition and Labor parties.
Coalition
MPs were less likely to believe climate change is happening, and showed
less trust in scientists, although the results reflected only those who
decided to take part in the survey. Forty-one federal MPs, 101 state
MPs and 69 local government representatives took part.
The
results showed 38 per cent of Coalition politicians believed the world
was getting warmer because of human-induced carbon emissions, compared
with 57 per cent of non-aligned politicians, 89 per cent of Labor
politicians and 98 per cent of Greens.
"This difference is
unlikely to have occurred by chance," said Dr Kelly Fielding, of the
university's Institute for Social Science. "What it shows is that a much
higher proportion of Liberal-National politicians are uncertain in
their views, whereas on average the Labor politicians are more likely to
agree with the statements made by scientists."
AUSTRALIA'S GREEN PARTY ARE DESTRUCTIVE CRAZIES: A ROUNDUP
Four current articles below:
Australia's Green party is far-Leftist
The
big parties' panicked abandonment of climate change has effortlessly
transformed the Greens. They are now two days from winning more power
than they've ever dreamed of.
The Greens are almost certain to
win the balance of power in the Senate for the first time. This will
make them the arbiter of any legislative disagreement between Labor and
Liberal and put them in a prize negotiating position.
And the
betting markets make the Greens favourite to win their first seat in the
House of Representatives on Saturday, giving them power to propose
laws.
This is the Greens' big chance to go from fringe to
mainstream. So what is Brown's vision? The Greens have policies on a
great deal more than climate change.
Their tax policy, for
instance, prefers less tax from the GST and more from income taxes.
Specifically, it commits the party to raising the top income tax rate
from 45 per cent to 50 per cent. And it demands company tax rise from 30
per cent to 33 per cent.
Would Brown actively pursue these proposals, or are they dead letters, like Labor's long-ignored platform to socialise industry?
Brown
not only vigorously advanced the case for "a much more equitable tax
system" yesterday, he also pledged a cap on executive salaries of $5
million. And he promised to force a future Labor government to extract
an extra $2 billion in mining taxes to pay for education.
The
Greens, in other words, are unabashedly advocating a greater
redistribution of income. As opposition parties sniff power, they
usually soften radical policies and become more centrist. Not the
Greens.
Brown said he would "look at the imbalance in our trade
agreements". He attacked the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement and
signalled hostility to the agreements Australia is negotiating with
Japan and China.
The Greens support Labor's broadband network,
but want to go further. Where Labor will build the network, then
privatise it within five years, the Greens will seek to keep it in state
ownership permanently.
Taken together, the Greens are bringing
alive the old Labor commitment to redistributive socialism. And
yesterday Brown said it was actually redistribution of wealth - not
climate science - that was the reason he helped block the Rudd
government's emissions trading scheme.
He helped defeat
Australia's only realistic attempt at an ETS, he said, because Rudd's
proposed compensation for carbon emitters, "the biggest polluters," was
too much.
The Greens are often accused of being a watermelon
party - green on the outside but a socialist red in the middle. Not
true. The party's leader showed yesterday that it's actually more like a
tomato, red not just on the outside but all the way to the centre.
"The conscience-less dishonesty of the green movement"
This
is the chilling story of how green activists targeted and finally
brought down John Gay, the visionary former chairman of the Tasmanian
timber company Gunns, damaged the company and helped wreck the state
economy.
It contains a clear warning for the rest of Australia of
what lies in wait as emboldened environmental activists move on to new
bogus campaigns against their next targets: the "wild rivers" of Cape
York at the expense of indigenous enterprise, the fishing industry,
farming or, catastrophically, the coal industry.
In Gay's
downfall is everything you need to know about the conscience-less
dishonesty of the green movement, and how its war on progress is
camouflaged as concern for nature.
"I'm not bitter with the
company," says Gay, who resigned in May. "I had to leave Gunns because
the institutional investors were targeted by the greens and kept
pressuring me to resign, and I just wasn't prepared to put my wife and
two kids through any more [of the] thuggery in the green movement.
They've damaged Tasmania and did their best to damage my credibility."
The
third-generation Tasmanian sawmiller left school at 15 to work with his
father, before building his own sawmill and being headhunted at 28 by
Gunns, a family-owned timber milling and hardware store business in
Launceston then turning over about $10 million a year. He became the
managing director, transforming Gunns into a top 50 company with a
market capitalisation of $900 million by 2003, when it was one of the
best-performing companies on the stock exchange.
Gay bought the company back from the multinational Rio Tinto, becoming a hero of the working people of Tasmania.
But
the international green movement and the Australian Wilderness Society
fought a relentless campaign to bring the company to its knees and
destroy Gay. They let loose violent feral protesters who chained
themselves to trees and sabotaged logging equipment; protesters with
placards picketed the ANZ Bank, which had undertaken to finance Gay's
proposal for a pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, but pulled out at the last
minute.
And they had environmentalists in suits successfully
traduce Gay to cowardly institutional investors who earlier this year
dumped Gunn's shares, halving the value of the company in a week.
Greenies
in suits also went to Japan, destroying Gunn's markets for its
woodchips, threatening - in an oh-so-reasonable way - companies which
used pulp sourced from Tasmania's forests to make paper. Afraid their
brands would be trashed, Gunns' Japanese customers dropped Tasmania like
a hot potato.
Then there was the personal vilification. Gay
describes it as "torture" for his wife, Erica, and adult son and
daughter, with his home under assault two or three nights a week for
years - from smoke bombs under the house, stink bombs at the front door,
dead possums in the yard, people rattling the gates late at night and
screaming abuse from the street. His wife was spat at in the
supermarket and the Tasmanian media sat on the fence as a good man's
reputation was destroyed. "My wife and kids were tormented … I had to
put in a security system so my wife could feel safe," he says.
Today
Gay will say nothing bad about Gunns. But he must view with dismay what
has happened since he left, with its wineries and hardware stores sold
off at rock-bottom prices, and its capitulation to the green movement.
Like
any quasi-religious force, the environmentalists needed an arcadia to
save and a demon to fight. The cute island state and the "rapacious
logger" fitted the bill. Gay was a godsend to them. An unreconstructed
working man, who never completed high school and believed in honest work
and fair play, he saw the world as rational and straightforward, rather
than an insane place of spin, mirage and hidden agendas.
His
friend of 45 years, and a former director of Gunns and former Liberal
premier of Tasmania, Robin Gray, says: "John is a very, very decent
bloke, very generous, but he's been painted as a dreadful uncaring
person. "People who should know better were influenced … by green
activists … who went to the chief executive of the ANZ Bank, which had
given commitments to fund the pulp mill … The movement against him
finally cost him his job."
The former premier Paul Lennon says
the Tasmanian economy is "under extreme stress, the timber industry is
on its knees". "Unemployment in Tasmania is 6.3 per cent. When I was
in politics two years ago, it was 4 per cent. And we were one of the
fastest-growing places in the country, but Tasmania is small and
vulnerable to big shocks. We need projects like the pulp mill to
underpin the economy."
Lennon blames the then environment
minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for "sitting on his hands" over approval for
the pulp mill before the 2007 election, under the onslaught of a
campaign in his eastern suburbs Sydney seat of Wentworth by the
businessman Geoffrey Cousins, who appeared out of nowhere to wage a
virulent campaign against the mill. The delay, Lennon says, stopped the
pulp mill in its tracks. Gunns is now in closed-door negotiations with
the Wilderness Society over whether it will be allowed to continue with
the mill.
"Who is actually going to believe that environmental
management is going to be better in Indonesia or Malaysia," Lennon says.
The campaign "exposes the real agenda of Greens". "The Greens believe
in shrinking the economy. We've found in Tasmania [that] they always
find a way to oppose projects - they always try to slow down growth."
One
Tasmanian political insider says Gay's failure was that he was "out of
touch with the way to operate a modern business". "He's a lovely bloke
but he didn't have the skills or the layers of bureaucracy, or the PR
people you need to manage the campaign for the pulp mill.
"He
just thought a pulp mill was a good idea for Tasmania. It would create
jobs, and he was going to build the best, most environmentally friendly
one in the world. He couldn't understand why people were putting
obstacles in his path."
Gay thought truth would win out. Now he
lies in bed at night and worries about the logging contractors he
couldn't save, who borrowed money to buy equipment and have lost their
livelihood.
Gay refused to kowtow to irrational green bullying, and his demise stands as an object lesson.
What
the green movement has done to Tasmania's timber industry, it will do
to the rest of the country. Those purported 13 per cent of people
planning to vote for the Greens on Saturday had better understand
exactly what they are voting for. It's not about saving trees. It's
about "moving backwards" to the dark ages.
Push to silence the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney after his criticism of Greenies
If a leading churchman cannot offer an interpretation of his own church's doctrine, we are back in Tudor times
The recent stoush [metaphorical punchup] between Cardinal George Pell
and the Australian Greens prompts the question “Where is the Australian
Tax Office when you need them?” According to Derek Mortimer, principal
of DF Mortimer & Associates, a boutique law firm working exclusively
for Not for Profit organisations, if the ATO cannot effectively monitor
and regulate charities, it fails them.
Currently the ATO serves
as a de facto regulator of charities. Through its tax ruling system,
churches and other charities are prohibited by the ATO from engaging in
party political activities like encouraging the public to vote against a
particular party. There is a good reason for this prohibition.
Charities need to keep their independence. The values and policies of
political parties and charities can align sometimes, but not always.
Charities
that take political sides can find their values compromised. In my
opinion, this has happened to Cardinal Pell and the church he
represents. In apparent defiance of the ATO’s own tax rulings Cardinal
Pell is reported as saying the Greens are “anti-Christian”. But as the
Greens have pointed out, at least some of their values and policies
align squarely with Christians.
There appears to be no immediate,
public effort by the ATO to restrain Cardinal Pell from making party
political statements. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect the ATO to do
so. Yet the ATO has been travelling through the court system against a
self described “activist” organisation called “Aid/Watch Incorporated”.
The ATO says this organisation has a political purpose and cannot be
charitable. The High Court heard the case in June and judgment will be
handed down later this year. The independence of the ATO becomes
compromised where it acts against one charitable organisation but does
not appear to act against another.
Nor does the ATO have a formal complaints process for the public to complain about a charity’s apparent breach of tax rulings.
In
Britain a member of the public can lodge a complaint about a charity
engaging in party political activities with the independent charity
regulator, the Charity Commission. The Commission may send the charity a
warning letter (in the nature of a gentle reminder of obligations) and
can also commence a more formal regulatory case report and in worse
cases, revoke charity registration and consequent fiscal privileges .
The Commission has been publicly active in the lead up to the recent
British general elections, to investigate and rule on complaints about
charities engaging in party political activities.
In January this
year the Productivity Commission restated what the Australian charity
sector has for many years been calling for; some form of charity
regulator independent from the ATO. The ATO provides many useful
services to charities, but if the ATO cannot effectively monitor and
regulate charities, it fails them.
If
the Greenies dropped their objection to "sprawl", their insistence on
"dumb growth" and their opposition to land use changes, it might be
different
ONE of the current social themes is that the
consumer is to blame for wanting a big home. The new social order -
excuse me if I get on my hobby horse for a second or two - wants us to
buy something smaller and magically make our housing problems disappear.
Sadly,
too few of those who clog up the blogosphere with urban commentary
understand the economics of new housing or the decision-making process
of a rational buyer.
Recent statistics published by CommSec show
that Australia has the largest homes in the world, with the average
floor area of a new dwelling (including townhouses but excluding
apartments) topping 214sq m, up from 150sq m just 25 years ago.
The
average floor area of new free-standing houses also set a record at
245sq m. Our homes are much larger than those in Europe and even many
American cities.
Why has this occurred? It is simply economics.
The actual land component of a new house-and-land package is very high
and fixed. The land usually costs two-thirds of the total purchase
price. This is particularly the case for basic or entry level new
housing.
For example, the land component of a basic $375,000
house-and-land package in Queensland could cost as much as $250,000. In
contrast, a 150sq m three-bedroom base level house on that land would
cost about $135,000 or about $2500/sq m as a total price (including the
price of the land).
Now a larger 250sq m four-bedroom house with a
study might cost $175,000, making the total package cost $425,000. The
buyer gets 100sq m of extra house for just $50,000 more. The total end
price per square metre has now dropped to $1700, or 30 per cent less.
Here
is the real rub. Assuming that the buyer can afford to pay the extra
deposit and fund a $425,000 house-and-land package, all it costs -
assuming a 10 per cent deposit and using today's rates - is an extra $10
a day in mortgage payments.
The new home buyer can now own a
home that is two-thirds larger for just $70 a week. To upsize the house,
as outlined in the example above, would cost the buyer an extra $3640 a
year.
Given the high cost of land in and around our capital
cities, the trend towards larger new homes makes economic sense.
Consumers are just acting in their own interests and are making rational
decisions to choose a larger and more valuable home for what is a small
additional out-of-pocket expense.
Unless there are real
economies in the land content, for example a plentiful supply of
subdivided land to keep land prices keen, building a small house on a
more traditional-sized suburban block of land is often not the best
value for money.
A paper published
yesterday in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans, confirms
other studies of tide gauge records which show that there has been no
statistically significant acceleration in sea level rise over the past
100+ years, in contrast to statements of the IPCC and Al Gore. Sea
levels have been rising naturally since the peak of the last major ice
age 20,000 years ago, and the rate of rise began to decelerate about
8,000 years ago:
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 115, C08013, 15 PP., 2010
Reconstruction of regional mean sea level anomalies from tide gauges using neural networks
Authors: Manfred Wenzel, Jens Schröter
The
20th century regional and global sea level variations are estimated
based on long-term tide gauge records. For this the neural network
technique is utilized that connects the coastal sea level with the
regional and global mean via a nonlinear empirical relationship. Two
major difficulties are overcome this way: the vertical movement of tide
gauges over time and the problem of what weighting function to choose
for each individual tide gauge record. Neural networks are also used to
fill data gaps in the tide gauge records, which is a prerequisite for
our analysis technique. A suite of different gap-filling strategies is
tested which provides information about stability and variance of the
results.
The global mean sea level for the period January 1900
to December 2006 is estimated to rise at a rate of 1.56 ± 0.25 mm/yr
which is reasonably consistent with earlier estimates, but we do not find significant acceleration.
The
regional mean sea level of the single ocean basins show mixed long-term
behavior. While most of the basins show a sea level rise of varying
strength there is an indication for a mean sea level fall in the
southern Indian Ocean. Also for the the tropical Indian and the South
Atlantic no significant trend can be detected. Nevertheless, the South
Atlantic as well as the tropical Atlantic are the only basins that show
significant acceleration. On shorter timescales, but longer than the
annual cycle, the basins sea level are dominated by oscillations with
periods of about 50–75 years and of about 25 years. Consequently, we
find high (lagged) correlations between the single basins.
Note:
The 1.56 mm/yr non-accelerating rate of sea level rise would result in
sea levels 6 inches higher than the present in 100 years. The
oscillations noted in this study correspond to the typical full and
half-cycle lengths of the natural Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the
natural 60-year climate cycle. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation warm
phase has been shown to produce a marked temporary rise in global mean
sea levels.
Once again, there's no such thing as a happy Greenie
California
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set an ambitious plan that requires a
third of the state's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.
But a fight over where to build large clean-energy projects is slowing
the green revolution.
One of these battlegrounds is Panoche
Valley, ringed by rolling, scrub-covered hills. Located in California's
rural San Benito County, the area was used mostly for cattle grazing,
and it has escaped the notice of many Californians. Until now.
Michael
Peterson, CEO of Solargen Energy, was drawn to this slice of Central
Valley ranchland because it gets almost as much sun as the scorching
Mojave Desert. This valley seemed less controversial than the Mojave,
which has become a nightmare for many solar entrepreneurs because of its
protected national monuments and desert tortoises. For Peterson, the
Panoche Valley seems perfect for large solar projects.
"When we
had an engineer come who'd built a lot of different solar [projects]
around [the region], we took him down to the property. And his comment
was, 'Wow. God made this to be a solar farm,' " Peterson says, laughing.
Peterson
wants to build one of the nation's biggest solar facilities of its
kind. It would power about 120,000 homes. Another benefit of the
project: Huge transmission lines already run right through Panoche
Valley, making it unnecessary to build costly new power lines.
"It's key. It's everything," he says. "If you don't have it, the land is only as good as the ability to connect to the power." More In The Series
So
far, five cattle ranchers have agreed to sell their land to Peterson's
company, but not everyone thinks Solargen's plan is such a green idea.
"They
would like to build an industrial project that extends the entire
length of the valley," says Kim Williams, who moved to the Panoche
Valley about four years ago to run an organic egg business called Your
Family Farm. "Once you take the vegetation off the soil, the high winds
are just going to be whipping up the topsoil and creating dust."
Williams
is among several critics, including local chapters of the Audubon
Society, that say the project would ruin the character of the valley and
harm wildlife. Hints of lawsuits and requests to extend the
environmental review process by some of these critics have slowed down
Solargen's application.
It turns out this valley floor is teaming
with creatures — some of them, like the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, are
endangered. Solargen's investors have spent more than $7 million
gathering information for a required environmental impact report. They
have hired more than 20 biologists to conduct wildlife surveys.
Mike
Westphal, an ecologist for the Bureau of Land Management, gives a brief
overview of the Panoche Valley site and proposed plans for a solar
farm.
Solargen has offered to buy another 11,000 acres adjacent
to the proposed solar array. The idea is that animals, threatened by the
project, could relocate to this land. But critics like Williams don't
buy that argument. "It would be impossible to ask the animals living on
the floor to just move," Williams says.
Time Running Out
Similar
debates over land use are playing out across California, and that has
created a juggernaut of big solar and wind proposals — more than 200 are
waiting approval. Michael Picker, the governor's renewable energy
adviser, is trying to hurry the process in order to obtain billions of
dollars in subsidies.
"Everybody wanted to step up the pace in
order to capture these federal stimulus dollars and to leverage the
private investment from banks and from other kinds of investment," he
says. But time is running out — to qualify, projects must break ground
before the end of this year.
Britain's green taxes could treble by 2020, costing taxpayers more than £16billion a year
Taxes
to pay for contentious climate change policies are set to treble over
the next decade, soaring to more than £16billion a year. The hike is
the equivalent of 4p on the current rate of income tax, a report from
think tank Policy Exchange claimed.
By 2020 the tax take from
green levies will be roughly equivalent to total public spending in
England on both the police and fire services, the figures show.
Householders
will pay £4.3billion in taxes on their energy bills by 2015 – more than
double the £2billion they will pay this year. This will soar to
£6.4billion by 2020, or around £280 for every household.
Firms will also be hit hard, with energy prices rising from £3.7billion to £9.9billion in the next decade.
The
think tank warned that poorer households tended to spend more on energy
so would have more of their meagre income swallowed up by taxes levied
on household bills.
The policies which are driving up tax are
intended to support either carbon emissions reduction or the promotion
of renewable energy.
But the report argues many of them do little
to curb global warming because they pay householders to produce power
uneconomically through technologies such as solar panels.
Policy
Exchange’s head of environment and energy, Dr Simon Less, said: ‘Climate
policies need to be much more cost-effective, to maximise the impact of
available resources on carbon reduction.’
A Department for
Energy and Climate Change spokesman said: ‘We need an energy mix which
is as affordable as possible for householders and avoids the UK becoming
dependant on imports and volatile fossil fuel prices.’
More than half of Britain's wind farms have been built where there is not enough wind
It's
not exactly rocket science – when building a wind farm, look for a site
that is, well, quite windy. But more than half of Britain’s wind farms
are operating at less than 25 per cent capacity. In England, the
figure rises to 70 per cent of onshore developments, research shows.
Experts
say that over-generous subsidies mean hundreds of turbines are going up
on sites that are simply not breezy enough. Britain’s most feeble wind
farm is in Blyth Harbour in Northumberland, where the nine turbines
lining the East Pier reach a meagre 4.9 per cent of their capacity.
Another
at Chelker reservoir in North Yorkshire operates at only 5.3 per cent
of its potential, the analysis of 2009 figures provided by energy
regulator Ofgem found. The ten turbines at Burton Wold in
Northamptonshire have been running for just three years, but achieved
only 19 per cent capacity. Europe’s biggest wind farm, Whitelee, near
Glasgow, boasts 140 turbines. But last year they ran at less than a
quarter of their capacity.
The revelation that so many wind farms
are under-performing will be of interest to those who argue that they
are simply expensive eyesores.
Michael Jefferson, the professor
of international business and sustainability who carried out the
analysis, says financial incentives designed to help Britain meet green
energy targets are encouraging firms to site their developments badly.
Under the controversial Renewable Obligation scheme, British consumers
pay £1billion a year in their fuel bills to subsidise the drive towards
renewable energy.
Turbines operating well under capacity are
still doing well out of the scheme, but Professor Jefferson, of the
London Metropolitan Business School, wants the cash to be reserved for
the windiest sites. He said: ‘There is a political motivation to drive
non-fossil fuel energy, which I very much respect, but we need more
focus.’
He suggests that the full subsidy be restricted to
turbines which achieve capacity of 30 per cent or more – managed by just
eight of England’s 104 on-shore wind farms last year. Those that fall
below 25 per cent should not be eligible for any subsidy. Professor
Jefferson said: ‘That would focus the mind to put them in a sensible
place.’
Britain has 2,906 wind turbines spread over 264 sites.
But a further 7,000 are planned for the next 12 years to meet European
targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Nick Medic, of
Renewable UK, which represents the wind industry, said talk of
efficiency was ‘unhelpful’. He added: ‘Other types of energy, from
hydro to nuclear, operate at 50 per cent efficiency at best due to
factors including maintenance shut downs and fluctuating demands.’
180 degree turn: Now global warming causes FEWER hurricanes!
The plain fact is that it's all speculation
Recent
research shows that the color of the ocean can have a big influence on
the occurence of hurricanes -- the greener the ocean, the more
hurricanes. And that's a good thing. The ocean's tint comes from the
presence of chlorophyll, the green pigment in phytoplankton that helps
the organisms convert sunlight into food, and thus forms the foundation
of the oceanic food chain, as well as a prime environment for
hurricanes. However, as we recently pointed out in another study,
warming temperatures of the oceans are having a negative impact on
phytoplankton populations, which have dropped 40% over the last 60
years. And that means fewer hurricanes as well.
According to a
press release from the American Geophysical Union, "In a simulation of
such a change [in color of the ocean] in one region of the North
Pacific, the study finds that hurricane formation decreases by 70
percent. That would be a big drop for a region that accounts for more
than half the world's reported hurricane-force winds."
Anand
Gnanadesikan, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New
Jersey, and his team are publishing the study in the next issue of
Geophysical Research Letters. They describe how a decrease in
chlorophyll concentration, and thus a drop in the greenish hue of the
ocean, directly causes a drop in the formation of hurricanes in that
area.
The discovery occurred when the team used computer
simulations of real conditions of chlorophyll concentrations in the
North Pacific, and simulations where chlorophyll concentrations in the
subtropical gyre of the of the North Pacific were set to zero. They
found that the absence of chlorophyll in the subtropical gyre modified
air circulation and heat distribution patterns enough that hurricane
formations were impacted. Outside the gyre, hurricanes increased by 20%,
yet there was a 70% decrease in storms further north -- more hurricanes
would hit the Philippines and Vietnam, but fewer would make landfall in
South China and Japan.
Climate Change In Germany Has Become “A Loser Topic”
I couldn’t help but to relish the story that follows.
The
German European Institute For Climate and Environment (EIKE) brings our
attention to a report by the publicly funded NDR German television news
show Panorama concerning the state of climate science and politics
today in Germany. If you’re a climate activist, things just couldn’t be
worse.
In summary the topic of climate change in Germany has gone
far beyond its shelf-life. It is used up and no longer draws a bit of
interest from the public. As the clip shows, the German public has grown
tired of the constant barrage of climate alarmism, and is now
über-bored by it. Editors have since taken climate news off the front
pages. The public doesn’t want to hear it anymore, editors fret.
At
0:36 of the clip, normal citizens are asked about climate change. The
reaction: they couldn’t care less about it. Indeed some even say warmer
is better. Climate change? No worries at all!
The depth of
public apathy has left climate activists and experts like Professor doom
& gloom Hans Joachim Schellnhuber frustrated, depressed and
resigned. Schellnhuber at the 1:39 mark: "Just a few years ago it was so
that when a meteorological extreme occurred, the phones would be
ringing off the hook. Today hardly anyone calls; climate change has
quasi become taboo."
Nobody wants to talk about it. And after the
disaster that was Copenhagen, neither do the political leaders. In
Schellnhuber’s view, the optimism in achieving a climate treaty is gone.
That was clearly visible at the recent UN Climate Conference in Bonn.
Says Karsten Sach, leader of the German negotiating delegation:
"Everyone knows we’ve reached a dead-end".
The media has lost
interest in reporting on the constant failure by policymakers. At the
3.56 mark, accompanied by gloomy music, a chart shows how the number of
reports on climate change appearing in three major centre-left
newspapers has dwindled. The hype is over. The public is fatigued, fed
up, and disinterested.
Editor Dagmar Dehmer of Berlin’s Der
Tagesspiegel says somberly: "Editors know the topic is important, but
it’s not topic no. 1 at the moment. Climate is no longer on the front
pages, and is not viewed as an earth-moving topic."
The video clip then moves to a car-tuning meet, where one auto-tuning enthusiast says: "Nobody cares about it".
And
what about Chancellor Angela Merkel? Climate change has become a thorn
in her side. She associates the issue with failure and hopelessness.
Says Tagesspiegel editor Dagmar Dehmer at the 5:38 mark: "Climate
change has become a loser topic. And Angela Merkel wants nothing to do
with it".
Yet, Merkel’s minister of environment insists that climate change is an important topic for the future.
For
the future, yes. But not for today. The report ends with relaxed
vacationers chuckling when asked by the journalists about the threats of
climate change.
Prominent Warmist "scientist" Mark Serreze stated: "As the climate warms, the summer melt season lengthens”. BUT:
Summer
has come to a premature and frosty end at Santa’s workshop. It has
been the coldest summer on record north of 80N, and temperatures have
dropped below freezing ahead of the average date. The entire ice
covered region is now below freezing.
It also appears that the
summer melt season will be the shortest on record. The maximum was
reached very late in March, and it appears likely that we are headed for
an early minimum.
Mark Serreze at NSIDC has stated: "As the
climate warms, the summer melt season lengthens …”. He was also
reported as saying: "Mark Serreze of the center forecast the ice decline
this year (2010) would even break 2007’s record."
Another
interesting fact is that we are almost certain to see a large increase
in the amount of multi-year ice (MYI) next year. The reason being that
almost all of the 1-2 year old ice (turquoise) in the NSIDC map below
will become classified as MYI next spring.
We have seen a remarkably rapid recovery from the 2008 low volume.
PIOMAS
continues to report record low volumes of ice, despite all evidence to
the contrary. The image below shows in red how far off the mark their
August 15 forecast was. Their modeling error will get much worse over
the next two weeks – because they model much of the thick multi-year ice
in the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Basin as only a few tens of centimetres
thick.
With the cold temperatures, ice area loss has almost
stopped. However, ice extent continues to drop – because the Arctic
Oscillation has turned negative and winds are compacting the ice towards
the pole. This bodes well for continued growth of ice in 2011.
PIPS shows average ice thickness increasing, due to the compression of the ice.
There
has not been a lot of ice loss during August. The modified NSIDC image
below shows in red, areas that have lost ice since August 1. Note that
the Greenland Sea appears to have lost ice. This is due to the fact that
there has been very little transport out of the Arctic Basin through
the Fram Strait, which again bodes well for ice gain in 2011.
The modified NSIDC image below shows ice gain since 2007.
NSIDC
maps continue to show more gain (16%) than their graphs (10%.) I have
not been able to get a satisfactory explanation from them about the
cause of that discrepancy. DMI shows a 25% gain in 30% concentration ice
over 2007.
Academic theories about the Northwest Passage becoming a commercial shipping opportunity appear pretty clueless.
“The
plans that you make can change completely,” he says. This uncertainty,
delay, liability, increased insurance and other costs of using the
Northwest Passage are likely to deter commercial shipping here. A ship
with a reinforced hull could possibly make it intact through the
passage. But if it got stuck, it would cost thousands of dollars for an
icebreaker like the Amundsen to come to the rescue. So even if the
Northwest Passage is less ice-choked than before, the route may not
become a shipping short-cut in the near future, as some have predicted.
The
South Pole will almost certainly set a record for most sea ice this
season. It is almost there, and there are still several months of growth
remaining.
Warmist scientist admits he can't prove what he believes
Today,
the New York Times takes its turn with extreme weather and global
warming. The article has this wonderful quote from Gavin Schmidt, a
climate scientist at NASA and blogger at Real Climate: "If you ask me
as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate
change, the answer is yes. If you ask me as a scientist whether I have
proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet".
This neatly sums
up the first of two reasons why I think that the current debate over
whether greenhouse gas emissions caused/exacerbated/influenced recent
disasters around the world is a fruitless debate. It is not a debate
that can be resolved empirically, but rather depends upon hunches,
speculation and beliefs. Debates that cannot be resolved empirically
necessarily involve extra-scientific factors. There is nothing unusual
such "post-normal" situations, as they are common, but like Gavin
Schmidt we should be clear about when we are in such a context.
While
I have no illusions that the inane debate over causality of specific
physical events will continue as long there is weather, there should be
no ambiguity in the fact that researchers who have looked for a signal
of increasing GHGs in increasing disaster losses (whether measured in
dollars or in lives) have yet to see such a signal. It would be
scientifically incorrect to claim that GHGs have been shown to account
for any portion of the damage or suffering resulting from recent
events....
The debate over global warming and extremes has been
well characterized as "climate porn." And like porn it is not going
away anytime soon.
Russia is on
fire, and Pakistan is under water. Scientific studies have not convinced
the climate change-deniers to act to save the planet. Perhaps an
imaginative game change is what is called for. "Global weirding" is one
such imaginative breakthrough, but let's not rule out the fire and flood
imagery of Armageddon, especially as apocalyptic imagery can well
symbolize the mounting security threat nations face because of the
social, political and economic chaos of accelerating climate change.....
While
weird weather comes and goes, what's really very weird is that the
floods in Pakistan and the Russian fires may even be connected.
Meteorologists who are observing the atmosphere above the northern
hemisphere are blaming an unusual pattern in the jet stream. The jet
stream stalled, allowing weather systems to sit still. "Temperatures
rocketed and rainfall reached extremes."
But what might really
break through in terms of the popular imagination connecting fire and
flood and mounting threat from world-wide chaos is biblical apocalyptic.
These events can been seen as signs of a global environmental
catastrophe of biblical proportions. Revelation 8: 12 tells of the
"woes" to come at the apocalypse; the text sounds like it was taken from
the weather report in western Russia where fires are devastating the
country's wheat crop. When the first trump sounds, "there came hail and
fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of
the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all
the green grass was burned up."
A fifth of Pakistan is under
water, and floods are ravaging parts of Asia. Rampaging floods make
their appearance in the apocalypse, pouring out death on the hapless
inhabitants of the earth. "Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water
like a river." Rev. 12: 15
The 'world-ending' imagery of the
earth burning up and snakes spewing water over the land is judgment for
the sinful acts of humankind. Failure to act decisively to stop, and
perhaps even, over time, reverse the worst effects of global weirding is
sin, pure and simple. And the earth will exact revenge for this
desecration. In fact, already is exacting such revenge.
The resulting chaos is a huge and potentially catastrophic security threat. It's positively apocalyptic.
Stephen
Pax Leonard will soon swap the lawns, libraries and high tables of
Cambridge University for three months of darkness, temperatures as low
as -40C and hunting seals for food with a spear. But the academic
researcher, who leaves Britain this weekend, has a mission: to take the
last chance to document the language and traditions of an entire
culture.
"I'm extremely excited but, yes, also apprehensive,"
Leonard said as he made the final preparations for what is, by anyone's
standards, the trip of a lifetime.
Leonard, an anthropological
linguist, is to spend a year living with the Inughuit people of
north-west Greenland, a tiny community whose members manage to live a
similar hunting and gathering life to their ancestors. They speak a
language – the dialect is called Inuktun – that has never fully been
written down, and they pass down their stories and traditions orally.
"Climate
change means they have around 10 or 15 years left," said Leonard. "Then
they'll have to move south and in all probability move in to modern
flats." If that happens, an entire language and culture is likely to
disappear.
There is no Inughuit written literature but a very
strong and "distinctive, intangible cultural heritage", according to
Leonard. "If their language dies, their heritage and identity will die
with it. The aim of this project is to record and describe it and then
give it back to the communities themselves in a form that future
generations can use and understands."
The Inughuits thought they
were the world's only inhabitants until an expedition led by the
Scottish explorer John Ross came across them in 1818.
Unlike
other Inuit communities they were not significantly influenced by the
arrival of Christianity in Greenland – so they retain elements of a much
older, shamanic culture – and their life is not very different now to
how it always has been. Many of the men spend weeks away from home
hunting seals, narwhal, walruses, whales and other mammals. And while
they have tents, they still build igloos when conditions get really bad.
Their language is regarded as something of a linguistic "fossil" and one of the oldest and most "pure" Inuit dialects.
NZ sceptics launch legal challenge over climate change data
And big science replies with its usual assertions
SCIENTISTS
have hit back at climate change sceptics, with a paper affirming the
case that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main
cause of warming. The Australian Academy of Science yesterday went on
the front foot to clear up confusion after challenges to warming
theories.
It came as New Zealand's National Institute of Water
and Atmospheric Research faced a legal challenge by sceptics group
Climate Science Coalition. The coalition has launched high court action
over the institute's climate data.
Academy past president Kurt
Lambeck said the scientific statement aimed to boost climate change
understanding. The role of CO2 in the atmosphere was well understood
and unless greenhouse gas emissions were reduced, an upward trend in
global temperatures would continue...
Scientists say it is
important to have debate on climate change, but spurious attacks were
taking up an increasing amount of time to debunk.
In NZ, the
coalition's statement of claim calls for the country's temperature
record to be set aside and for NIWA to produce a "full and accurate"
temperature record.
NZ Climate Change Research Institute senior
researcher Professor Andy Reisinger said NIWA had checked its records,
validated long-term trends with thousands of meteorological stations
around the world and answered innumerable queries.
"The coalition
has not put forward any clear and consistent scientific arguments
against this local or global temperature trend; has not published its
views in scientific peer-reviewed journals; has not disclosed its own
scientific methods by which it claims to show that there has been a
cooling rather than warming; and its members have little credibility,"
Prof Reisinger said.
"The High Court action will cost taxpayer money to defend the obvious against the obscure and ridiculous."
Massey
University's Ralph Sims said he had yet to find a recent peer-reviewed
paper authored or co-authored on climate science by coalition
commentator Bryan Leyland.
Beaten by an amateur who gathers his own facts and sticks to them
The
Met Office's forecasts were guaranteed to drive Simon Cansick and his
neighbours into a deep depression. It seemed the professional weather
experts could never get it right.
So 47-year-old Mr Cansick
decided to see if he could do better himself. He bought his own weather
station, positioned it on the roof and linked it to the internet.
He
provides live information - automatically updated every three seconds -
24 hours a day. And it has proved so accurate that farmers in the
North Yorkshire village of Duggleby, near Malton, are ignoring the Met
Office forecasts in favour of his readings.
'As a country we're
obsessed by the weather so we naturally check the forecast every day and
plan things round it, only to find out that the forecasters got it
wrong,' he said.
'It just ends up spoiling the day. A lot of the
information collated by the Met Office for this area is based on what is
happening in Scarborough, which is by the sea.
Mr Cansick, an
accountant, spent £1,000 on his meteorological equipment. He now
provides data for wind speed, gust speed, temperature, rainfall and
cloud height. The website, www.dugglenet.org, offers predictions for
the next 24 hours, graphs on recent conditions and even historical data.
He
also plans to set up a service which measures and records soil
temperatures - vital information for arable and horticultural producers.
And he hopes to extend his weather predictions from one day to five.
Sadly for the rest of the country, however, he confines his forecasts to within a ten-mile radius.
'Certainly,
in terms of the correct weather conditions, our readings are more
accurate than the published ones,' said Mr Cansick, who lives with his
wife Emma, 34, and their 11-month-old daughter Emily.
'The local
farmers used to check the Met Office forecasts every day. 'If it was
due to be nice and sunny they'd head down to the fields, get the combine
harvester out and then, more often than not, it would pour down with
rain. 'As a result their entire day was interrupted and ruined because
of a dodgy weather forecast.'
Unsurprisingly, Mr Cansick's
efforts received a frosty reception from the Met Office. Forecaster
Charles Powell said: 'Every observation we have has a standard location
where we can get consistency of accuracy and reliability.
'Putting
measuring instruments on your roof isn't technically the best place to
have them because they might absorb more sunlight and therefore record a
temperature a few degrees hotter than it actually is.'
Yet they are central to the Warmist argument. No "hockeystick" without them
A
reader draws attention to an important study on proxy reconstructions
(McShane and Wyner 2010) in the Annals of Applied Statistics (one of the
top statistical journals):
A Statistical Analysis of Multiple
Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over
the Last 1000 Years Reliable?
It states in its abstract:
We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly
better than random series generated independently of temperature.
Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at
predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts.
Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and
sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from
contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to
predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years
ago.
This should knock Warmism into a cocked hat -- but it won't, of course
The Week That Was (To August 14, 2010)
Excerpt from Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Last
weekend a major ice berg broke off the Petermann Glacier on Greenland
about 620 miles south of the North Pole. This is the largest ice berg to
break off from Greenland in 48 years. Initial reports did not attribute
this event to “global warming” and Professor Andreas Muenchow of the
University of Delaware, who has been studying this glacier noted it had
been growing for the past 7 to 8 years.
However, almost immediately some climate scientists were informing Congress that this was only the beginning. According to Professor Richard Alley of Penn State,
we may pass a ‘tipping point’ in ten years and a rise in temperatures
of 2 to 7 degrees C would wipe out Greenland’s ice sheet and sea levels
will rise be some 23 feet (3 meters) submerging coastal cities. (Please
see "Greenland Glacier Calving and Sea Level” by Nils-Axel Morner. Dr.
Morner points out that this rate of sea level rise is many times greater
than what occurred with the great ice of the Northern Hemisphere
melted. The referenced article also points out that according to ice
core borings, in the past 10,000 years Greenland has been as much as 2.5
°C warmer than today.
Also perplexing is that the ice cores show
the current temperature is almost minus 31°C. A warming of 7°C would
bring it to minus 24°C, hardly the melting point of ice.
Book of the Week: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science
by Ian Plimer exemplifies why so few geologists are on the great global
warming express. By what some consider a slight of hand, the vaunted
Summary for Policymakers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) covers the carbon cycle for the past 50 years of the
earth’s climate history. Plimer covers the carbon cycle for past 4,000
million years. Changes in the sun, earth, ice, water, and air of earth’s
climate history are detailed in Heaven and Earth. Fiery volcanoes,
slush ball earth, drastic changes in the carbon dioxide / oxygen
composition of the atmosphere are all part of the remarkable tapestry of
the history of this planet. Yet, life formed, changed it, and survived.
Perhaps
Australia’s pre-eminent academic geologist, Plimer exposes the weak
physical evidence of the IPCC in claiming that man is causing
unprecedented and dangerous “global warming.” which, by focusing on the
past 50 years, diverts attention from major inconsistencies in this
hypothesis. The IPCC cannot explain that ice ages existed when the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was many times greater
than today and many times greater than man could possibly make it by
burning fossil fuels. The IPCC cannot explain why in the past 10,000
years the earth experienced periods warmer than today even though the
IPCC asserts that carbon dioxide was roughly stable until the 20th
Century.
During times of high carbon dioxide concentrations, life
flourished. It did not stagnate or was threatened as the IPCC suggests.
Plimer demolishes the fear due jour by US EPA and NOAA claiming “ocean
acidification” from human carbon dioxide emissions will destroy much of
ocean life. He describes oceans as complex chemical solutions in rough
balance and that sea floor rocks and sediments of the earth are an
important part of this balance which makes the oceans alkaline. [EPA
experiments of dropping hydrochloric acid into sea water do not capture
this vital balance.] As Plimer describes, millions of years of undersea
volcanic activity emitting massive quantities of sulfuric acid and
carbon dioxide directly into the oceans have failed to acidify them and
man’s carbon dioxide emissions will not. [Side note: The volcanic hot
deep sea vents that are rich in sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide feed a
form of life that is dependent on chemosynthesis rather than
photosynthesis.]
Although not for the casual reader, Heaven and
Earth reveals much of what is ignored in commonly expressed climate
science and is important for serious study of this complex subject.
The State of Earth's Climate 2009: How can so many people be so wrong?
Guest editorial by Sherwood Idso, Keith Idso, and Craig Idso
In a "Highlights" report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's State of the Climate in 2009
document, which was prepared under the direction of the U.S. National
Climatic Data Center, we can read the principal findings of what the
document describes as the work of "more than 300 scientists from 48
countries." Their primary conclusion, as stated in the Report's first
paragraph, is that "global warming is undeniable," and the Report goes
on from there to describe "how we know the world has warmed." But this,
and all that follows, tells us next to nothing about what has caused the
warming, which is the crux of the whole contentious matter.
The
Report next states, for example, that "recent studies show the world's
oceans are heating up," which is fine; but then -- as if hoping no one
will question them -- the Report says the oceans are warming, "as they
absorb most of the extra heat being added to the climate system from the
build-up of heat-trapping gases," which contention is far from a proven
fact, and is -- in fact -- merely an hypothesis .... and a bad one at
that, as we shall soon see.
Another fault of the Report is its
hyping of "melting Arctic sea ice," while it remains silent on the state
of Antarctic sea ice, which has been doing just the opposite as it has
grown in extent.
Likewise, a major inconsistency of the Report
is its stating, with respect to temperature, that "a particular year can
experience record-breaking highs and lows in any given location,"
while, "as a whole, global climate continues to warm." This is very
true; and it can also do so while, as a whole, global climate cools or
remains unchanged.
And it implies the same thing for all types
of weather phenomena (such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc.), which
means that the occurrence of any unusually dramatic weather phenomenon
in any "particular year" should imply nothing about the long-term trend
of that phenomenon or the presumed trajectory of the global climate
within which it is embedded.
Yet the Report goes on to describe
six such extreme events that occurred in the "particular year" of 2009,
which would have to have been done for no other reason than to imply
that these weather extremes were caused by global warming, which flies
in the face of their earlier contention that record-breaking low
temperatures in any year say nothing about the long-term thermal
tendency of the planet.
Last of all, the Report states that
"people have spent thousands of years building society for one climate
and now a new one is being created -- one that's warmer and more
extreme," which leads us to wonder ....
How could more than 300
scientists from 48 countries possibly be so wrong? Any student of
history and palaeoclimate well knows that earth's climate has changed
dramatically over the past "thousands of years." During the central
portion of the current interglacial period, for example, many parts of
the planet were a few to several degrees Centigrade warmer than they
currently are.
And only a thousand years ago, the Medieval Warm
Period was holding sway. Although many of the scientists of Climategate
infamy tried mightily to make that period of warmth "go away," the
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has for quite
some time now posted a review of a different research project every
single week that testifies to the reality of the Medieval Warm Period.
And
that ever-growing body of research is demonstrating beyond any doubt
that there was a several-hundred-year interval of warmth back then that
was at many different times (stretching from decades to centuries), and
in numerous places (throughout the entire world), significantly warmer
than the Report's highly-touted first decade of the 21st century, and at
a time when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was far less than it is
today.
What makes this particular failure of the Report so doubly
damning is the fact that it claims that each of the "more than 30
different climate indicators" it has analyzed "is placed into historical
context." That is obviously not true.
And for a parameter so
central to the core of the global warming discussion as temperature to
not be put into proper long-term context is inexcusable, although quite
understandable, especially when one realizes the implications it would
hold for the Report's unfounded contentions about the present state of
earth's climate.
The Holocene Temperature History of Northern Europe
The
little ice age was exceptionally cold and some warming following that
was to be expected. CO2 levels and temperature also shown to be out of
phase
Discussing: Seppa, H., Bjune, A.E., Telford, R.J.,
Birks, H.J.B. and Veski, S. 2009. Last nine-thousand years of
temperature variability in Northern Europe. Climates of the Past 5:
523-535.
Seppa et al. (2009) combined 36 nine-thousand-year-long
pollen-based July and annual mean temperature reconstructions for the
portion of Europe stretching from the Norwegian Atlantic coast to 26°E
in Estonia and Finland and from 57°N in Southern Fennoscandia to 70°N,
the latter 5000 years of which temperature reconstruction they compared
to a stacked chironomid-based July mean temperature record based on data
obtained from seven Fennoscandinavian sites.
Seppa et al. report
that "the stacked records show that the 'Holocene Thermal Maximum' in
the region dates to 8000 to 4800 cal yr BP and that the '8.2 event' and
the 'Little Ice Age' at 500-100 cal yr BP are the clearest cold episodes
during the Holocene," while the graphical representations of their data
clearly indicate that the Little Ice Age was the colder of the two
major cold episodes
Yet again, here is another major analysis of
multiple paleotemperature records that reveal the Little Ice Age to have
been the coldest interval of the entire Holocene. And with 20th-century
global warming starting from the current interglacial's coldest point
in time, it is only natural to expect that the ensuing warming would be
rather substantial, irrespective of what the air's CO2 content might
have been doing concurrently. And so it was.
But does the fact
that the atmosphere's CO2 concentration rose substantially over the 20th
century while air temperature also rose substantially (albeit more
haltingly) not suggest that the CO2 increase was driving the temperature
increase? Not at all; because over the prior seven thousand years, when
Seppa et al.'s data show Northern European temperatures to have been
steadily falling, earth's atmospheric CO2 concentration was slowly but
surely steadily rising. And you can't get much more out of phase than
that.
The
Washington Examiner's Barbara Hollingsworth has some good news, the
Dem's planned golden goose called the Chicago Climate Exchange is
running out of money and laying off employees.
Reuters reports that a lack of Senate action on cap-and-trade
legislation is forcing the Chicago Climate Exchange to lay off about
half of its remaining "really talented" 50-employee staff.
The first round of layoffs by owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc.,
which acquired CCX in April for $604 million, began July 23 when about
20 people were let go. Employees were reportedly told that the American
marketplace for carbon credits was being "restructured."
The
only surprise is that Richard Sandor, who founded CCX in 2003 and was
dubbed a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment" in 2007, is being
retained as an advisor. "Voluntary" trading of greenhouse gas emissions
on CCX has all but dried up and prices have plunged from a high of over
$7 per ton in 2008 to just 10 cents now, making recent stock market
losses look rosy by comparison. Not exactly what Sandor, who once
predicted a $10 trillion worldwide carbon market, expected would happen.
The biggest losers have been CCX's two biggest investors - Al Gore's
Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs - and President
Obama, who helped launch CCX with funding from the Joyce Foundation,
where he and presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett once sat on the board
of directors.
In my experience of peer review, the reviewers often don't seem even to read the paper -- JR
The
Swiss online NZZ here has a report on the peer-review process and the
problems plaguing it. Peer-review has become a leading topic in science
in Europe and all over the world. The NZZ starts off: "Irritated by
multiple scandals over the last years, many scientists are up in arms
over the peer-review of scientific articles and are hoping for
improvement... Many say there’s a need for reform."
Scientists
say manipulation is as easy as pie. As a whole, the field of science is
becoming overwhelmed by the flood of papers seeking publication. The NZZ
writes that according to a Finnish study, already in 2006 1.35 million
peer-reviewed papers were published, and the trend is accelerating:
"And it is unclear whether the current large-scale peer-review process
yields the correct, important results every time. Also publishers and
peer-reviewers can make mistakes, as hanky panky like copying text and
manipulating charts is especially easy in today’s computer age."
The
NZZ does not name any particluar science field here, or anywhere else
in the report. But for those familiar with climate science and the CRU
e-mails, it sounds all too familiar.
The topic of peer-review has
gained much importance over the years, as it’s the lifeblood of
scientific careers. That’s one reason why the recent European Science
Forum in Turin in early July was so jam packed.
The NZZ asks: Is the current system the best we have?
Based
on a 2009 study by Adrian Mulligan of Elsevier publishing, the NZZ
reports that one third of the scientists replied with yes, one third
with no, and the other third were undecided. The survey sampled 4000
scientists.
With those results one could reasonably assume that
half are not really convinced by the peer-review process. That tells me
it needs to be reformed. There are many problems with it. The NZZ
mentions some of them.
For example, some scientists say that
papers do not even get reviewed by experienced scientists, but are often
passed down to younger, less experienced colleagues who don’t really
know how to do it.
The NZZ writes about being able to reproduce
results: "Increasingly, peer reviewers are no longer able to reproduce
the results of studies on their own – because the time and effort simply
would be too much. Philip Campbell of Nature brought up that point in
Turin."
Campbell says errors will always get by peer-reviewers,
and sometimes even outright fraud. But that’s rarely the case, as
studies such as one from Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh
2009 in the journal PLoS ONE shows. NZZ writes: "According to the
results, an average of 2% of scientists admitted to having made at least
one falsification. And up to 34% admit to having committed a dubious
act."
Plagiarism is another problem. Fortunately,
plagiarism-recognition software such as CrossCheck help to detect
plagiarism. The software is based on publication data-banks.
Diagram
manipulation is detected using the algorithms in programs for graphic
processing. Other offences committed include ghostwriting, including
co-authors who did not take part in the study and salami publication.
In
my view, the NZZ report places too much of the blame on the sheer
volume of papers that need to be reviwed and on human nature, and
completely ignores the political aspects that have corrupted the
process.
But in the end, its conclusion is correct: Peer-review
needs to be reformed, as for now there is no other alternative system
available.
WELL DONE to all involved in this SATELLITEGATE expose!
It
helps explain puzzles many have had including some I had - namely that
even with the Solar-Lunar climate driver I developed recently (although
there are other factors too) smoothed world temperatures (both land and
reported satellite) over recent years especially this year/last decade
(?) seemed 'too high'.
This revelation further confirms something
I and Tom Harris said on Russia Today TV Feb (5th) 2010 namely that WE
JUST DO NOT reliably KNOW what world temperatures are and have been
doing over the last decade or century. See Laura Emmet's superb
ClimateGate report here (Video)
We
do know local things of course like it has been and is very hot in
Russia and has been astoundingly cold in parts of South America and
Australia compared with normal, but these monstrous data blunders will
obscure rational discussion and temperature reportage.
The
climate hype industry will do everything in its power to put a lid on
this one. Imagine if it were found the satellite data had been reading
minus 200F in Michigan etc and that had been used in input for world
averages, THERE WOULD BE FRONT PAGE NEWS AND ENRAGED QUESTIONS IN EVERY
ELECTED (and unelected) PUBLIC FORUM IN THE WORLD coupled with public
sackings of the scientists involved and the most dire 'end of the world'
warnings possible and redoubled calls for carbon supertaxes
The key questions are:-
Why
are ALL the errors and tricks in data collection and processing found
since Climategate broke of the sort which make temperatures too high?
How bad is this error and how long has it been going on for?
Are there other errors in satellite data?
What parts of the globe does it mainly concern?
WHEN and HOW will we get a reliable world temperature data set; and just WHAT is the best (most reliable) data set around?
Could it be that the world temp peak (believed) of around 1998 - 2003 was no higher than that around 1935-1940?
Are we actually heading for the next ice age as lake Michagan boils according to [satellite] measurements?!
Corbyn also comments on the recent Russian heatwave here. Excerpt:
"The present and recent superheat in Russia, superfloods in Pakistan
and supercold in much of South America (Odd we haven't heard much about
that bit of 'Climate Change') might be new to them but they are nothing
new to the world and are part of essentially PREDICTABLE natural
solar-magnetic lunar cycles."
Blacklisted Scientist Challenges Global Warming Orthodoxy
I
am not sure how much got lost in translation in the following summary
of Miskolczi's work but he clearly rejects the absurd yet orthodox
notion that a gas (such as CO2) can "trap" anything
Today
Hungarian atmospheric physicist Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, says he has found
and proven that the IPCC and their experts are wrong in their theory
about how the greenhouse effect works. In the process, he has shown that
changing CO2 concentrations are not the determining factor the IPCC and
other scientists claim.
Over the last 20 years Miskolczi
achieved several results which prove that the greenhouse effect in the
Earth’s atmosphere is completely dependent on energy. The IPCC would
have the world believe that it is the ingredients of the atmosphere
which matter more than the energy, and that it is rising levels of CO2
that are causing global warming.
Working with a number of sets of
temperature and humidity data from all over the world, Miskolczi has
found that the greenhouse effect is a balance of energy dependent
primarily on the sun. This is something reasonable people have
recognized for some time but haven’t been able to prove without the same
sort of heavy science and math the IPCC experts have been using.
Those
who disagree with the IPCC’s conclusions have needed some form of proof
to back their positions. Until now, those proofs have been too few in
number to slow Anthropogenic Global Warming’s (AGW) momentum backed with
billions of dollars. Solid science which can be verified and recreated
has been needed and Miskolczi claims that his research has finally
provided just that. New mathematical equations seem to have put the
players in this climate game into their proper places.
To put it very simply, Dr. Miskolczi has described previously unknown properties of our atmosphere.
Unfortunately
it isn’t as clean and easy as E=mc2. The very complexity of climate
science has been used to kick sand into the eyes of the public, blinding
us to alternative theories whether they are correct or not. The science
is so difficult to follow that no one can refute the IPCC without
discussing concepts most of the public don’t have the time or desire to
learn. So by default the IPCC has owned the conversation and the playing
field. What’s more, they have some big allies in supporting positions.
At
the time of his original discovery Dr. Miskolczi was a contractor for
NASA and had published many times in renowned journals with his
colleagues there; he resigned his position in 2005 when NASA refused to
publish work contradicting AGW.
Despite being blacklisted by the
scientific community supporting AGW, he has continued his research
proving and refining his results. However, this same community is also
the one which peer reviews work like this. When a scientist is tossed
off this team, they can’t get their work reviewed and pushed to the
press as being “peer reviewed.” Despite this handicap Miskolczi has
persevered, just this month publishing yet again, this time proving with
observations that the greenhouse effect is actually stable.
Miskolczi
does not appear to be saying that global warming or cooling doesn’t
occur. Instead, he shows that CO2 does not and cannot increase the
surface temperature of the Earth independently of incoming energy. In
his paper he provides a graph spanning 61 years from 1948-2008. It shows
that the greenhouse effect remains constant while CO2 concentrations
have risen. Miskolczi has found physical proof that the greenhouse
effect works differently than previously thought and it isn’t affected
by changes in carbon dioxide.
Lacking now is an honest scientific
community’s review of his work, something hard to get once you have
been kicked off the team.
The American and international press
have also ignored this publication. Though more articles appear daily
contradicting the IPCC, this single decisive discovery, if true,
completely dismantles the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Amazingly it has yet to make the front page.
For more information
Dr. Miskloczi’s latest paper can be found here: Ferenc Miskolczi: The
stable stationary value of the earth’s global average atmospheric
Planck-weighted greenhouse-gas optical thickness (Energy &
Environment Vol. 21 No 4, 2010 August Special Issue: Paradigms in
Climate Research), and is available at Multi-Science Publishing Co.,
Great Britain.
Last week another alarmist story appeared in the Guardian quoting
Richard Alley, professor at the once great Penn State University in
which it reported on the natural calving of a large chink of the
Petermann glacier in Greenland. They noted "Greenland shed its largest
chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even
grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at
Pennsylvania State University.
"Sometime in the next decade we
may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures
that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding
that a rise in the range of 2-7 C would mean the obliteration of
Greenland's ice sheet."
We asked a real expert on sea level, Nils-Axel Morner to comment. Here is what he had to say:
No ”huge rise in sea level” to foresee: Observation rules out modelling
Recently,
“a panel of leading geoscientists told the US Congress” that sea level
is likely to rise by 7 metres within this century. What nonsense, we
must say. Not only, is this against observational facts, it is also
against physics.
At the Last Ice, the huge ice caps over Europe
and North America had their southern margins way down at mid latitudes
(at Hamburg in Europe and at New York in North America). When climate
changed, the ice melted at a very rapid rate. At Stockholm, for example,
the ice margin was displaced northwards at a rate of about 300 m per
year. Indeed, an enormous speed.
Still, global sea level did not
rise more than about 10 mm per year or 1 metre in a century. This rate
sets the absolutely ultimate physically frame of any possible sea level
rise today. Any claim exceeding this value must be classified as sheer
nonsense. It is as simple as that.
The Greenland Ice Cap did not
melt during the postglacial hypsithermal (some 5000 to 8000 years ago),
when temperature was about 2.5 oC higher than today. Nor did it melt
during the Last Interglacial when temperature was about 4 oC higher than
today. As to time, it would take more than a millennium (with full
thermal forcing) to melt the ice masses stored there.
The panel
also talk about a possible “tipping point”. Well, the only event of that
type we can be fairly sure about, seems to be the approaching turn from
a Solar Maximum (just passed) to a Solar Minimum (calculated at around
2040).
The view presented by the panel is another sad expression
of IPCC propaganda. What they say is not founded in geoscientific
knowledge and physical laws.
The World is far too full of real problems that call for immediate consideration to waste time on wild exaggerations.
Reports of the Earth’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Here’s a letter to the New York Times Book Review by Don Boudreaux, a Professor of Economics:
Reviewing Andrew Beahrs’s book about Mark Twain’s culinary tastes,
William Grimes remarks that the author of Huckleberry Finn lived in “a
country soon to be overwhelmed by industrialized agriculture and
ecological catastrophe” (“Your Tired, Your Poor and Their Food,” August
8).
“Ecological catastrophe?!” Mr. Grimes confuses his
fashionable suppositions with actual history. A genuine ecological
catastrophe would have made human existence a nightmare in the 100 years
since Mr. Twain’s death. Instead, the past century has witnessed
unprecedented improvements in living standards.
Agricultural
output is several times higher today, both in absolute amount and in
yield-per-acre. Available supplies of nearly all minerals continue to
increase. Americans of all income levels are much better fed, much
better clothed, much better housed, and much better cared for medically.
The automobile cleaned America’s streets of the dung and flies that
once cursed denizens of cities and towns. Electricity and petroleum
have replaced far-filthier coal and wood as major sources of household
energy. Perhaps most significantly, life expectancy in 2010 is 30 years
longer than it was in 1910.
The Incandescent Bulb Ban: Another Regulatory Overreach
Is
the modern incandescent light bulb ready to retire from society and
find its final resting place in the halls of the American History
Museum? Politicians seem to think so, but consumer behavior indicates
otherwise. According to an article in The New York Times,
Despite a decade of campaigns by the government and utilities to
persuade people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescents,
incandescent bulbs still occupy an estimated 90 percent of household
sockets in the United States. Aside from the aesthetic and practical
objections to fluorescents, old-style incandescents have the advantage
of being remarkably cheap.
The government solution to
replace incandescent bulbs is to regulate them out of the marketplace
and forcefully restrict consumer choice. The Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007 placed stringent efficiency requirements on
incandescent bulbs in an attempt to phase them out between 2012 and 2014
and replace them with more expensive but more energy-efficient bulbs,
the most popular being compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs).
Critics
of CFL bulbs argue that exposure to mercury vapor is dangerous if the
bulbs are broken, and others complained about CFL bulbs causing
migraines and epilepsy attacks, resulting in medical groups asking for
exemptions for those with health problems. Proponents of CFL bulbs argue
that the increased energy efficiency will offset the higher sticker
price, but critics argue it will take an exceptionally long time where
people use lights infrequently, such as closets and attics.
In
effort to meet tougher regulations, the new incandescent light bulbs are
also selling at record rates, but also at record prices. A new bulb
presented by Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers is selling at 20
times the price of a standard bulb ($5 compared to 25 cents)—an immense
price increase for a 30 percent efficiency improvement. However, the new
bulbs last three times as long as a standard bulb, bringing the price
ratio down to less than seven times the price of a standard bulb.
Although
this law could mean the end of a century-old industry and all the jobs
that go with it, bulb manufacturers are demonstrating a remarkable
resilience against needless regulations through market innovation. Yet
there is only so much that the industry can do to stay a step ahead of
legislation, and whether incandescent bulbs will survive the
government’s regulatory whip remains to be seen. A few dollars more here
and there may not seem like much, but CFLs sell at around $1 each.
Although fluorescent bulbs are currently not favored by households, they
could soon become the chosen bulb, an unnatural leaning that will
create false information for the light bulb market.
If consumers
truly preferred fluorescents to incandescents, they would purchase them
without any legal incentive. Yet they do not. Many prefer the soft
yellow lighting of incandescents to the unnaturally white light of
fluorescents. More might prefer the simple affordability of
incandescents. Demand for cheap incandescent light bulbs is not going to
change because of legislation (and, in fact, could lead to hoarding),
so the only option left to environmentalists is to remove the
incandescent light bulb from the market altogether and make it
impossible for consumers to light their houses inexpensively.
This
is one example of the absurdity of federal regulations and how
bureaucrats pointlessly try to change human behavior. The regulatory
burden grew tremendously during President George W. Bush’s tenure and is
only getting worse under President Obama’s. It is a trend that
restricts freedom and choice in the marketplace and costs taxpayers
billions of dollars. It is a trend that the government should reverse.
Cap-and-trade
legislation has died, with little hope of resurrection for a long time
to come. What the representatives of the people cannot accomplish,
however, the Environmental Protection Agency can.
The EPA’s Lisa
Jackson has denied ten petitions filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
Republican attorneys general from Texas and Virginia, and other
conservative groups. The petitioners asked the EPA to reconsider its
finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and
therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has
refused to reconsider, and plans to regulate emissions from new cars and
trucks this year, and emissions from power plants next year. The state
of Texas is now threatening not to conform to the new regulations.
Christians
believe that when God created the world and created people in His
image, He gave mankind a mandate to be stewards of the creation.
Therefore, Christians should be especially concerned about treating the
natural world with care and respect. At the same time, the stewardship
responsibility includes all of the resources we have – nature, the
ecosystem, and technology; as well as our bodies, talents, and
relationships with other people.
People of faith have no
intention or desire to pit these responsibilities against one another.
When a proposal to improve the environment negative consequences for our
economic and technological ability to steward our resources and care
for people created in God’s image, Christianity teaches that we should
investigate whether the environmental policy is truly necessary to
accomplish its stated goal, and whether it is possible to care for the
environment in a way that also enhances human life and productivity.
To
restrict energy usage is to restrict human ability to productively
steward God’s creation. God ordained work as a good thing for Adam and
Eve to do in the garden of Eden before sin came into the world. For
this reason, Christians believe that productive cultivation of natural
resources can improve, rather than damage, the health of God’s creation.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency generally treats
human economic activity as climate enemy number one. Unfortunately,
discussing climate issues through the EPA bureaucracy does not lend
itself to a full and open investigation of the options and issues at
stake. The legislative branch set up the bureaucracy in such a way that
it can make difficult policy choices without facing electoral
accountability. Joe Postell of The Heritage Foundation has explained why
the progressive movement began setting this system in place several
decades ago:
"The progressives sought to circumvent
representative government by transferring power from Congress to a newly
created fourth branch of government, our modern bureaucracy. Congress
would no longer make laws but merely pass bills that consist of
assignments to agencies. The actual laws then would be passed by
agencies in the form of "rules" carrying the full force of law."
If
the EPA believes it knows the best way to promote “public health and
welfare,” it will not easily admit that it might be. EPA officials may
have the best of intentions for crafting the best policy, but there’s
no guarantee that they are safe from the lure of self-interest, much
less from their own fallibility.
For instance, the EPA believes
that regulating emissions will improve the American economy by creating
“green” jobs. The evidence, however, does not support this line of
reasoning. The government simply cannot create jobs in one industry
without destroying jobs elsewhere. For every “green” job Spain has
created by subsidizing wind and solar energy, it has destroyed 2.2 jobs
created by the private sector. Green jobs have done nothing to improve
Spain’s 19 percent unemployment rate. Denmark actually spends more
money on creating jobs in the wind energy industry than the jobs
actually pay.
Politicians in the United States have already
tried unsuccessfully for years to create technological innovation by
legislative mandate, and there’s no logical reason to expect that more
government mandates will produce efficient energy technology.
Rather
than stimulating the American economy, full regulation of carbon
emissions will damage it severely. Essentially, a cap or a regulatory
burden on carbon emissions would create energy scarcity, making it just
as expensive to purchase energy from fossil fuels as it is to purchase
energy from “renewable” sources. The supply of efficient energy would
drop in order to encourage production and consumption of inefficient
energy, and prices would skyrocket as a result. Politicians themselves,
including Barack Obama as a presidential candidate, have admitted that
skyrocketing prices are a crucial component of the carbon regulation
strategy.
Under the cap-and-trade bill considered by the House
of Representatives, the average American family would likely face a 90
percent increase in electricity prices, according to research done by
The Heritage Foundation. Gasoline and natural gas prices would also
rise by over 50 percent. The economic impact of EPA regulation would be
even worse than the impact of cap-and-trade legislation, because
regulation would involve more compliance, administrative, and legal
costs.
Skyrocketing energy prices would cause the prices of most
other goods and services to rise as well, because energy is the
lifeblood of the economy. Almost nothing happens – no manufacturing, no
transportation, and no sales – without energy. For people who
already have plenty of money – think John Kerry and Bill Gates – this is
not much of a problem. But economically vulnerable groups already
spend much larger portions of their budgets on basic necessities than do
those who are better off. The poor have less discretionary income to
spend on things they don’t absolutely need, and therefore less room to
breathe when expenses rise.
This economic burden would come in
addition to other financial woes caused by carbon regulation. An
economy struggling under dramatic decreases in employment, household
income, and national GDP would make it even more difficult for
low-income families to cover expenses, especially utilities. Families
who could not afford to heat or cool their homes, especially the
elderly, would risk their health and could end up homeless. After
inability to pay rent, inability to pay utilities is the most common
cause of homelessness.
The Environmental Protection Agency
justifies this onerous economic burden with its finding that greenhouse
gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. However, its proposed
regulation of emissions could endanger public health and welfare even
more. Christian doctrine teaches that it is not acceptable to treat the
poor unjustly, or take from them the ability to earn their own living
and to productively steward the resources God has given them. Rather,
we should investigate whether human economic productivity could be an
ally rather than the enemy of our natural resources.
Official: Satellite Failure Means Decade of Global Warming Data Doubtful
by John O'Sullivan
The
fault was first detected after a tip off from an anonymous member of
the public to climate skeptic blog, Climate Change Fraud (view original
article) (August 9, 2010).
Caught in the center of the
controversy is the beleaguered taxpayer funded National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s Program Coordinator, Chuck
Pistis has now confirmed that the fast spreading story on the respected
climate skeptic blog is true.
However, NOAA spokesman, Program
Coordinator, Chuck Pistis declined to state how long the fault might
have gone undetected. Nor would the shaken spokesman engage in
speculation as to the damage done to the credibility of a decade’s worth
of temperature readings taken from the problematic ‘NOAA-16’ satellite.
‘NOAA-16’
was launched in September 2000, and is currently operational, in a
sun-synchronous orbit, 849 km above the Earth, orbiting every 102
minutes providing automated data feed of surface temperatures which are
fed into climate computer models.
NOAA has reported a succession
of record warm temperatures in recent years based on such satellite
readings but these may now all be undermined.
World-renowned
Canadian climatologist, Dr. Timothy Ball, after casting his expert eye
over the shocking findings concluded, “At best the entire incident
indicates gross incompetence, at worst it indicates a deliberate attempt
to create a temperature record that suits the political message of the
day.”
Great Lakes Sees Unphysical Wild Temperature Fluctuations
Great
Lakes users of the satellite service were the first to blow the whistle
on the wildly distorted readings that showed a multitude of impossibly
high temperatures. NOAA admits that the machine-generated readings are
not continuously monitored so that absurdly high false temperatures
could have become hidden amidst the bulk of automated readings.
In
one example swiftly taken down by NOAA after my first article, readings
for June and July 2010 for Lake Michigan showed crazy temperatures off
the scale ranging in the low to mid hundreds - with some parts of the
Wisconsin area apparently reaching 612 F. With an increasing number of
further errors now coming to light the discredited NOAA removed the
entire set from public view. But just removing them from sight is not
the same as addressing the implications of this gross statistical
debacle.
NOAA Whitewash Fails in One Day
NOAA’s Chuck
Pistis went into whitewash mode on first hearing the story about the
worst affected location, Egg Harbor, set by his instruments onto fast
boil. On Tuesday morning Pistis loftily declared, “I looked in the
archives and I find no image with that time stamp. Also we don't
typically post completely cloudy images at all, let alone with
temperatures. This image appears to be manufactured for someone's
entertainment.”
But later that day Chuck and his calamitous
colleagues now with egg on their faces, threw in the towel and owned up
to the almighty gaffe. Pistis conceded,
“I just relooked and
(sic) the image again AND IT IS in my archive. I do not know why the
temperatures were so inaccurate (sic). It appears to have been a
malfunction in the satellite. WE have posted thousands if (sic) images
since the inauguration of our Coatwatch (sic) service in 1994. I have
never seen one like this.”
But the spokesman for the Michigan Sea
Grant Extension, a ‘Coastwatch’ partner with NOAA screening the
offending data, then confessed that its hastily hidden web pages had,
indeed, showed dozens of temperature recordings three or four times
higher than seasonal norms. NOAA declined to make any comment as to
whether such a glitch could have ramped up the averages for the entire
northeastern United States by an average of 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit by
going undetected over a longer time scale.
Somewhat more contritely NOAA's Pistis later went into damage limitation mode to offer his excuses,
“We need to do a better job screening what is placed in the archive
or posted. Coastwatch is completely automated so you can see how
something like this could slip through.”
In his statement Pistis
agreed NOAA’s satellite readings were “degraded” and the administration
will have to “look more into this.” Indeed, visitors to the Michigan Sea
Grant site now see the following official message:
"NOTICE:
Due to degradation of a satellite sensor used by this mapping product,
some images have exhibited extreme high and low surface temperatures.
“Please disregard these images as anomalies. Future images will not
include data from the degraded satellite and images caused by the faulty
satellite sensor will be/have been removed from the image archive.”
NOAA
further explained that cloud cover could affect the satellite data
making the readings prone to error. But Pistis failed to explain how
much cloud is significant or at what point the readings become unusable
for climatic modeling purposes.
As one disgruntled observer noted,
“What about hazy days? What about days with light cloud cover? What
about days with partial cloud cover? Even on hot clear days, evaporation
leads to a substantial amount of water vapor in the atmosphere,
particularly above a body of water. How can this satellite data be even
slightly useful if it cannot "see" through clouds?”
Top Climatologist Condemns Lack of Due Diligence
The
serious implications of these findings was not lost on Dr. Ball who
responded that such government numbers with unusually high or low ranges
have been exploited for political purposes and are already in the
record and have been used in stories across the mainstream media, which
is a widely recognized goal.
The climatologist who advises the military on climate matters lamented such faulty data sets,
“invariably remain unadjusted. The failure to provide evidence of
how often cloud top temperatures "very nearly" are the same as the water
temperatures, is unacceptable. If the accuracy of the data is
questionable it should not be used. I would suggest it is rare given my
knowledge of inversions, especially over water.“
How Many other Weather Satellites Are Also ‘Degraded’?
A
key issue the government administration declined to address was how
many other satellites may also be degrading. ‘NOAA-16’ is not an old
satellite - so why does it take a member of the public to uncover such
gross failings?
Weather blocker: jet stream stops and causes disasters
I think even Warmists would be hard put to show exactly how CO2 blocks the jetstream -- and they can explain ANYTHING!
The
devastating Russian heatwave and Pakistan floods are caused by one
unusual weather pattern - the static jet stream, meteorologists say.
The
northern hemisphere jet stream, a fast-moving high-altitude air
current, circles the earth from west to east. But in the past month, a
"blocking event" has brought the jet stream to a halt, keeping weather
patterns stationary over certain countries.
"Over Pakistan, the
weather pattern is just staying with the monsoon, and the monsoon is
bringing drenching rains," weatherzone.com.au meteorologist Josh Fisher
said. "But this jet stream is also bringing dry air from eastern Africa
right up into Russia and this continuous heatwave is allowing the
wildfires to build."
The effects of the stalled jet stream across
Europe and the US have been catastrophic. In early July in the eastern
states of the US and Canada, a heatwave caused numerous deaths and
power cuts.
In Pakistan, about 1600 people have died since floods
struck in July and early August, while about 14 million are struggling
to cope with the consequences of the natural disaster, the UN and
Pakistani government said.
In Russia, an unprecedented heatwave
has triggered about 557 wildfires and left the capital Moscow cloaked in
heavy smog. Moscow's daily mortality rate has doubled to about 700, the
city's health department head said, with city morgues almost full.
Mr
Fisher said the Rossby waves - spinning wind currents that give the jet
stream its wavy form by pushing it north and south - are responsible
for the stalled jet stream. The waves have been stronger this year,
working against the jet stream and bringing it to a halt.
This
blocking pattern, while difficult to predict, usually lasts about eight
to 11 days, he said. "The one that brought the hot temperatures to the
US lasted over a week, while the current one affecting Pakistan and
Russia has been persisting for already around eight days and could last
for a few more days."
But less is known about what triggers this
abnormal activity. Climate change has been cited as one possibility,
but scientist Gerald Meehl of the National Centre for Atmospheric
Research in Colorado told the New Scientist magazine there was no way to
test the theory, as the resolution in climate change models was too low
to replicate weather patterns such as blocking events.
Another
cause could be low solar activity, Mr Fisher said. Low solar activity
has already been linked to an increase in cold winters in Europe, with
activity on the sun declining since 1985, Professor Mike Lockwood of the
University of Reading said in findings published in April.
At
the beginning of the climate conference in Bonn, Germany, UN climate
chief Christiana Figueres called on delegates to do what was
“politically possible” and make “incremental” progress. By most
accounts, the Bonn talks fell short of even these modest goals. Rifts
between poor countries and rich nations that were papered over in
Copenhagen reopened leaving delegates with more to debate at the final
climate conference in Tianjin, China before the year-end Cancun summit
and less common ground from which to begin discussions.
Contentious
topics grew more heated and previously settled issues were
reconsidered. China continued to claim that international monitoring of
its emissions would interfere with its sovereignty. Developing countries
sought to make the emissions targets they’d agreed to in Copenhagen
voluntary, while insisting that rich countries’ reductions remain
mandatory. Some poor nations also sought to increase the amounts of
money pledged for climate change mitigation from the long-term goal of
$100 billion a year by 2020 and short-term goal of $10 billion a year by
2012. (Although US deputy special climate envoy Jonathan Pershing said
they were seeking "staggering sums out of line with reality," the
pledged figures now seem less substantial when compared with China’s
plan to spend some $70 billion a year for a decade on renewable energy
investments and the costs of rebuilding after climate-related disasters
in Pakistan and Russia.)
Each dispute added contentious pages to
the climate text under discussion, which must now be whittled back down
in the Tianjin talks in October. This "tit for tat" diplomacy, as the
European Union's co-lead negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger described it,
caused the working draft to double in size from 17 to 34 pages.
The
only thing all negotiators seemed to agree upon was that their efforts
in Bonn had been unsuccessful. "These negotiations have if anything gone
backwards," said the EU's climate action commissioner Connie Hedegaard.
“All parties seem to be having a difficult time coming to convergence
and the text is larger than it has to be,” America’s Pershing told the
press. He claimed that during the talks some countries had been “walking
back from progress made in Copenhagen." Dessima Williams of Grenada,
who served as the spokeswoman for the 43-nation Association of Small
Island States, concurred: "There seems to be some backsliding. This is
very lamentable and very unhealthy."
The Guardian’s John Vidal
tried to find the thinnest sliver lining in the very dark clouds over
Bonn. Referring to the controversial Danish text, which would have
sidelined the UN and abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, and the nonbinding
Copenhagen Accords that President Obama helped cobble together at the
last minute of the previous climate summit, Vidal suggests that perhaps
“what we are seeing is the welcome, overdue correction to last year's
kamikaze global diplomacy which fatally destabilised the global talks
and ended in the Copenhagen fiasco. This analysis would say the
negotiations are back on track, the majority of world countries are
involved as opposed to just a few, and, with a fair wind and a raised
level of ambition by everyone, it could lead to a much more balanced
agreement.”
But neither he--nor I--are much swayed by this rose
tinted view: “More likely is that the level of ambition for Cancun will
be reduced further with no more than a package of agreements negotiated
and all the tough stuff put back until next year. Or 2013. Or 2014,”
Vidals concludes. That, he says, would be “the nightmare scenario”--an
outcome that the squabbling in Bonn has made all the more likely.
While
Figures and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon both attempted to put a
brave face on the Bonn talks, they could not succeed in securing more
emission reduction pledges. Worse, many existing commitments were thrown
into question. The most recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change found that developed nations must make 25-40
percent reductions below the 1990 benchmark by 2020 to stave off the
worst effects of climate change. The now-weakened pledges made after
Copenhagen were estimated to only amount to a cut of 12 to 19 percent,
well short of the safe reduction range. Any climate meeting that does
not bring the political promises closer to the scientifically requisite
reductions can only be viewed as a failure.
British local Councils "Should Not Tackle Climate Change"
Councils
in the UK should do "absolutely nothing" to tackle climate change
unless a stringent global deal on reducing carbon emissions is reached
through the United Nations, which includes developing as well as
developed countries - according to Lord Lawson.
Insisting that
such an agreement would be unlikely due to India and China's need to
rapidly increase economic growth - in order to bring tens of millions of
citizens out of poverty - the chairman of the Global Warming Policy
Foundation claimed that town halls were wasting resources by promoting
renewable energy schemes and greeninitiatives.
"For now, energy
is carbon based because it is cheaper than anything else and it makes no
sense to decarbonise unless everybody is doing it; it's lunacy to go it
alone when China is building a new coal power station every week," he
said, speaking at the LGA annual conference.
"It would cost the
British economy £50bn a year up to 2050 to meet the requirementsof the
UK Climate Change Act. Local authorities should do absolutely nothing to
tackle climate change. Your money could be put to far greater use."
Lord
Lawson said northern Europe would actually greatly benefit from
continued warming and urged public servants to focus on adaptation
rather than mitigation. He also highlighted Met Office figures showing
that global temperatures had not risen at all in the last decade -
although, he admitted they had gone up by 0.75 degrees over the last 150
years since the industrial revolution.
Countering his views,
founding member of the Tyndall Centre professor Andrew Watkinson told
delegates that 10 years was too short a period to identify weather
trends and this explained the stabilisation in temperature.
"The
climate science is sound and last winter was the second warmest globally
despite the bad weather experienced here in the UK," said Watkinson,
also a professional fellow of the University of East Anglia.
"We
could see temperature rises in the future of between 1-4 degrees as a
result of greenhouse gases - way beyond what humans on earth have
experienced before, so local authorities have to take on the science and
show leadership with new forms of energyas well as adaptation and
mitigation measures."
Watkinson revealed that some scholars
thought the global population could shrink from six billion to one
billion if the worst effects of climate change came to fruition and
parts of the southern hemisphere became inhabitable.
But Lord
Lawson rejected these claims insisting that more extreme warming periods
had occurred during Medieval and Roman times and that sea levels were
not rising rapidly anymore."There has certainly been skulduggery with
the science; it's totally one-sided - ignoring the benefits of global
warming and exaggerating the downsides," he added."Climate change is
like a new religion and there are some people who see it as a way to
undermine capitalism."
Open letter from Climate Depot's Executive Editor Marc Morano to Penn State Ethics Prof. Donald A. Brown
Dear Professor Brown:
You
have recently been making the news with some very unique and serious
claims regarding man-made global warming. You have made the laughable
claim that Senate's failure to pass cap-and-trade the “worst ethical
scandal...and a moral lapse of epic proportions.”
Sadly, this
claim alone proves that your understanding of science and economics is
what is truly the “worst ethical scandal” here.
How would passing
a climate bill that was 'scientifically meaningless' improve ethics or
morality or the climate? See: Even Obama's EPA admits cap-and-trade bill
'will not impact world CO2 levels'
You spend most of your
“science” argument trying to convince the public of dangerous man-made
global warming by noting that the Earth has been warming. Wow. So in
your simplistic scientific mind Warming = Human caused. Sorry Professor
that is not a very deep and well thought out argument.
You claim: “2010 is the hottest year so far and the last decade is the hottest on record.”
Oh
really? How long does “so far” go? You are aware that these are land
based temperature data and we are talking minute fractions of a degree.
See: Climate Depot's full statement to USA Today on 'Hottest' Year And
Arctic Ice: NOAA's Jay Lawrimore 'should be ashamed of himself' --
'Declaration that we are experiencing the 'hottest' year is purely a
political statement. Lawrimore knows that these statistics are merely
tenths of a degree or LESS'
If you had cared to look at satellite
data you would find that 2010 is not even the “hottest year” in the
last 12 years, let alone of all time. Why do you cherry pick your
evidence?
You resort to pure climate astrology when you claim:
“More wildfires are being seen around the world...Droughts and floods
are increasing in intensity and frequency...Storm damage is rising as
predicted.” Once again, wow! As Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. has noted,
claims like yours “have a status similar to interpretations of
Nostradamus and the Mayan calendars.”
Tell me Professor, which of the below worst floods on record were caused by carbon dioxide?
Date... Location... Dead
1887, September-October Hwang Ho (Yellow) River, China Over 900,000
1939 North China 500,000
1642 Kaifeng, Honan Province, China Over 300,000
1099 England and the Netherlands 100,000
1287, December 14 The Netherlands 50,000
1824 Russia 10,000
1421, November 18 The Netherlands 10,000
1964, November-December Mekong Delta, South Vietnam 5,000
1951, August 6-7 Manchuria 4,800
1948, June Foochow, China 3,500
You
claim: 'Fire seasons start earlier and are harder to contain" Wow, it
must be rising Co2 from mankind, right? But then again, your assertions
don't hold up. See: 'Global warming theory doesn't come anywhere close
to explaining why it's so darn hot this summer in Moscow...confluence of
several naturally-occurring atmospheric circulation patterns'
How about land use issues? See: Russia's Fires 'Caused In Large Part By Forest Mismanagement'
Do
you ever ponder other factors, or are you “ethically bound” to cut and
paste really lame talking points of global warming claims?
Australia's future productivity and the Greens’ agenda
The
Coral Sea, east of the Barrier Reef, covers an area of 972,000 Sq. Km. .
(About the same area as South Australia). It is a highly prospective
oil and gas area. Now declared a no fishing, no go area.
In order
for the water to run to waste in the name of “preserving the river”,
the farmers in the Murray Darling irrigation area are to have their
irrigation water supplies cut by 60%. Thus rendering Australia’s largest
food bowl, and the farmers, to a state of irrelevance.
Bob Brown
says that the greatest blot on Australia’s environmental reputation are
the power houses fed by Yallourn Valley brown coal. These power houses
produce Australia’s cheapest clean power and industrialised Victoria. He
insists that they be closed by 2020.
All of the above are green initiatives.
And,
Green’s Senator Christine Milne stated on a recent ABC 7.30 Report
programme: “…….we want to see a carbon price as quickly as possible
because we want transformation of the whole economy and society”.
Australia’s
uranium reserves are the world’s largest. Nuclear Energy is cheap,
clean and safe. Already there are some 438 Nuclear Power stations world
wide with 61 more being built, and 250 more being proposed.
Labor
is entrenched in its resistance to opening new uranium mines, and
developing a Nuclear Industry here, because of their affiliation with
the Greens.
Greenie
logic: According to chief Greenie Bob Brown, power stations are a
“great blot on Australia's environmental reputation” but building solar
plants that blot out hundreds of square miles of the landscape –
including valuable agricultural and residential land – while sending
electricity prices through the roof is a good environmental practice!
Astrologers
make their predictions vague so that SOMETHING will confirm them.
Warmists do better than that: ANYTHING confirms their predictions.
Comment below by Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr
The World
Meteorological Organization has issued he following statement: "Several
regions of the world are currently coping with severe weather-related
events: flash floods and widespread flooding in large parts of Asia and
parts of Central Europe while other regions are also affected: by
heatwave and drought in Russian Federation, mudslides in China and
severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. While a longer time range is
required to establish whether an individual event is attributable to
climate change, the sequence of current events matches IPCC projections
of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global
warming."
Even though the IPCC report can be parsed in many ways,
I await the textual exegesis that supports the claim that the "sequence
of current events matches IPCC predictions." This will be difficult
given that the IPCC didn't even make projections for 2010. I welcome in
the comments efforts to justify the claim by the WMO.
I am
coming to the conclusion that there is something about the climate issue
that makes people -- especially but not limited to academics and
scientists -- completely and utterly lose their senses. The WMO
statement is (yet) another example of scientifically unsupportable
nonsense in the climate debate. Such nonsense is of course not going
away anytime soon.
But because various unsupportable and just
wrong claims are being advanced by leading scientists and scientific
organizations, it would be easy to get the impression that on the issues
of extreme events and climate change, IPCC science has a status similar
to interpretations of Nostradamus and the Mayan calenders.
Here are two scientists who have accurately described this faith based climate “science”:
Japanese
scientist Kanya Kusano, a Program Director and Group Leader for the
Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science &
Technology, has publicly declared that man-made climate fear promotion
is now akin to “ancient astrology.”
Mathematical physicist Dr.
Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics, astrophysics, at
Tulane University, agrees with Kusano. “Whether the ice caps melt, or
expand --- whatever happens --- the AGW theorists claim it confirms
their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology,”
Tipler wrote on May 15, 2009. “It is obvious that anthropogenic global
warming is not science at all, because a scientific theory makes
non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that
the average person can check for himself,” Tipler explained.
"As
we know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed
to do this. The theory has predicted steadily increasing global
temperatures, and this has been refuted by experience. NOW the global
warmers claim that the Earth will enter a cooling period,” Tipler wrote.
'Medieval mystics...Palm readers and fortune tellers'
Scientist
Dr. Doug Hoffman mocked warming predictions: "The whole enterprise is
reminiscent of Medieval mystics claiming to predict the future while
spouting gibberish," Hoffman, a mathematician and engineer, who worked
on environmental models and conducted research in molecular dynamics
simulations, wrote on October 13, 2009. "Palm readers and fortune
tellers stand as good a chance as any in this game," Hoffman added.
Even
religious leaders have recognized the scientific transition to
paganism. See: Catholic Cardinal George Pell in 2006: 'In the past,
pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate
capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon
dioxide emissions' ....
Now, quite simply anything that happens
can be blamed on man-made global warming! The warming fear pushers have
now sunk to the level of blaming prostitution on man-made global
warming. Your daughter becomes a hooker, blame global warming!
If
you are former Vice-President Al Gore, you can now claim man-made
global warming is 'causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow',
never mind the fact that his 2006 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” never
once warned of coming blizzards or record cold. (For counter see: Gore's
February 'Un-Truths': No increase in moisture content...a definite
declining trend over the last 60 years – the opposite of what Al Gore
claims')
One of the biggest scientific laughingstocks when it
comes to man-made global warming has turned out to be Obama's Nobel
Prize Winning Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. Chu has descended into a
deep faith-based science without peer among cabinet officials. Chu now
apparently believes “predictions” are some sort of “proof” or “evidence”
of what the Earth will be like 100 years from now.
Chu told a
conference in California his prognostication. “At no other time in the
history of science have we been able to say what the future will be 100
years from now,” Chu, the soothsayer, declared according to a June 28,
2009 article in Palo Alto Online News.
See: Obama's 'Climate Astrologer': Energy Sec. Chu claims he knows 'what the future will be 100 years from now' - June 28, 2009
Is
science speaking into Sec. Chu's ear and telling him of what the future
holds? Chu has reduced his scientific expertise to that of a
televangelist who claims he hears God speaking to him.
The
question looms: Shouldn't Sec. Chu be touting these scary predictions of
the year 2100 on a boardwalk with a full deck of Tarot Cards? Imagine
if a senior cabinet official in 1909 had stated he knows for certain
what the climate and energy mix of the year 2009 will be. Any such
cabinet official making such wacky statements would be laughed out of
1909 America, but in 2010 America, that same person gets some sort of
odd scientific respect.
Superheat in Central Russia no indication of future climate catastrophe -- expert
Weather
once again becomes climate when it suits the Warmists. Nobody mentions
that while Russia is baking, South America is freezing amid record
cold. So there is no "global" warming. Russia and South America
roughly cancel one-another out.
Below is my rough translation
of a report from Russia in German. I had time to do only the first two
paragraphs but you get the idea -- JR
The abnormal heat
which this summer has central Russia firmly in its grip is no indication
of a future climate catastrophe and no pointer to a decisive climate
change -- rather it is a precedented natural occurrence. So Mikhail
Kabanov, Corresponding Fellow of the Academy of Sciences and adviser to
the Institute for Climate and Environmental Monitoring, told RIA Novosti
on Wednesday on Novosibirsk.
The fluctuations in this or the
other direction in this or that region are entirely explained by the
instability of the climate system. This changes regularly and produces
various anomalies, including extreme ones. The weather conditions this
years are just a testimony to that, said the expert
Lord Monckton is under attack, a sure sign that he’s winning on warming. Monckton fights back and refutes Prof. Abraham
Have
you noticed the kicking around that CFACT Advisor Lord Christopher
Monckton's been getting lately? Add to the title “Viscount of
Brenchley,” “whipping boy du jour.” Seldom a recent day goes by without
some new name calling or conspiracy theory attacking Lord Monckton
echoing through the left-wing blogosphere.
Why is Chris Monckton
the victim of a global warming attack campaign? Effectiveness. Few
have been so brilliantly effective at debunking the global warming scare
as this compellingly articulate British Lord.
Lord Monckton
does his homework. He scours the scientific literature. He devours
every word and graph. He is in constant contact with a vast network of
leading scientists throughout the world. He wades past the executive
summaries and masters the details. He checks the math, checks the
logic, and checks the consistency of what is claimed about our climate.
He synthesizes global warming science and policy raising vital
questions that provoke thought in the mind of any expert or layman with
an open mind.
Despite the nearly unimaginable sums available to
the global warming folks – despite their command of the media, the
politicians in their thrall and the carbon profiteers lining up at the
taxpayer's trough, Lord Monckton and his allies are winning. Like the
child who revealed that the Emperor had no clothes, Lord Monckton wakes
the good sense of those who hear him. The public has caught on.
The
warming propaganda machine has lost its momentum and is desperate to
get it back. They want to silence Lord Monckton and remove him from the
field. To that end they'll say anything. They attack his title hoping
we won't notice that every British Viscount has a right and by long
tradition is called “Lord.” They attack his graphs and charts, hoping
we won't bother to learn that most of his data comes straight from the
International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the sources it cites.
Lord Monckton had hoped that by using the IPCC's data warming advocates
would be forced to debate the merits. Sadly, they continue to alternate
between mocking the data and restating their conclusions as received
wisdom. Yet when granted a fair forum for debate, it is Monckton who
triumphs. Just weeks ago his team of experts were voted the winners in a
warming debate at the Oxford Union – a treasured haven of free thought.
Last
year Lord Monckton gave a presentation on global warming in St. Paul
Minnesota that became a sensation on YouTube. This inspired Prof. John
Abraham of the University of St. Thomas to attack his presentation in a
lengthy video. Lord Monckton has refuted Prof. Abraham using his own
medium. The first of a series of videos setting the record straight are
being released today and we invite you to view them.
As CFACT
has said before, the chain of logic behind global warming claims does
not hold up. Lord Christopher Monckton will neither be silenced, nor
ignored. As Mahatma Gandhi told us, "first they ignore you, then they
ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
At
the end of the Cold War, there was an influential sentiment in academic
and business circles that the nation-state was going to lose its
central position in world politics that it had held since the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648. The nation would be assaulted from both above and
below. Globalization would shift authority to “higher” planes like the
United Nations, while sub-national interest groups would pursue their
own agendas indifferent or hostile to society. Allegiances would shift.
Corporations would follow profits, not the flag, and non-government
organizations (NGOs) would place ideology above country.
Most
Americans have paid little attention to such musings, even though they
have been affected by them. The “globalization” of production has seen
the offshoring of jobs, but few people feel any allegiance to business
firms. They live in societies, not corporations. In the midst of the
worst economic downturn since the 1970s, what is on the public’s mind is
how things are going here, in the United States. Citizens expect their
government to protect their prosperity and security; rebuild the
national economy, and protect them from foreign rivals.
If it
holds that the “cap and trade” legislation that would have increased the
cost of energy, thus crippling economic recovery, is dead in this
Congress, then the integrity of the nation-state has survived. The
Senate could not find a majority that was willing to sacrifice American
progress for the “benefit” of the outside world. But the nation’s future
is still endangered from the UN and the NGOs.
The third round of
UN “climate change” negotiations this year was held August 2-6 in
Bonn, Germany. Over 3,000 people attended. These included delegates from
178 governments, but also representatives from hundreds of NGOs. The
purpose was to continue work on a binding treaty to be adopted in
Cancun, Mexico in early December. The agreement would subordinate
national economic growth to a “global” framework that would redistribute
wealth and power in accord with an ideological program.
The UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) poses the same
unacceptable terms for the United States and the other Western
industrial nations as has been the case since it was created in 1994.
The new Executive Director is Christiana Figueres, an anthropologist
from Costa Rica who has worked with the UNFCCC since its establishment.
She believes “More stringent actions to reduce emissions cannot be much
longer postponed and industrial nations must lead.” Her country is not,
however, one of those designated to reduce emissions and suffer a fall
in living standards as a result.
Though 190 entities have signed
the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, only 37 (virtually all European) are
considered “industrial economies” subject to mandatory emission cuts
under the agreement. The rest could sign on without any obligation other
than to pressure the Western countries to go into economic decline. The
Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under
the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) is one of the primary forums meant to
pressure the West to make more crippling cuts beyond 2012. Fortunately,
the United States has not ratified Kyoto. Even President Barack Obama
could not accept an unbalanced agreement based on it in Copenhagen last
year.
Yet, the UNFCCC continues on the two-track system where
all the costs are to be borne by the developed countries while the mass
of developing countries—led by China, India, Brazil and South Africa,
remain free of anti-growth mandates. The developed countries are only
urged to limit the growth of emissions, rather than be required to
reduce them. The developed states are to transfer technology and capital
to the developing states and watch passively as industries migrate from
countries with restrictions to those who remain free and open for
growth.
The developed countries are expected to provide the
developing world with $30 billion by 2012 and $100 billion per year by
2020 to fund “climate adaptation” programs. ‘Developing nations see the
allocation of this money as a critical signal that industrialized
nations are committed to progress in the broader negotiations,” said
Figueres. Indeed, this year’s negotiations seem much more focused on how
to grab a slice of this financial pie than about climate change, a
topic hardly anyone really cares about because it is widely regarded as
hokum. The big issue is whether the funds will be distributed through
the UNFCCC or the World Bank.
NGO Friends of the Earth opposes
the World Bank because it is “controlled by rich countries and is the
largest international lender for fossil fuel projects.” The Green NGOs
have consistently favored the claims of the developing countries at the
UN, continuing their antipathy towards the economic success of the
“rich” Western world. Hatred for the U.S. and Western civilization in
general is what spawned the environmentalist movement in the first place
out of the “anti-imperialist” New Left of the 1960s. The first Earth
Day was in 1970. Its rallies were attended by the same activists who
were burning American flags protesting the expedition against communist
sanctuaries in Cambodia that year.
The theme was that the U.S.
must be brought down, both at home and abroad. Reducing America’s wealth
would reduce its power, which the New Left considered an evil influence
on the world. As aging Weather Underground radical Jeff Jones wrote in
2008, “There can be no solution to the world’s environmental crisis as
long as Americans enjoy their rapacious and engorged standard of living
at the expense of the health and survival of billions of other.” He
traced this feeling back to 1969, when Students for a Democratic Society
“famously announced that those of us living in the heart of the
imperial empire were going to have to give some of it back.”
The
global redistribution scheme at the UN will hopefully fail to produce a
treaty this year for the same reason it failed last year; the clash of
national interests. But the Green NGOs will still be hard at work trying
to cripple the U.S. economy from within, pushing for higher energy
taxes, and blocking new coal and nuclear power plants, oil drilling and
refineries, and in some cases even the construction of windmills and
solar farms.
As Darren Samuelsohn wrote in Politico Aug. 7,
Green groups “are hoping to defend and expand on state and regional
climate laws and compacts, including a carbon market for power plants
operating in the Northeast and emerging systems in the West. And they
will work at the state public utility commission level to make carbon
dioxide emissions a crux in reviewing permits for new and existing
coal-fired power plants.” Enormous sums are being mobilized. “The Sierra
Club is spending $18 million and has 100 people across the country
working on challenges to coal-fired electricity, said Michael Brune, the
group’s executive director. He hopes to increase the budget to $25
million next year,” reported Samuelsohn. The Environmental Defense Fund
was cited as having spent $20 million on “cap and trade” lobbying. The
Union of Concerned Scientists, who spent the Cold War trying to disarm
America, is now working to impoverish it.
The irony is that
those who give the most to these Green groups probably enjoy the kind of
life-styles the radicals wish to end. It is Lenin’s old adage with a
twist; the donors are buying the rope that will be used to hang them.
For
those Americans who do not want their lives to be made worse, or for
their children to grow up in a country unable to provide the same
opportunities for advancement as were open to previous generations, the
need is to defeat the Greens at all levels, global, national and local.
While it may be impossible to understand why some people turn against
their country; the task is not to understand them, but to stop them. The
head-shrinkers can deal with them later, once the path is cleared for
the rest of the country to move forward.
On
August 12, the Environmental Protection Agency sent out a press
release, “EPA Proposes Rules on Clean Air Act Permitting for Greenhouse
Gas Emissions”.
It is a frontal attack on the U.S. economy that
is currently in the throes of a decline that has not been seen since
the Great Depression. If the EPA succeeds in this Big Lie, the
provision of affordable energy in America will cease.
“The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency is proposing two rules to ensure that
businesses planning to build new, large facilities or make major
expansions to existing ones will be able to obtain Clean Air Act permits
that address their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
The Clean
Air Act does not cover carbon dioxide (CO2) which the EPA deems the
primary GHG. This is because poses no threat to the environment and,
indeed, is a vital and essential element of the environment insofar as
all vegetation from a blade of grass to a giant Sequoia tree is
dependent on it for growth.
Moreover, the proposed regulation of
CO2 is based on the global warming fraud that says that it is
responsible for a significant warming of the planet. There is not a
scintilla of proof of this and, indeed, the Earth is presently in one of
its natural cycles of cooling, not warming. Thus, there is no
scientific justification for the regulation of carbon dioxide no matter
how many times the EPA says there is.
The EPA release says “projects that will increase CHG emissions substantially will require an air permit.”
If
American industry, particularly the targeted “power plants and oil
refineries”, are required to get GHG permits, it will put yet another
huge sector of the nation’s economy under the thumb of the most
insidious exponents of the global warming fraud, enemies of any economic
growth.
“The Tailoring Rule covers large industrial facilities
like power plants and oil refineries that are responsible for 70 percent
of the GHGs from stationary sources,” says the EPA news release.
What it doesn’t say is that this power to regulate that does not exist in the present Clean Air Act.
It
will cause electricity costs to skyrocket along with gasoline and all
other oil derivatives. It will utterly wreck the U.S. economy that is
already in dire straits.
If an invading nation had imposed these
kinds of restrictions on Americans, we would be in the streets with guns
and any other means to fight them.
There is NO global warming.
Carbon dioxide plays NO role in this non-event. This is regulation by
deception, by lies, by the arrogance of environmentalists who view the
human race as a cancer on the planet. And, naturally, they have waited
until Congress has gone on recess to “propose” this attack on the
nation.
Take action! Contact your Representatives and Senators. Drown the White House in protests. The EPA must be stopped!
Development blocked because dormice MIGHT be there -- even though there is no sign of any
The
humble dormouse is potentially standing in the way of the development
of a £12m Morrisons supermarket in Wadebridge, Cornwall.
Morrisons,
one of three retailers proposing sites around the town, wants to build a
store on the local football club ground. To gain permission it has
offered to provide a replacement ground at nearby Bodieve. But the
possibility that dormice, a European Protected Species, are inhabiting
that site has led planning officers to recommend the council refuse
permission.
The local planning officer said the football club
development should be refused as "there is a reasonable likelihood of
dormice being present".
Although no dormice have been found, they
have been spotted 2km away. The local planning committee meets to rule
on Morrisons' application on Thursday.
Stephen Frankel, a
spokesman for campaign group Love Wadebridge, said: "These companies are
very powerful. They want to ignore us, but it seems they cannot ignore
our dormice."
Morrisons said it had commissioned a local
ecologist to carry out a dormouse survey. It said it had asked Cornwall
Council to defer its decision on its planning application until the
survey had been completed.
A spokesperson said: "At this stage,
no evidence has been produced to show there is a dormouse presence on
the site. However, our scheme, should it be granted consent, would
provide for a significant amount of new dormouse habitat."
Thousands
of British businesses will be liable for significant fines and charges
under a new government “green tax” scheme. Companies that fail to
register their energy use by next month will be hit with fines that
could reach £45,000 under the little-known rules.
Those that do
participate in the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) initiative by
declaring their energy use will face charges for every ton of greenhouse
gas they produce. These payments are expected to average £38,000 a
year for medium-sized firms, and could reach £100,000 for larger
organisations.
Surveys have shown that thousands of businesses
are unaware they are supposed to be taking part, or even that the scheme
exists at all.
The imposition of new charges and fines will put
pressure on firms at a time when economists are warning of a “double
dip” recession as companies, consumers and the public sector all cut
their spending.
Business leaders criticised the CRC — which was
created by Labour but implemented by the Coalition — as “complex and
bureaucratic”. One accused ministers of swinging “a big hammer” at
companies and questioned whether it would have any environmental
benefits.
Under the scheme, any company or public sector
organisation that consumes more than 6,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of
energy a year – meaning a power bill of about £500,000 – must register
its energy use by the end of next month. From April, firms will need to
buy permits for each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted. For those using
6,000MWh, that could mean £38,000.
The scheme is intended to
create a financial incentive to cut energy use, and those organisations
that record the biggest reductions will get bonuses, funded by penalties
imposed on those with the worst record.
Of about 4,000
organisations estimated to qualify for the scheme, only 1,229 have
registered to date, leaving thousands at risk of fines. Missing the
Sept 30 deadline will mean an immediate £5,000 fine, and £500 for each
day after that, up to a maximum of £45,000.
Another 15,000
smaller organisations are also required to register and could be
expected to buy permits in the future. If they miss the September
deadline, they face fines of £500.
WSP Environment & Energy, a consultancy firm, estimated that a total of 7,500 businesses would miss the deadline.
Greg
Barker, the energy and climate change minister, who is overseeing the
scheme said yesterday: “I understand the original complexity of the
scheme may have deterred some organisations and I want to hear
suggestions as to how we can make the scheme simpler in the future.”
Executives
and business groups said that the scheme had been poorly communicated
and publicised, leaving many companies in the dark.
One recent
survey suggested that 53 per cent of executives had not even heard of
the CRC and did not know whether their firm was affected.
The
Environment Agency, which will run the scheme for the Government, has
refused even to publish a list of the companies that are required to
register, citing the Data Protection Act.
The Coalition is pressing ahead with the CRC despite Conservative pledges to cut red-tape on businesses.
Business
groups said the paperwork and costs involved in complying with the CRC
scheme could put a significant new burden on companies already
struggling in an uncertain economic climate. The Bank of England is
expected to underline fears about the economy today with forecasts for
faltering economic growth and persistent inflation.
Yesterday, the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply reported a slowdown in British manufacturing exports to Europe.
Bob
Jarrett, of the BHF-BSSA Group, a trade body that represents thousands
of independent shops, said ministers had not done enough to explain or
justify the CRC. “We’ve only come across this in the last few weeks, and
yet the deadline is at the end of next month. The Department for Energy
has not given this nearly enough publicity,” he said.
What the Chinese really think of 'Man Made Global Warming'
One
of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade
us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their
economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building
programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just
waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes
marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get
there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West
will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs
nations thwack us into the long grass.
This is, of course, utter
nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made
Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should
they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply
into Western culture is… No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly
imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to
buy.
What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was
largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the
fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations.
But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know
exactly what the official view is.
Ozboy – one of the finest commenters in this parish as well as proprietor of the Liberty Gibbet website – sets the scene nicely:
The argument [that China leads the world in renewable energy
technology investment] rings a little hollow when you consider Beijing
plans to build coal-fired power stations at the equivalent rate of one
Australia, per year, for the next twenty-five years. The reputed Chinese
fascination with renewable energy looks at best, a very long-term
fallback position; at worst, a façade.
That’s what makes what
you’re about to read even more startling. It’s a book called Low Carbon
Plot, by Gou Hongyang and, as it’s freely available in China’s
government-controlled bookstores, carries Beijing’s nihil obstat. No
English translation is currently available, but our own China
correspondent, Locusts, has translated the introduction from the
original Mandarin, and (not entirely without risk to himself) has asked
me to make it publicly available on this forum. At four thousand words,
it’s a little long to insert onto a blog page, but you can navigate to
it from the Rare Scribblings menu option at the top, or just click here.
It’s not so much an eye-opener as it is a bombshell. If true, it
shows the Chinese government as rejecting CAGW in its entirety,
believing it a conspiracy between Western governments and business to
protect their own way of life, at the expense of the entire developing
world—in other words, 80% of the world’s population.
Ozboy
does not exaggerate. Here, for example, is the author’s damning
verdict on the Climate Change industry. Noting the irony of the spate of
freezing cold weather that greeted the Copenhagen summit, the author
wrily notes:
It was as if the freezing cold winter
was having a laugh at all of these “Global Warming” theories. If the
world was warming at an ever quickening pace, as all of these
environmentalists say, then whence from such extreme cold? Whenever
there are any doubts about Global Warming, it is almost as though
environmentalists turn everything around and claim that this is too, a
result of Global Warming. The Greenhouse Effect has turned in to a big
basket, no matter what bad thing it is, just chuck it in.
He
is even more damning about solar power in which, let it not be
forgotten, China is supposed to be the world’s most shining example of
just how well it can work. First, he neatly captures the wishy-washy,
John-Clare-esque pastoral utopianism which drives greenies to throw
commonsense out of the window and pursue “renewable energy” regardless
of all the facts:
Isn’t this the most beautiful
thought possible, no pollution, everywhere is just greenery mountains
and rivers, people won’t need to worry about coal mines collapsing, no
need to worry about forests being chopped down, no need to worry about
rising sea levels submerging island nations. It is as if, if only
humanity could adopt clean energy, then all of our problems would be
resolved with one sweep of the knife. But is the result really thus?
There is a very real problem staring everybody in the face. Solar
power, wind power, can they be implemented on a large scale? Can they
provide large scale industries with enough electricity? Can they supply
trains with the power to fly along the tracks?
It is obvious, that the answer is in the negative.
He then – rather daringly, I think – weighs into the environmental unsoundness of this supposedly clean energy source:
Is solar power really clean? Investigations show that the base
silicon that solar panels rely on is extracted via a energy intensive,
heavily polluting industry. And where is this industry based? China.
China has already become the world’s biggest photovoltaic industrial
market. The most important ingredient in solar power is polycrystalline
silicon. The efficiency of manufacturing the panels is rather low, and a
lot of pollution is generated as a by-product. When local industries
started producing polycrystalline silicon, they were mostly reliant on
outdated technology. Apart from high energy consumption, for every ton
of pure polycrystalline silicon created, there were also more than 8
tons of ammonium chlorid[adized] silcon as by-product, as well as [other
shit that a cursory look at google translate doesn't answer].
The prosperity of China’s solar power industry, at the price of the
environment of those rather weak distant regions, in order to attract
commerce and investment, in order to collect tax revenue, very many
environmental appraisal programmes have not yet been strictly
implemented.
Here is the author eloquently demolishing the Carbon = Poison meme:
Will the increase in Carbon Dioxide definitely lead to the planet
warming? Although there have been many many reports published by
research institutes that verify this, but from the viewpoint of the
history of man, and scientific method, the theories have not yet
achieved scientific proof.
But, after many years of repeated
indoctrination from every kind of propaganda machine, and the mixing
together of environmental pollution and the exhaustion of natural
resources, people have already formed a conditioned reflex, when the
wind blows, the grass bends with it, and quickly hang these things on
the hook of “carbon”, and attempted to get rid of carbon at a faster
rate. We need to start peeling, and get back to the real world, and
cannot stick labels everywhere. “Carbon” is the same “carbon” it was
before, we must not get in to too much of a fluster. It is with polluted
water/effluent, acid rain, destructive logging and waste with which we
must struggle over the long term.
And here he is
concluding that it is a fiendish plot – a new Cold War to all intents
and purposes – by the West to suppress the economic growth of the BRICS
nations.
Behind the back of the demonizing of
“carbon”, we must recognize that it is the sinister intention of the
Developed Countries to attempt to use “carbon” to block the living space
of the Developing Countries.
There is only one Earth,
natural resources are limited. If according to current technological
conditions, and Developing Countries had the same living standard as
Developed Countries, then we’d need at least 3 to 5 Earth’s to satisfy
our appetites. This is what Developed Countries are most afraid of, the
development of the Developing Countries poses an enormous threat to
their way of lives.
In 2008, the price of foodstuffs
substantially increased, a certain President actually said that the
primary reason was because suddenly, one day, 300 million Indians
started to eat two bowls of rice, and one billion Chinese started to
drink milk.
In the eyes of some Westerners, the many
developing countries have absolutely no right to enjoy the same standard
of life as them.
If we really are equal, are of one mind,
and together protect the Earth – our garden, we really can see a
beautiful utopia in the future. But the Developed countries do not in
the slightest wish to take any responsibility, they have set up double
standards over “carbon emissions”, everywhere reflecting their
arrogance and selfishness.
Behind “the Carbon Plot” is national interest, it is the bitter struggle for the right to existance for every country.
At this time, we again see the struggle between two camps, Europe,
the USA and other developed countries, and China, India, Brazil, and
Russia as the representatives of the Developing Countries, owing to
their common interest, now walking closely together.
Personally,
I think his conclusion says more about BRICs chippiness and paranioa
than it does socio-political actualite. The CAGW scam owes much more to
an attempted power grab by the left in order to achieve
“environmentally” in the 21st century what it couldn’t achieve
economically in the 20th Century, viz: total state control of the means
of production, in the guise of ecological correctness.
But it
doesn’t really matter whether the author is right or wrong in what he
thinks. What matters is simply that this IS how the Chinese think,
which, whether you love China or loathe it is fantastically good news
for those of us in the realist/sceptics camp. China, after all, is the
world’s future dominant economic power and, this being so, it makes an
absolute nonsense of attempts by the EU and the US to hamper our
industrial growth by imposing on our economies eco-taxes and
eco-regulations which the Chinese intend to ignore completely.
This
truth hasn’t hit home yet: not in the EU; not in the Cleggeron
Coalition; not in Obama’s USA. Here’s my bet. The first to see sense on
this will be whichever Republican administration takes over from Obama’s
one-term presidency in 2012. From that point on – by which time we’ll
have had two more exceptionally cold winters to concentrate our minds –
British and European environmental policy will look increasingly foolish
and irrelevant.
A
STATE Government-backed scheme to use the sun to power towns in
Queensland's scorched Outback has run into the dust due to concerns
about the light. Cloncurry in the state's northwest was meant to be the
centrepiece of a radical $30 million plan to use solar energy to heat
water and generate electricity, cutting carbon emissions and reliance on
diesel – and eventually taking the town off the grid.
But The
Courier-Mail can reveal that three years after its launch, instead of a
forest of 8000 mirrors the project consists only of four test panels and
a fake tower behind a locked gate.
It was forecast that by now, a
"groundbreaking" 10-megawatt solar thermal power plant would be using
steam from water heated in a graphite block to drive a turbine to
generate electricity. It should have been supplying power to the homes
of 4828 residents.
The Government, which faces criticism over a
series of expensive infrastructure blunders, is blaming the project's
failure on concerns about light pollution. Boffins are now looking into
concerns that residents could be exposed to blinding light from the
plant.
Energy Minister Stephen Robertson has broken the official
commercial-in-confidence line of the state's commercial partner,
Sydney-based Lloyd Energy Storage, to reveal the technological glitch.
"There was a glare issue exceeding what they consider to be appropriate
levels," he said. "If the glare issue cannot be addressed the project
will be moved somewhere else in Cloncurry or it will not proceed."
The
State Government earmarked $7 million for the project. Of that,
$900,000 had been spent so far, he said. "We are talking about a
sunrise industry here, no pun intended," Mr Robertson said. "Sometimes
we've got to take a risk with taxpayers' money to prove up this new
technology."
He admitted the "timelines had blown out", and said
the University of Melbourne had been commissioned by Ergon Energy and
Lloyd Energy to prepare an independent report into "glare issues". He
said the report would be finalised and publicly released later this
month.
He could not say if it was the four panels on the
outskirts of Cloncurry that had been deemed "too glary" or those of
another project. The company is trialling the same technology at Lake
Cargelligo in NSW.
Premier Anna Bligh touted the project for
Cloncurry in November 2007, aiming to take a personal interest. Lloyd
Energy and the SMEC Group were to contribute $24 million. Subject to
feasibility studies, the system was expected to be suitable for any
remote town or towns on the fringe of grid power, such as Thargomindah,
Quilpie, Cunnamulla, Normanton, Charleville or Julia Creek.
Die, I
tell you, die ... ye're all going to die, die a most horrible death ...
die, yes you ... die. And so reports the BBC: "Many more people will die
of heart problems as global warming continues, experts are warning,"
they tell us.
"Climate extremes of hot and cold will
become more common and this will puts strain on people's hearts, doctors
say ... A study in the British Medical Journal found that each 1C
temperature drop on a single day in the UK is linked to 200 extra heart
attacks."
"Heatwaves, meanwhile, increase heart deaths from other causes, as shown by the events in Paris during summer 2003."
The
worst of it is that these people are serious and so is the BBC. They
cannot see how stupid they look, how stupid they sound, and how stupid
they are. In fact, they are beyond stupid. They are barking mad.
Amongst
other things, I wonder if any of them know what a Saturated Adiabatic
Lapse Rate is [The higher up you go, the colder it gets], and what thus
happens when you drive from the coast (altitude 0ft) to my home,
altitude a smidgin short of 1000ft? Are they really saying that this
puts people at risk of a heart attack?
It is these people that
are the real health hazard – they sap our life energy with their
constant, sterile diet of scare stories. But if they are so in love with
the idea of death, they should embrace it and save us leading them
there. I am sick to the back teeth of them.
Here’s
a fact that I suspect most people don’t know: Wherever we humans have
gone in the past two centuries, we have increased local and regional
biodiversity. Biodiversity, in this case, is defined as increasing
species richness. Yet, “the popular view [is] that diversity is
decreasing at local scales,” Brown University biologist Dov Sax and
University of California, Santa Barbara biologist Steven Gaines report
[PDF].
Ample scientific evidence shows that this popular view is
wrong, however. For example, more than 4,000 plant species introduced
into North America during the past 400 years grow naturally here and now
constitute nearly 20 percent of the continent’s vascular plant
biodiversity.
The fear among opponents of "invasive species" is
the aggressive outsiders will cause a holocaust among the native plants.
That might initially seem reasonable because there are a few species,
like kudzu, purple loosestrife, and water hyacinth, that grow with
alarming speed wherever they show up. But that doesn't mean other
species are in danger. “There is no evidence that even a single long
term resident species has been driven to extinction, or even extirpated
within a single U.S. state, because of competition from an introduced
plant species,” Macalester College biologist Mark Davis notes [PDF]. Yet
this spurious threat of extinction persists as one of the chief reasons
given for trying to prevent the introduction of exotic species.
Meanwhile,
there are plenty more examples in which local and regional species
richness has been increasing. Introduced vascular plants have doubled
the species richness of the plant life on most Pacific Islands. In fact,
the species richness of some islands has increased so much that they
now approach the richness of continental areas. In New Zealand 2,000
introduced plant species have taken up residence with the islands’ 2,000
native species and only three native plant species have gone extinct.
The opening of the Suez Canal introduced 250 new fish species into the
Mediterranean Sea from the Red Sea which resulted in only a single
extinction.
Researchers find increases in species richness on the
local level as well. Sax and Gaines cite studies [PDF] which find that a
corner of West Lancester in Britain has seen a dramatic rise in plant
species diversity over the past two centuries, gaining 700 exotics while
losing 40 natives. They note that reptile and amphibian diversity has
increased slightly in California. Mammal diversity has increased on many
oceanic islands, and in Australia and North America. Freshwater fish
diversity has increased significantly in many drainages throughout the
U.S.
Birds are different. Many species, especially those endemic
to isolated islands, have gone extinct, largely due to habitat loss and
predation from humans or introduced predators such as rats.
Nevertheless, Sax and Gaines note that “net bird diversity (in spite of
large changes in species composition) has remained largely unchanged on
oceanic islands.” In other words, despite extinctions of endemic
species, the number of avian species on any given island remains about
steady because new species are introduced to them.
So why then
are so many ecologists and environmentalists on a jihad against
introduced species? Of course, some introduced species do cause harm to
the environment. They become pests (which means they set up shop where
we don’t want them to) or cause disease in people or creatures we care
about. But the vast majority of introduced species blend in more or less
unobtrusively with the natives. The main objection to spreading
non-native species seems to be aesthetic.
For example, Birmingham
University biologist Phillip Cassey and colleagues respond to the
evidence of rising local and regional biodiversity by complaining that
many of the birds that a visitor from the U.K. would encounter in New
Zealand are the same species found back home. “The same is true for
floras and faunas around the world,” lament [PDF] Cassey and colleagues.
“It is the biological equivalent of flying from Seattle to Paris and
going to Starbucks for your coffee.”
Fair enough. But this is not
a scientific argument. Sax and New Mexico University biologist James
Brown correctly observe that whether the impacts of introduced species
“are considered to be positive or negative, good or bad is a subjective
value judgment rather than an objective scientific finding. Scientists
are no more uniquely qualified to make such ethical decisions than lay
people.” Cassey may wish to quaff his café au lait at Les Deux Magots
while others enjoy their Venti Café Misto in the familiar purlieus of a
Parisian Starbucks.
Nevertheless, aesthetic reasons are still
reasons and science can be validly deployed in their service. Some
people may prefer landscapes restored to a condition prior to the
introduction of outside species. As Davis and his colleague Stony Brook
University biologist Lawrence Slobodkin point out [PDF], architecture
uses mathematics, physics, and engineering to achieve aesthetic and
social goals. “Perhaps ‘ecological architecture’ might be a more apt
characterization of the work of ecological restoration,” they suggest.
“Because the term acknowledges the central role played by both values
and science.”
Ultimately, Davis argues that the good news from
biology is that the “globalization of the Earth’s biota will not lead to
a world composed of zebra mussels, kudzu, and starlings.” Instead,
while in the future different regions of the world will be more similar
in their floras and faunas, Davis concludes, “At the same time, they
will become more diverse, in some cases much more diverse.”
An ancient Earth like ours -- despite FIVE TIMES as much atmospheric CO2
Geologists
reconstruct the Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years
ago and find they were like ours -- findings published in a peer
reviewed publication. The complete lack of logic in the last sentence
below was needed to get it published, of course
An
international team of scientists including Mark Williams and Jan
Zalasiewicz of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester,
and led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke, formerly of Leicester and now at the
University of Lille (France), has reconstructed the Earth’s climate
belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years
ago.
The findings have been published online in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA – and show that these
ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.
The
researchers state: “The world of the ancient past had been thought by
scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon
dioxide levels much higher – over twenty times as high – than those of
the present. However, it is very hard to deduce carbon dioxide levels
with any accuracy from such ancient rocks, and it was known that there
was a paradox, for the late Ordovician was known to include a brief,
intense glaciation – something difficult to envisage in a world with
high levels of greenhouse gases. “
The team of scientists looked
at the global distribution of common, but mysterious fossils called
chitinozoans – probably the egg-cases of extinct planktonic animals –
before and during this Ordovician glaciation. They found a pattern that
revealed the position of ancient climate belts, including such features
as the polar front, which separates cold polar waters from more
temperate ones at lower latitudes. The position of these climate belts
changed as the Earth entered the Ordovician glaciation – but in a
pattern very similar to that which happened in oceans much more
recently, as they adjusted to the glacial and interglacial phases of our
current (and ongoing) Ice Age.
This ‘modern-looking’ pattern
suggests that those ancient carbon dioxide levels could not have been as
high as previously thought, but were more modest, at about five times
current levels (they would have had to be somewhat higher than today’s,
because the sun in those far-off times shone less brightly).
“These
ancient, but modern-looking oceans emphasise the stability of Earth’s
atmosphere and climate through deep time – and show the current man-made
rise in greenhouse gas levels to be an even more striking phenomenon
than was thought,” the researchers conclude.
Reference:
Vandenbroucke, T.R.A., Armstrong, H.A., Williams, M., Paris, F.,
Zalasiewicz, J.A., Sabbe, K., Nolvak, J., Challands, T.J., Verniers, J.
& Servais, T. 2010. Polar front shift and atmospheric CO2 during the
glacial maximum of the Early Paleozoic Icehouse. PNAS
Skeptical paper now accepted by an academic journal
After lots of shifty objections from other journals
By Steve McIntyre
CA
readers are aware that Ross and I twice submitted a comment on Santer
et al 2008 to International Journal of Climatology (both available on
arxiv.org), showing that key Santer results (which were based on data
only up to 1999) were overturned with the use of up-to-date data. These
were both rejected (but have been posted up on arxiv.org). Ross has now
led a re-framed submission, applying an econometric methodology for the
analysis. This is available, together with SI and data/code archive
here.
Although key Santer et al 2008 results are invalid with
up-to-date data, they have been widely cited as showing that there is no
inconsistency between models and observations in the tropical
troposphere (e.g. CCSP, EPA), as had been previously believed/argued by
some.
IJC reviewers and editor Glenn McGregor took the position
that the invalidity of key Santer results was not of interest to the
climate science community. They proposed all sorts of other
investigations as a precondition for publication – many of them
interesting enterprises and suggestions, but all very time consuming and
not relevant to the simple issue of whether key Santer results were
overturned with up-to-data.
The reviewers of our first submission
refused to permit the editor to provide us with their actual reviews,
requiring the editor to paraphrase their reviews.
In our second
try, one of our reviewers objected to us using Santer et al 2008 methods
in a comment on Santer et al 2008. He argued that the S08 methods were
incorrect (blaming Douglass et al for leading them down a “cul-de-sac”)
and condemned our demonstration that their results fell apart with
up-to-date data as a “descent away to meaningless arguments”. He argued
that our comment on S08 should instead use “diagnostic” of Santer et al
2005.
The history of our comment was somewhat played out in the
Climategate letters. In one Climategate email, Peter Thorne of the UK
Met Office, a Santer coauthor, who appears to have been one of the
reviewers who rejected our submission, wrote to Phil Jones notifying him
of the rejection of our submission, using the defamatory term
“Fraudit”.
Santer’s campaign for support for his obstruction of
my data requests accounts for many Climategate letters. As members of
the editorial board of Climatic Change, Santer had previously
co-operated with Phil Jones in 2004 in ensuring that Climatic Change did
not require Mann et al to comply with reviewer requests for supporting
data and code.
Santer did ultimately place some of the requested
material online. Despite Santer’s whining and delaying, this archive was
very useful as it enabled co-author Chad Herman of the excellent
treesfortheforest blog to benchmark his own emulation of Santer’s
calculations and to create a fresh archive of PCMDI runs. Chad’s archive
is FAR more usable for statistical analysis than endlessly
re-processing PCMDI and may well have use for interested parties over
and above the analysis in this article. (Remind me to discuss this at
greater length).
After a certain point, Ross gave up on us being
able to publish the simplest of comments at IJC and re-framed the
analysis with “new” econometric methodology and submitted to Atmospheric
Science Letters. There was a Team reviewer, but the editor permitted
Ross to respond and used his own judgment on the response – this is what
is referred to in Climategate letters as a “leak” in the journal
network.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
U.S. electricity blackouts skyrocketing
While Greenies obstruct the building of any new generators except windmills -- and they don't like windmills much either
New York's Staten Island was broiling under a life-threatening heat
wave and borough President James Molinaro was seriously concerned about
the area's Little League baseball players.
It was last July's
Eastern heat wave and Consolidated Edison was responding to scattered
power outages as electricity usage neared record highs.
So,
authorities followed Molinaro's suggestion to cancel that night's Little
League games, which were to be played under electricity-sucking stadium
lights.
"Number one, it was a danger to the children that were
playing out there in that heat, and secondly it would save electricity
that people would need for air conditioning in their homes," said
Molinaro, who'd been forced to sleep at his office that night because of
a blackout in his own neighborhood.
Throughout New York City,
about 52,000 of ConEd's 3.2 million customers lost power during the heat
wave. Triple-digit temperatures forced residents like 77 year-old Rui
Zhi Chen, to seek shelter at one of the city's 400 emergency cooling
centers. "It felt like an oven in my home and on the street," Chen said.
Experts
on the nation's electricity system point to a frighteningly steep
increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000
consumers.
During the past two decades, such blackouts have
increased 124 percent -- up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to
92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of
Minnesota. In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities
reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.
"It's hard to imagine how
anyone could believe that -- in the United States -- we should learn to
cope with blackouts," said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud
Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.
There is of course some levelling out already -- but not over the sort of period considered below
We
are sure you’ve heard that sea level is rising? We conducted a web
search on “Global Warming and Sea Level” and nearly 3.5 million websites
are immediately located. And before you conduct the search yourself,
you already know what you will find. The earth is getting warmer due to
the buildup of greenhouse gases, the warmer sea water expands causing
sea level to rise, and most of all, you will read all about the ice
melting throughout the world pouring fresh water into ocean basins
causing sea level to rise far more. Alarmists insist that the worst is
just around the corner, and the sea level rise will accelerate or even
quickly jump to a new level given some catastrophic collapse of large
sheets of ice near the fringes of the polar areas. Coastlines will be
inundated, the human misery will be on a Biblical scale, ecosystems will
be destroyed … this goes on for millions of websites!
Back in
August of 2008, scientists from all over the world attended a workshop
entitled “Empirical Constraints on Future Sea-Level Rise” and they just
published a summary of their findings in the Journal of Quaternary
Science. Somewhere along the way, they decided to refer to the group as
“PALSEA” for PALeo SEA level working group.
The PALSEA group begins their article noting:
The eustatic sea-level (ESL) rise predicted for the 21st century
represents one of the greatest potential threats from climate change,
yet its magnitude remains a subject of considerable debate, with
worst-case scenarios varying between 0.59m and 1.4m. In general, the
basis for this debate revolves around the uncertainties in the dynamical
behaviour of ice sheets (such as loss of buttressing through ice shelf
break-up or enhanced ice flow through water lubrication of the ice sheet
base), which may lead to a nonlinear sea-level response to climate
change.
Note that the authors are talking about
worst-case scenarios leading to “0.59m and 1.4m”; if the trend of the
past 50 years continues (from Figure 1), sea level will rise around 0.20
meters (around 8 inches) by 2100. The PALSEA team notes that measuring
sea level can be tricky “Because changes in ice mass will also cause
changes in regional (due to gravitational and rotational feedbacks) and
global (due to volume) sea level, the changes in sea level at a
particular coastline record the difference between vertical motions of
the land and sea, commonly referred to as relative sea-level (RSL)
changes. Such isostatic effects are a function of the distance from the
large ice sheets.”
Now for the good stuff! The PALSEA team states that
Given a broad range of emission scenarios the IPCC AR4 predicted
global warming of between 1.18C and 6.48C during the 21st century. The
last time that a global warming of comparable magnitude occurred was
during the termination of the last glacial period (TI).
Furthermore, they write
Given this evidence for periods of rapid warming during TI, at least
some of this warming occurred on decadal to centennial timescales.
Because of the general similarity between the magnitude and rate of
warming predicted for the 21st century and the warming that occurred
during certain periods of TI, it is interesting to consider rates of
sea-level rise during TI as a case study of the response of sea level to
climate change.
The PALSEA group presents the graphic
below (Figure 2) showing three different rates of sea level rise
following an increase in temperature. As seen there, sea level could
rise exponentially (as suggested by many climate change alarmists), it
could rise linearly, or it could rise and then level off (the
“asymptoting” curve).
Here’s what they conclude:
Therefore, we suggest that option 1 (exponential sea-level rise) is
extremely unlikely. …An exponential increase in rates of sea-level rise
with respect to temperature would result in 21st-century sea-level rise
an order of magnitude larger than estimates using alternative patterns
of response – it is an important result that the palaeo-sea-level data
rule out such a response.
Finally, they write “the
palaeo sea-level data suggests that sea-level rise related to current
warming may be rapid at first and slow over time.”
Basically,
their analysis of what happened in the past favors the “asymptoting”
curve that is quite different from the exponential curve favored by
those proclaiming the worst is yet to come! Mother Nature showed us in
the past how sea level responds to warming
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Antarctic temperatures have never been stable
It
is said frequently that the climatic data for Antarctica for the past
30 years – the period for which records are far superior to previous
times - shows clear signs of mankind’s influence. However, it is
important to look at such changes in a historical context. This is
important else we attribute any and every change seen in the past few
decades to mankind alone. When it is done today’s changes are seen in a
new light.
Never Stable
Antarctica’s climate has never
been stable, and there have many significant changes in the past few
thousand years, indeed the past few hundred as well. Proxy indicators
from ice cores show abrupt alterations in atmospheric circulation and
temperature. One of the most dramatic changes was the intensification of
the circumpolar westerly winds between 6000 and 5000 years ago and
between 1200 and 1000 years ago.
Going back even further there is
strong evidence for dramatic changes obtained the synthesis of ice core
isotope proxy records for temperature showing that there was a warm
period, much warmer than Antarctic is today, between 11,500 and 9000
years ago, a period sometimes referred to as the early Holocene climatic
optimum. The ice sheets responded to this warmth. Analysis of grounding
lines in the marine-based parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet, at the
head of the Ross Ice Shelf, show that the sheets started to retreat to
their current position from a position close to the edge of the current
Ross Ice Shelf 7000 - 9000 years ago.
It is also clear that the
climate of the Earth’s polar regions are linked. Intensification of
atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere (indicated by a
stronger Siberian High and northern circumpolar circumpolar westerlies
and a deeper Icelandic Low) and to a lesser degree in the Southern
Hemisphere (stronger circumpolar westerlies and deeper Amundsen Sea Low)
occurs 8200 - 8400 years ago. Date from Siple Dome (West Antarctica)
and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project ice core climate proxies for
northern and southern circumpolar westerlies show remarkably concurrent
major intensification periods between 6000 and 5000 years ago and
starting 1200 - 600 years ago. It appears that Antarctic events start
earlier and less abruptly than those in Greenland.
The most
dramatic changes in atmospheric circulation during the Holocene noted in
the Antarctic are the abrupt weakening of the southern circumpolar
westerlies 5200 years ago and intensification of the westerlies and the
deepening of the Amundsen Sea Low starting 1200–1000 years ago.
Following
the early Holocene warming Siple Dome data indicate significant cooling
between 6400 and 6200 years ago, followed by relatively milder
temperatures over East Antarctica 6000 – 3000 years ago that lasted
until about 1200 years ago in the Siple Dome area. There then seems to
have been a flattening and a slight decline in temperature starting 1200
– 1000 years ago, followed by warming in the last few decades.
Penguin Optimum
The
timing of these climatic changes can also be deduced from observations
of abandoned Adelie penguin colonies along the coast of Victoria Land.
This is because penguins depend on sea ice extent. Research into penguin
rookeries suggest a ‘‘penguin optimum’’ associated with a warmer
climate and less sea ice between 4000 and 3000 years ago. This
‘optimum’’ ended abruptly 3000 years ago, as the inland lakes began to
fill and the coastal lakes began to decrease in size. It seems the
abandoned rookeries were reoccupied between 1200 and 600 years ago, also
suggesting warming along the southern Victoria Land coast.
The
abrupt climate change commencing 1200 – 1000 years ago is the most
significant Antarctic climate event of the past 5000 years. Its onset is
characterised by strengthening of the Amundsen Sea Low and the southern
circumpolar westerlies with cooling both at Siple Dome. It is this
event that provides the underpinning for centennial and perhaps
shorter-scale natural variability upon which future climate change over
Antarctica might operate.
In the past 300 years there has been
major changes in what appears to have been a significant shift in
atmospheric circulation above the entire trans-Antarctic region between
about 1700 and 1850. Concurrently there has been abrupt climate change
in the North Atlantic as well as a significant change in atmospheric
circulation in the North Pacific.
“There
are only two certainties in life: death and taxes.” It’s a phrase that
originated more than 200 years ago (first attributed to Benjamin
Franklin) and it still holds true today. But did you know an Australian
political party is trying to combine life’s two certainties?
The
Australian Greens advocate the re-establishment of an estate tax as part
of their economic platform, which the Greens are taking to the upcoming
federal election. Estate taxes, otherwise known as death duties, were a
common part of Australian life for most of the 20th century, and forced
individuals to pay tax on a deceased family member’s estate, mainly
their property and other valuable possessions. The United States still
enforces an estate tax today.
Exemptions and thresholds were
implemented to spare low and average income earners from much of the
burden, but Queensland abolished estate taxes in the late 1970s, and by
the mid 1980s, the Commonwealth and other states had followed
Queensland’s lead.
The Greens’ proposal to reintroduce an estate
tax promises to “protect the family farm, the family home and small
business with a threshold of $5 million”, but it is hard to understand
why a party so strongly dedicated to protecting vulnerable members of
society plans to tax the dead in order to enforce its social policy.
Also,
in contrast with both major parties’ pledges to cut company taxes once
the budget bottom line improves, the Greens plan to increase the company
tax rate to 33 per cent, which would irreparably harm productivity and
lead to a death of a different kind: the figurative death of the
Australian economy. They also seek to impose a higher rate of tax on the
Australian mining industry.
For a party growing in influence and
poised to hold the balance of power in the Senate from July 2011, the
Greens’ policies warrant further examination. Their estate tax plan is
nonsensical and would only increase the hardship and sorrow suffered by
grieving families after the death of a loved one, and force many sons
and daughters to either sell their business, bring in partners, borrow
more, downsize or lay off staff.
As US magazine Investors
Business Daily editorialised this year, people “should not be punished
because they work hard, become successful and want to pass on the fruits
of their labour, or even their ancestors’ labour, to their children”.
An estate tax can also be a disincentive for people and businesses to
save and invest, and, rather ironically, can even be considered harmful
to the environment, as an American review argued in 1998.
Perhaps it’s time to add a third certainty to the list to join death and taxes – bizarre Greens economic policy.
US Government in Massive New Global Warming Scandal – NOAA Disgraced
Global
warming data apparently cooked by U.S. government-funded body shows
astounding temperature fraud with increases averaging 10 to 15 degrees
Fahrenheit. Official Warmists are well-known for "adjusting" their data
but this is ludicrous
By John O'Sullivan
The
tax-payer funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
has become mired in fresh global warming data scandal involving numbers
for the Great Lakes region that substantially ramp up averages.
A
beleaguered federal agency appears to be implicated in the most blatant
and extreme case of climate data fraud yet seen. Official records have
been confirmed as evidence that a handful of temperature records for the
Great Lakes region have been hiked up by literally hundreds of degrees
to substantially inflate the average temperature range for the
northeastern United States.
The web pages at the center of this latest climate storm were created by NOAA in partnership with Michigan State University.
Someone
under the pseudonym ‘Sportsmen’ anonymously tipped off skeptic blog,
Climatechangefraud.com. Independent analysts affirm the web pages as
genuine. In his email the faceless whistleblower explains that what
precipitated the scoop was “a rather dubious report in the media that
the Great Lakes temperatures have risen 10 to 15 degrees, I found it was
downright laughable.” (Just a few examples of media hysteria here and
here and here and here)
He continues, “ Prior to this report I
would frequent the ‘Coastal Watch’ temperature maps for northern Lake
Michigan. When this report came out it dawned on me that the numbers
didn't match what I had been reading on the Coastal Watch temperature
page.”
Under a scheme called ‘Sea Grant’ NOAA collaborates with
national universities to compile an official federal temperature record.
In this instance, the partnersip is with Michigan University’s ‘Coastal
Watch.’
Together the two institutions show temperature maps for
northern Lake Michigan registering an absurd 430 degrees Fahrenheit
-yes, you read it right –that’s four hundred and thirty degrees-and this
is by no means the highest temperature recorded on the charts.
In
the heated debate about Earth’s ever-changing climate you certainly
don’t need to be scientist to figure out that the Great Lakes would have
boiled away at a mere 212 degrees so something has seriously gone awry
inside this well-funded program.
In addition to its civilian
employees, NOAA research and operations are supported by 300 uniformed
service members who make up the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. But
don’t bet on anyone being court-martialled over this latest global
warming fiasco.
Paid for entirely from federal taxes, the shamed
public body’s key responsibilities include warning of dangerous weather
and protection of ocean and coastal resources, and conducts research to
improve understanding and stewardship of the environment.
Michigan State University Also Complicit in Fraud?
The
worst evidence of hyper-inflated global warming data is on a web page
entitled, ‘Michigan State University Remote Sensing & GIS Research
and Outreach Services.’
While another web page identifies that
Michigan State University’s ‘Coastal Watch’ site is officially connected
to NOAA thus implicating both institutions in a climate data
conspiracy. At the bottom of the web page mention is made of ‘Sea Grant’
that is described as a “unique partnership of public and private
sectors that combines research, education and technology transfer for
public service.“
The legend further boasts that such data is
shared across “a national network of universities meeting the changing
environmental and economic needs of Americans in coastal ocean and Great
Lakes regions.”
NOAA Makes it White Hot in Wisconsin
But
our intrepid anonymous whistleblower wasn’t done yet. He pointed out
that Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, really got cooking this July 4th around
9:59AM, according to NOAA and Coast Watch. It was there, at the bottom
left row of the temperature data points, that the records reveal on that
day a phenomenally furnace-like 600 degrees Fahrenheit. (Click here if
CoastWatch link does not work or disappears)
Further analysis of
the web pages shows that the incredibly wide temperature swings were
occurring in remarkably short 10-hour periods-and sometimes in less than
5 hours. Strangely, none of the 250 citizens of the 78 families living
in the village appeared to notice this apocalyptic heatwave during their
holiday festivities.
Hidden Data Spike Hikes Heating Averages
But
our sharp-eyed stranger comments, “ As I understand it, the current
available Gif data maps are several for the latest dates, but the
archives have less dates to choose from. It's possible that in the past
these numbers were incorrect but in the archive system you do not see
the numbers that could have been in gross error.”
So it may
reasonably be inferred climate fraudsters had a perfect opportunity here
to fraudulently apply overcooked and overlooked data so that America’s
Joe Public would be none the wiser that a few climate numbers vastly
ramped up the national temperature averages.
Laughably, NOAA
publishes a caveat at the bottom right corner of their web page warning
about their data is “Not to be used for navigation purposes!”
The
current head of NOAA is Dr. Jane Lubchenco, nominated by President
Barack Obama and confirmed by the United States Senate on March 19, 2009
and is the first woman to serve as NOAA administrator. On her
appointment Lubchenco declared that science would guide the agency and
that she expects it to play a role in developing a green economy. You
can say that again!
Readers now interested in doing their own
detective work may wish to peruse the further data found here and here
to further ascertain whether climate doomsayers have rigged more ‘real
world’ temperatures in a shabby scheme to win support for green energy
tax hikes. If you find anything be sure to drop Lubchenco a line here.
There
is a wild debate in the skeptic community on whether CO2 plays a role
in climate changes over time and if so how much. I am going to avoid
getting embroiled in that discussion because no one knows, including
the IPCC, which starts with the basic assumption that it does, that we
understand the forcing and proceeds from there. They back into the
forcing in their models which are seriously flawed with very poor
understanding of the clearly important factors of water in all its forms
in our atmosphere and in the role of the sun and oceans. Even with
seriously contaminated surface observation data , their models are
failing miserably even just a decade or two into the runs.
There
was a very similar divisive argument in the meteorological community in
early to middle part the last century as Dr James Fleming of Colby
College documented in the book “Historical Perspectives on Climate
Change”. The pertinent chapter was on the web and can be found here.
This was before models and was based on theory as the write-up
documents.
As a Synoptic Meteorologist and Climatologist over the
years I have let the data do the talking. The data says that CO2 plays
little or no role in climate change - which is cyclical and relates far
better with the cycles in sun and ocean.
When correlating CO2
with temperature trends in various periods of cyclical warming and
cooling the last 110 years we find a negative correlation from the late
1800s to 1917 (-0.35), positive from 1917 to 1940 (+0.43), negative
during the WWII and post WWII boom from 1940 to around 1975 (-0.40),
positive from 1975 to around 2000 (+0.36) and negative in the short
period to 2009 (-0.56).
The
Russian scientists Klashtorin and Lyubushin (2003) found a similar
alternating pattern comparing GLOBAL temperature trends and World Fuel
Consumption. They found a +0.92 from 1861 to 1875, a -0.71 from 1875 to
1910, +0.28 from 1910 to 1940, -0.88 from 1940 to 1975, +0.94 from 1975
to 2000.
In the paper they projected a reversal post 2000 which
has verified. This on again, off-again correlation suggests that CO2 is
not the primary climate driver. Since the solar TSI and ocean
multidecadal cycles are much better correlated, they are more likely
candidates.
As opposed to be a pollutant or an agent of harm, CO2
is a blessing, a plant fertilizer that has supported an agricultural
revolution. Nurseries use CO2 to boost plant growthy in greenhouses,
pumping it in at levels maybe 3 times ambient levels.
Just the increase in the last century has improved crop yields as shown by NASA greening studies and the UN’s own graph.
More HERE (See the original for links and more graphics)
More Warmist hatred
A
Daily Kos contributing editor has suggested that “Steve Milloy and his
buddies” commit suicide or be euthanized apparently for the crime of
opposing global warming alarmism.
Amid a rant on his Examiner.com
blog about skeptics “carpet-bomb[ing] newspaper editorial pages with
climate change disinformation…], Steven Alexander, who writes for Daily
Kos under the nom-de-plume “Darksyde,” wrote that: "… if only Milloy
and his buddies could check into one of the [Soylent Corporation's]
lovely medical suites for a short nature movie and a glass of wine…"
The reference is to the assisted suicide scene in the 1973 movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston.
The Clarity Digital Group, which owns Examiner.com, removed the offensive posting immediately upon notification.
Former
Washington Post reporter David Weigel was recently fired from the paper
for privately writing on the Journolist listserv that Matt Drudge
should “… set himself on fire.”
Now Alexander has publicly wished a similar fate for climate skeptics.
If
you wonder why the skeptics fight so vigorously against the
greenshirts, the sort of intolerance exhibited by Alexander over a mere
difference in opinion is one reason. God help us all, if they prevail.
A
new national poll of green consumers found that belief in global
warming is declining, and even the worst nightmare scenarios would not
change people’s minds or behaviors.
The poll, one of four annual
surveys conducted by Shelton Group, surveyed 1,098 Americans who at
least occasionally buy green products and found only about half believe
climate change is occurring and caused by human beings.
Asked
whether they agreed with the statement, “Global warming or climate
change is occurring and it is primarily caused by human activity,” 52%
of green consumers agreed, compared to 49% of U.S. consumers overall.
That’s down significantly from a year ago when 58% of all U.S. consumers
agreed.
Respondents who disagreed, or were undecided, were then
asked, "Which of the following scenarios would convince you that climate
change is a real and immediate threat and cause you to make dramatic
changes in your lifestyle? You wake up one morning and find out that…"
followed by a list of nightmare scenarios. These included: The polar ice
cap has completely melted, kids can no longer play outside in the
summer and Nebraska is turning into a desert.
The top two
responses were: "None of these would convince me" at 27%; and "One or
more of these would convince me but I would be unlikely to make changes"
at 24%.
“That means over half of those who are unconvinced about
global warming are either unlikely to change their mind or unlikely to
change their ways, no matter what happens,” said Suzanne Shelton, CEO of
Shelton Group....
Lessons from the Horizon blowout: more hype than harm
Only
two weeks after BP began capping the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout,
people have begun to ask, "Where's the oil?" The fact that skimmer
ships sent out to clean the water of oil are unable to find oil to clean
is leading the mainstream media to question whether environmentalists
tried to exploit this unfortunate event by making it seem worse than
it really was for political reasons.
The Gulf oil spill was a
disaster for many reasons. Eleven lives were tragically cut short.
Millions of dollars of equipment was destroyed. Several million barrels
of oil rather being put to productive spewed into the Gulf. While we
don't yet have a full accounting of the environmental damage the oil
spill might ultimately cause, there is no question that the gulf's
wildlife, the shore and the region's fisheries and recreation industries
have suffered.
Environmentalists hyped the spill - in the
absence of good evidence - variously as "America's Chernobyl," (Sierra
Club), as "an unprecedented environmental disaster," (Natural Resources
Defense Council) and "an unprecedented ecological and human tragedy,"
(Environmental Defense).
Echoing the environmentalist's claims,
on several occasions, President Obama has called the Horizon blow out
"the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history." Fortunately,
these are proving gross overstatements, since the damage from the spill
is proving far less than their frightful claims.
For instance,
the Horizon blowout has killed far less than 1 percent of the number of
birds killed by the Exxon Valdez spill. And while we've heard horror
stories and seen pictures of oil coated marine mammals, it turns out to
be the same pictures shown over and over again since wildlife response
teams have only collected three visibly oil coated dead mammals thus
far. It's true that about 350 acres of Louisiana's valuable coastal
marshes have been soaked by oil. However, this far less that the 15,000
acres of wetlands lost each year due in no small part to the Federal
programs including: the cutting of channels and canals for transport and
the Army Corps stranglehold on the Mississippi's path of flow;
federally subsidized flood and hurricane insurance that encourages
people to develop (and redevelop after storms) coastal wetlands; and
federal agriculture subsidies that encourage overproduction and the
overuse of pesticides and fertilizers - the runoff of which contributes
each year to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the spill,
the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, prompting the gradual
lifting of the harsh restrictions that had shut down the fishing and
shrimping industries.
Environmentalists hyped the spill in an
attempt to push the Senate to pass the largest energy tax in history.
Though the Senate's energy bill had nothing to do with the safety of
offshore oil rigs, the Green lobby tried to link the two in the public's
mind. Fortunately, neither the public, nor ultimately, many Senators
were buying it.
Unfortunately, environmentalists were successful
in convincing the Obama Administration to shut down new offshore oil and
gas production after the spill. This was despite that fact that the
scientific panel which President Obama appointed to recommend a
response, said that a moratorium was unjustified and could make a bad
situation worse. Though, the Administration's moratorium was struck
down by two separate courts as illegal, in the meantime, offshore oil
rig workers, their suppliers, and associated industries joined Gulf
fishermen and hotel employees in the unemployment line. Thirty-three
offshore rigs were shuttered. And the public coffers suffered a
significant loss of revenues.
Theories for why the damage from
the blowout has not been as great as expected range from the surface
evaporation of much of the oil, to microbes eating it, to the currents
and the dispersants simply dissipating the oil faster and to a greater
degree than anticipated. One possibility that few people are discussing
is that we simply never had a reliable estimate of how much oil was
spilled. While it was almost certainly a larger amount than BP and the
government originally claimed, it was also likely considerably less than
gargantuan claims made by environmentalists.
It is too soon to
tell what long-term harms, if any, may result from the spill, but for
the moment, it appears that we can all be thankful that the worst
doomsday claims made by the green lobby have little relation to reality.
The spill, as bad as it was, was another instance of environmentalists
playing the role of Chicken Little. The sky was not falling, though we
did experience some rough weather.
Can all states be “particularly vulnerable” to global warming?
One
of the most frequent tricks used by global warming alarmists to induce a
state legislature to pass costly carbon dioxide restrictions is to
claim the particular state is “particularly vulnerable” to global
warming for various reasons, justifying costly, state-specific action.
“Particularly
vulnerable” is a relative term, of course, and not all states can be
“particularly vulnerable” relative to each other.
For example,
the July 22 Nashville Tennessean claims, “The Southeast is one of the
most vulnerable regions to climate change.” However, a quick Google
search for “global warming” and “particularly vulnerable” shows a
plethora of states, regions, and groups alleged to be “particularly
vulnerable” to global warming. A partial list includes:
The Northeast The Southeast The Southwest The Gulf Coast The Atlantic Coast The Great Plains Latinos Native Americans Children Senior citizens Cities Rural areas Developing nations Developed nations California Connecticut Florida Hawaii Idaho Indiana Louisiana Maine Maryland Montana New Jersey New York North Carolina Oregon Rhode Island Texas Virginia
The
Tennessean is not entirely to blame for its disingenuous claim of the
Southeast being “particularly” vulnerable to global warming. After all,
the newspaper is merely reporting the claims of a new report from the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Of course, EPA is the source for
many of the other “particularly” vulnerable claims above, as well.
While
“particularly vulnerable” is used as a rallying cry in various states
to push for state-specific global warming laws, the truth of the matter
is that “particularly vulnerable” has become an absolutely meaningless
term. If all states are “particularly vulnerable,” then none are.
Every time a big
iceberg breaks off a glacier, Wamists in their illogical way hail it as a
sign of global warming. But, if anything, it proves the opposite
1962: Chunk of Greenland ice shelf calves into 230 square-mile island.
2010: Second-largest Greenland glacier calves into 100 square-mile island.
With
climate change being blamed for, gasp!, a hot summer, shouldn't these
"islands of ice" be increasing in a so-called warming world? Sadly for
alarmists (and CNN), this glacier is actually growing which causes
increased calving!
That's because the Petermann Glacier, from
which the latest ice island broke off, has been getting larger over the
last 8 years, which is the primary cause for the creation of these
floating islands of ice. They literally snap off under their own
enormous weight. Just ask Obama's chief science advisor, John Holdren.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Probably not the ‘hottest year’
Who needs those pesky thermometers?
James Hansen of NASA, an ardent believer in man-made warming, announced
recently that “The 12-month running mean global temperature in the
Goddard Space Institute analysis has reached a new record in 2010 . . .
NASA, June 3, 2010. The main factor is our estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.” The GISS figures show that recent temperatures in the Arctic have been up to four degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.
Should we be alarmed? Probably not very.
My esteemed colleague Art Horn, at the Energy Tribune blog, has blown the whistle on Hansen and GISS. He points out that GISS has no thermometers in the Arctic!
It has hardly thermometers that are even near the Arctic Circle. GISS
estimates its arctic temperatures from land-based thermometers that
supposedly each represent the temperatures over 1200 square kilometers.
That’s a pretty heroic assumption.
Meanwhile, the Danish
Meteorological Institute is publishing sea-surface temperatures from the
Arctic showing a cooling trend in the Arctic oceans during melt season
since about 1993. Clearly, we have no accurate measure of the real
temperatures and trends in the Arctic at this moment. Probably that’s
not very important. The Russians say that the Arctic has its own 70-year
climate cycle. The files of the New York Times, in fact, are filled
with stories from the 1920s and 1930s, clearly showing that the Arctic
was as warm then as now.
But this is the moment when proposed
energy taxes would start to scuttle 85 percent of the energy which
powers the modern world and its lifestyles. Global climate alarmists,
Hansen among them, are playing a desperate and short-sighted game of
“pass the energy taxes.”
President Obama says energy taxes are a
high priority—perhaps high enough to ramp up his “health care reform”
strategy. In a lame-duck Congressional session, after the November
elections, Congress persons who had already lost their seats, would vote
to saddle America with energy taxes that would triple our electric
bills and, according to a Harvard study, drive gas prices to $7 per
gallon.
The energy taxes are intended to make fossil fuels
expensive! The idea is to deliberately drive fossil fuel prices high
enough to force us to stop using them. Then we’re supposed to depend on
costly and erratic solar and wind power. (Biomass can never produce much
energy: biofuel crops would take too much land, and we can’t make
ethanol out of cellulose sources.)
The man-made global warming
believers have invested 20 years in their campaign to convince us of
CO2-driven climate calamity. To their chagrin, the earth’s temperatures
started to trend downward in 2007.
The sunspot index, which has a
much stronger correlation with our thermometer record than CO2 (79%
versus 22%) started predicting the cooling in 2000. The sun is still in a
long cold-predicting minimum.
In 2008, NASA itself told us that
Pacific had shifted into its cooling mode. The history of the Pacific
Decadal Oscillation indicates a 30-year cooling phase, the opposite of
the 1976–1998 warming trend.
They’re panicked about losing the
whole ball game. They feel they must get an energy tax on the books
before the earth has a chance to resume the recent-and-predicted cooling
trend. They imagine that if the law gets on the books, a restart of the
cooling wouldn’t push the next Congress to repeal the energy tax!
They
might even be right, though it seems a stretch given the American
people’s already-massive Obama-debt and the demonstrated history that
tax cuts grow the economy and tax increases strangle it.
It’s a desperate time, not for the earth, but for the global warming campaigners.
Gridded
land surface temperature data products are used in climatology on the
assumption that contaminating effects from urbanization, land-use change
and related socioeconomic processes have been identified and filtered
out, leaving behind a “pure” record of climatic change.
But
several studies have shown a correlation between the spatial pattern of
warming trends in climatic data products and the spatial pattern of
industrialization, indicating that local non-climatic effects may still
be present.
This, in turn, could bias measurements of the amount
of global warming and its attribution to greenhouse gases. The 2007
report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set aside
those concerns with the claim that the temperature-industrialization
correlation becomes statistically insignificant if certain atmospheric
circulation patterns, also called oscillations, are taken into account. But this claim has never been tested and the IPCC provided no evidence for its assertion.
I estimate two spatial models that simultaneously control for the major
atmospheric oscillations and the distribution of socioeconomic
activity. The correlations between warming patterns and patterns of
socioeconomic development remain large and significant in the presence
of controls for atmospheric oscillations, contradicting the IPCC claim.
Tests for outlier influence, spatial autocorrelation, endogeneity bias,
residual nonlinearity and other problems are discussed.....
Conclusions
Direct
testing refutes the IPCC’s assertion that “the correlation of warming
with industrial and socioeconomic development ceases to be statistically
significant” upon controlling for atmospheric circulation patterns.
The correlations are quite robust to the inclusion of atmospheric circulation indicators, confirming
the presence of significant extraneous signals in surface climate data
on a scale sufficient to account for about half the observed upward
trend over land since 1980.
As discussed in the underlying
papers by deLaat and Maurellis and McKitrick and Michaels,
socioeconomic activity can lead to purely local atmospheric
modifications (such as temporary increases in local particulates and
aerosols) as well as land-surface modifications and data
inhomogeneities, and these can cause apparent trends in temperature data
that should not be interpreted as general climatic changes. As was
noted half a century ago by J. Murray Mitchell Jr., “The problem remains
one of determining what part of a given temperature trend is
climatically real and what part the result of observational difficulties
and of artificial modification of the local environment.” (Mitchell
Jr., 1953).
The results herein show that this longstanding
concern is likely still relevant, and the hypothesis used by the IPCC to
dismiss it cannot be supported by the data. A substantial fraction of
the post-1980 trends in gridded climate data over land are likely not
“climatically real” but result from data quality problems and local
environmental modifications.
Slandering the Alberta oilsands is a very profitable business for Greenpeace
They
must have had a good laugh over at Greenpeace’s headquarters in
Amsterdam when they heard about the Alberta government’s latest plan to
defend the oilsands. Last week, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach announced a
$268,000 advertising campaign to counter global anti-oilsands
propaganda.
Just to put that in perspective, the government of
Alberta will reap more than $7 billion in energy taxes this year. So
Stelmach is spending 0.0038% of that to defend the oil industry. For
comparison, Stelmach spent $22 million — almost a hundred times as much —
designing a fancy new logo and slogan as part of a three-year
“rebranding” of the province.
Even more bizarre is that most of
the ads will run in Alberta — pretty much the last place that needs
convincing. But even if the ads ran in America, $268,000 is a joke. A
single 30-second ad during the Super Bowl, for example, costs more than
$3 million.
Greenpeace is more effective. The day after Stelmach
announced his master plan, Greenpeace activists climbed out of the top
of the Calgary Tower and unfurled a huge anti-oil banner. The news and
pictures instantly spread around the world, earning millions of dollars
worth of free media coverage.
As always, Greenpeace immediately
asked for donations for their stunt. Its websites around the world
published breathless accounts of their bravery — with a call for money
on every page.
This isn’t their first oilsands
trespass-for-dollars scheme. Last fall, Greenpeace activists broke into
several oilsands mines and a processing plant, getting free publicity
every time. Expect more.
So how should Alberta fight back?
Debating Greenpeace doesn’t work. They’re not interested in other
opinions. The answer is simple: Follow the money. Greenpeace’s budget
last year was nearly $270 million. They need to bring in more than
$700,000 a day just to keep the lights on.
Slandering the
oilsands is very profitable for them — and it doesn’t carry the risks
that campaigning against Saudi Arabia’s oil fields would, or China’s
nuclear plants. Which is why Greenpeace doesn’t try stunts there.
If
their oilsands break-ins had costly consequences, Greenpeace would move
onto other, more lucrative projects. Oilsands producer Suncor had the
right idea when they sued Greenpeace for $1.5 million over their 2009
trespass.
But there is a legal tool Stelmach has that Suncor
doesn’t: The Criminal Code. Currently, only the little people at
Greenpeace are ever charged, for minor crimes like mischief and, in the
case of the Calgary Tower, break and enter. Many of those arrested are
in their 20s, and are let off with a slap on the wrist.
In the
meantime, Greenpeace makes enormous profits off the scheme. They can
always find more cannon fodder to do their dirty work.
But there
is a section of the Criminal Code designed for such a conundrum: Section
467.1, which allows for the prosecution of a “criminal organization.” A
criminal organization is defined as one whose main activity is the
“commission of one or more serious offences that, if committed, would
likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit,
including a financial benefit, by the group.” Break and enter, for
example, is considered a “serious offence.”
Greenpeace operatives
have been charged dozens of times in Alberta alone. The law is clear.
To be convicted under Section 467.1, the crime organization’s leaders
don’t need to know the exact details of the offences being committed, or
even the identity of the people involved.
The list of factors
for courts to consider includes the repeated use of a name (Greenpeace
banners always feature their logo); the receipt of a benefit (Greenpeace
always fundraises off their stunts); and repetition of these activities
(almost a half-dozen times in the past two years). The law applies to
members of the organization anywhere around the world.
What do
you think would make Greenpeace’s executives stop laughing? A few
amateur newspaper ads, and arresting some college kids? Or the
prosecution of senior Greenpeace executives here in Canada — and in
Amsterdam, too?
The
latest news is most countries in the world are backing out of the
pseudo scientists' wishes for limits on greenhouse gases and global
warming legislation. Most industrial countries realize it is too
expensive an endeavor to partake in at a time when the world's economy
is teetering on collapse, since over two hundred billion dollars would
be needed from wealthy countries to help poor countries conform to
proposed climate change rules. Poor countries also do not need any more
restrictions on industrialization than they now have which would limit
what little growth they may have.
The actual quote of money
needed from industrial countries is one hundred billion dollars, but all
realize that the cost is expected to double or even triple in the
coming years if all were to get on board. Such fantastic amounts of
money have to come mostly from the American taxpayers in the form of
double gasoline prices, tax amounts equal to energy use amounts of all
energy bills, higher prices for all goods and services and across the
board tax State and Federal tax hikes for all Americans.
In this
time of having the worst economy since the Great Depression with most
people just scraping by from day to day and some not making it at all,
it is insane for any rational individual to even consider anything which
would lessen what economy we have.
The whole premise of this
pseudo science movement relies on the pretext of cutting carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere. CO2 isn't even a pollutant, but a natural gas
existing in the atmosphere. The greatest CO2-making machines in the
world are human beings, which breathe out CO2 after each breath of air.
There are currently about eight billion people living on the face of
this planet and billions of other species of air-breathing creatures
living along with us, which says in itself that biological entities are
the largest emitters of CO2, with all else coming in a very distant
second. So to go along with the global warming pseudo science is inane
since air breathing entities are the main culprits of greenhouse gases.
We
would be in essence accepting taxation on a deliberately invented
problem which cannot be resolved other than eliminating half of the
world's population.
The global warming idiots still want us to
believe that climate change is responsible for all of the Earth's
extreme weather phenomena over the past few decades. However for those
who know weather and climate and have a lifetime of observation to
compare over the years find that there have always been extremes in
weather multiple times in any given year and records prove that. There
may be record breaking heat, massive flooding, and many devastating
storms occurring in the world today, but the fact is such extreme
weather has been going on since the planet developed an atmosphere. Most
weather records of extremes in all categories were recorded many
decades ago.
Recently global warming pseudo scientists have said
the world's warming is definitely human caused and the sun has nothing
to do with it because solar activity has been in a low period for
decades. This is an outright lie since we have had more solar activity
happening in the last fifteen years than at any time in previous
history.
Their claim of the world having been warmer over the
last two decades is also a lie since actual records differ with their
predisposed computer generated models of the same time period.
The
polar ice packs vary from year to year and have since we have been
keeping records, and today's ice packs are well within the range of
variance showing no real actual receding ice. The same can be seen in
many mountainous areas where glacier ice packs are. In all instances,
any reduction of ice is caused by lack of precipitation rather than
temperature.
This brings us to the fact that climates are in
constant flux and have been since the beginning of time. The only
difference between weather and climate is the fact that weather
constantly changes, whereas climate changes over the course of many
years. This can be seen in Egypt where the area of the Pyramids show a
much wetter and more moderate temperate climate in the area thousands of
years ago.
Of course there is more CO2 in the atmosphere today
than even fifty years ago because much of the world's great rain forests
have been cut, thus allowing more CO2 to remain in the atmosphere since
no trees are there to breathe it in and convert it into oxygen.
This
whole global warming lie is really all about making money from citizens
who have very little to give. It is also part of a larger plan
involving government control over the world's masses, which will boil
down to how many children we are allowed to have, what type of
transportation we will use, the type of food we eat, our life style, and
ultimately who will be selected for a euthanasia program, under the
guise of protecting the whole by eliminating the few who are no longer
productive in society.
We must realize the whole idea of global
warming and climate change is a pseudo science motivated by a political
agenda rather than fact-based hard science.
Greens'
policies more Christian than Cardinal George Pell, says Greenie leader
Bob Brown. I accept that Bob may be an expert on global warming
theology but I suspect that a Cardinal knows more about Catholicism than
Bob does.
Bob also seems to be a one-man opinion poll: Not good polling methodology
AUSTRALIA'S
Catholic leader Cardinal George Pell has taken up the rhetoric of the
extreme right and his views do not represent mainstream Christian
thinking, Greens leader Bob Brown says.
Senator Brown says
Australian Greens' policies are much closer to mainstream Christian
ideals than the Sydney Archbishop's ideas. He was responding to
criticism of the Greens by Cardinal Pell in an opinion piece published
in News Ltd newspapers yesterday.
Cardinal Pell wrote the Greens
were hostile to the notion of the family and the party would allow
marriage regardless of sexuality or gender. He said the Greens were
"thoroughly anti-Christian".
Senator Brown, in reply, said
Cardinal Pell's "anti-Christian" claim was a lie, and that he had fallen
out of touch with his people. "The good archbishop has forgotten the
ninth commandment, which is 'thou shall not bear false witness against
thy neighbour'," Senator Brown said. "He's lost the ethic of the golden
rule and the Greens have kept it.
"The Greens are much closer
to mainstream Christian thinking than Cardinal Pell. "That's why he's
not standing for election and I am."
The Catholics the senator
spoke to support an end to discrimination, he said. "They support
compassion to asylum seekers and they support the BER (Building the
Education Revolution) scheme, like the Greens do," he said. "Cardinal
Pell opposes those things."
Senator Brown said the archbishop's
views on gay marriage were "discriminatory and biased". "The majority
of Catholics support equality in marriage (as do) the majority of
Christians in Australia," he said.
"The Greens are with the
majority but both the big parties, like Cardinal Pell, are opposed to
21st Century majority thinking in Australia. "He's lost contact with
his own voters ... his own Catholic majority in this country."
In
his article, Cardinal Pell wrote the Greens' once claimed that humans
are simply another smarter animal - an ethic designed to replace
Judeo-Christianity. He said some Greens are "like watermelons, green
outside and red inside". "A number were Stalinists, supporting Soviet
oppression," he wrote.
Senator Brown said Cardinal Pell had
"taken up the rhetoric of the extreme right in Australia". "That is not
new but he has become very politically active against the compassion
and the environmental commonsense of the Greens policies," he said.
The
column in the Sunday Telegraph by His Eminence does not now seem to be
online at its original source so I excerpt it below. He headed his
column with "The Greens are Anti-Christian". In answer to the question
of how people should vote in the coming election, he replied:
First
of all they should look at the policies and personal views of the
individual candidates. Good and wise people are needed in the major
political parties. Many, including myself, are concerned about the
environment and so my second point was to urge my listeners to examine
the policies of the Greens on their website and judge for themselves how
thoroughly anti-Christian they are.
In 1996 the Green leader Bob
Brown co-authored short book, The Greens, with the notorious
philosopher Peter Singer (now at Princeton University) who rejects the
unique status of humans and supports infanticide as well as abortion and
euthanasia. They claimed humans are simply another smarter animal so
that humans and animals are on the same or similar levels depending on
the level of consciousness.
This Green ethic is designed to
replace Judaeo-Christianity. Some Greens have taken this anti-Christian
line further by claiming that no religious argument should be permitted
in public debate. Not surprisingly they are often consistent on this
issue, welcoming Christian support for refugees, but denying that any
type of religious reasoning should be allowed on other matters.
One
wing of the Greens are like watermelons, green outside and red inside. A
number were Stalinists, supporting Soviet oppression. A few years ago
they even tried unsuccessfully to use the privileges committee of the
NSW Legislative Council to silence religious voices in public debate.
The
Greens are opposed to religious schools and would destroy the rights of
those schools to hire staff and control enrolments. Funding for
non-government schools would be returned to the levels of 2003-04.
Already in Canberra, Green pressure was one factor in the attacks on
Calvary Hospital because they were not providing abortions.
We
all accept the necessity of a healthy environment, but Green policies
are impractical and expensive, which will not help the poor.
For those who value our present way of life, the Greens are sweet camouflaged poison.
A new doctrine for the Methodist Church: Global warming
Who cares about that silly old Bible with its old-fashioned fairy stories? We want MODERN fairy stories!
Anyone
who has observed the way the belief in man-made global warming has
become for many a new religion might be intrigued by a lengthy document
published by the Methodist Church, in the hope that next year it will
become official Methodist policy.
Entitled Our Hope in God’s
Future, it kicks off by proclaiming that “the theological task is to
reflect on modern scientific accounts of the threats posed by climate
change in the context of affirming the triune God as creator and
redeemer of the universe”. “What is required of God’s people,” it goes
on, “is repentance.” The first step must be “confessing our complicity
in the sinful structures which have caused the problem”.
The
document makes it clear that all good Methodists must take as their new
Bible the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, along with the famous report by Lord Stern. Inspired by this
holy writ, like any Old Testament prophet it reels off all those
familiar apocalyptic warnings of the catastrophes sinful mankind is
bringing on the planet – floods, droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves,
melting ice caps, sea levels rising by 20 feet (although they did get
that one from the prophet Gore).
One cannot imagine how they left
out plagues and swarms of locusts, since they could have found biblical
evidence for this in the IPCC report. But, of course, only the most
devout disciple will still believe in all these apocalyptic predictions
anyway, since in every case there is plenty of sound science to suggest
they are no more than scare stories.
Quite what the Methodist
faithful are supposed to do to avert all these disasters, the document
doesn’t make clear, apart from droning on, just like Chris Huhne, about
the need to work for salvation by creating a “low-carbon economy”.
But
one thing that is clear is that the authors of this document have
completely abandoned the core principle of Arminian theology that led
John Wesley to set up the Methodist church in the first place — namely
that “no works of human effort can cause or contribute to human
salvation”. Perhaps if these Methodists want to start a new religion
they should just join Greenpeace, which got there before them.
Excerpts from Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Quote of the Week:
“The report emphasizes that human society has developed for thousands
of years under one climatic state, and now a new set of climatic
conditions are taking shape.”
The quote of the week came from
the NOAA report released on July 28, the day before EPA’s declaration
that it will not reconsider its finding that carbon dioxide emissions
are harmful to human health and welfare. Virtually weekly, physical
evidence mounts that over the past 10,000 years the earth has
experienced periods warmer than today – the last one was the Medieval
Warm Period and cold periods such as the Little Ice Age. Yet, NOAA
maintains that the earth’s climate has been virtually stable for
thousands of years.
This goes to the crux of the political issue –
the systematic disregard by publically funded scientists of
contradictory physical evidence. Be it by hockey sticks, use of
carefully selected time frames, calculation of past temperatures by
computer models with highly speculative assumptions, or any other means,
a code of silence infects publicly funded climate science.
The
public has a right to know all the science not just selected parts of
it, as in the NOAA report. A right ignored by publically funded
scientists. (Please see the excerpt of Bob Carter’s article “Closing out
dissent”)
*********************************************
The
Number of the Week is +0.49°C. This is the temperature anomaly for
July, 2010 from UAH Globally Averaged Satellite-Based Temperature of the
Lower Atmosphere as reported by Roy Spencer.
The temperature for July is 0.49°C above the mean for the past 32.5
years. Temperatures continue to be slightly below, but not statistically
significantly so, than the record for the satellite measurements set in
1998, which was a strong El Niño year. The 2009 – 2010 El Niño appears
to be over. Sea surface temperatures are falling. It remains to be seen
if atmospheric temperatures will fall later this year.
We can
all be thankful that Roy Spencer and John Christy adamantly believe that
the public should be informed of the results of science – not selected
parts of it.
***********************************************
With
little or no government support, George Mitchell spent almost 20 years
and his own money to develop a means of “fracking” shale to extract
natural gas. If the method can be successfully applied elsewhere, then
many areas of the world with no “recoverable” hydrocarbon reserves will
have abundant reserves. The method is proving successful around Fort Worth, Texas and in the Eastern US.
The
method uses water and sand mixed with small amounts of chemicals.
Already the anti-energy groups are attacking the method because it uses
millions of gallons of water per well and some questionable chemicals.
Even though the process takes place thousands of feet below the water
table and below aquifers for drinking water, these groups are playing on
fear of contamination of drinking water. Clearly, proper treatment of
surface waste water from the process is needed. But this should be
determined by science, not by fear.
Also of concern is the role
that the Federal Government, particularly the EPA, may decide to play.
Continued success in this privately funded enterprise will render many
alternative energy schemes of Federal and state governments even more
financially impractical. Will governments allow it?
Our attitude to ionising radiation is irrational, and easing safety limits would do far more good than harm
The
word "radiation" frightens people, and little wonder. Ever since the
cold war, the prevailing view has been that ionising radiation can do
real harm to us without being seen or felt - and should be avoided at
all costs. In fact radiation is much less harmful than we feared. Given
the availability of carbon-free nuclear power, this makes a sea change
in our view of radiation rather urgent.
Fear of radiation grew
alongside descriptions of what might happen in the event of a nuclear
war. In earlier decades there was genuine scientific uncertainty about
radiation's long-term health effects, and scientists were unable to be
reassuring. So, driven by universal popular concern, tight regulation
was imposed to minimise public exposure.
Since 1950, public dose
limits have been tightened by a factor of 150. Currently, the
internationally recommended limit is 1 millisievert per year above the
natural background level of about 2.5 millisieverts per year. For
comparison, a typical CT scan might give you a dose of 5 millisieverts
and a simple dental or limb-fracture X-ray 1/100th of that.
Much
has been learned over the past half century from clinical medicine,
radiobiology and accidents like Chernobyl. There is no doubt that a very
high single dose is fatal, as the fate of the initial 237 firefighters
at Chernobyl illustrates. Within a few weeks, 28 died, and 27 of those
had received doses in excess of 4 sieverts.
However, many people
receive much higher doses than this, albeit under very different
circumstances. When a cancer patient is treated with radiation in a
radiotherapy clinic, the tumour dies after absorbing a dose of more than
40 sieverts. During the treatment, healthy tissue and organs near the
tumour get an incidental dose of some 20 sieverts, which is 20,000 times
the recommended annual limit and at least five times the dose that
proved fatal at Chernobyl.
How can tissue survive this friendly
fire? A radiation dose is the same in principle, whether received in a
hospital or elsewhere. But the critical point is that the therapeutic
dose is spread over four to six weeks, giving cells time to repair the
damage. Each day the healthy cells receive about 1 sievert, and just
manage to repair themselves. The tumour cells receive a higher dose, and
just fail to do so.
So much for acute effects, but what about
longer-term ones? Very rarely, the damage is misrepaired, and the
resulting error may eventually lead to cancer. To find out how often
this happens, we need to compare the lifelong health data of a large
number of people, some of whom have received a significant radiation
dose and some who have not.
The nuclear bombs dropped on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 provide us with
the data we need. About 66 per cent of the original inhabitants of the
two cities survived to 1950, since when their individual health records
have been extensively studied.
By 2000, 7.9 per cent of them had
died of cancer, compared with 7.5 per cent expected from rates found in
similar Japanese cities over the same period (Radiation Research, vol
162, p 377). This shows that the extra risk caused by radiation is very
small compared with the background cancer risk, and less than the 0.6
per cent chance of an American citizen dying in a road traffic accident
in 50 years.
Not surprisingly, those who received higher doses
developed more cancers. But those subjected to doses less than 0.1
sievert showed no significant increase in solid cancers or leukaemias.
Nor did they suffer an increase in the incidence of deformities, heart
disease or pregnancy abnormalities. So there is a practical threshold of
0.1 sievert for any measurable effect due to a single acute dose.
Given
what we now know, from radiotherapy to the legacy of the attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is clear that radiation safety limits are far
too conservative. Evidently, our bodies have learned through evolution
to repair or eliminate damaged cells, with a low failure rate. I suggest
the upper limit might be reset at a lifetime total of 5 sieverts, at no
more than 0.1 sievert per month. That would be a fraction of a
radiotherapy dose, spread over a lifetime.
Such a revision would
relax current regulations by a factor of 1000. This may seem excessively
radical to some, especially those in the safety industry who have spent
60 years trying to reassure the public by regulating against all
avoidable sources of radiation - which, after all, is what society asked
them to do.
But common sense says that extra precautions are
most needed when we know least, and in a reasoned approach to any new
technology we should start with a cautious limit which may be relaxed
later, as instrumentation improves and our appreciation of it grows. The
regulation of ionising radiation has resolutely gone in the opposite
direction, driven by fear.
Changing the limits would bring
practical benefits. Radiation safety is a major contributor to the cost
of nuclear power, so any relaxation should lead to big cost reductions.
Given that we urgently need to develop carbon-free energy sources, that
is hugely beneficial.
It should also lead to a more sensible
attitude to nuclear waste. If treated properly, the quantities are
small, it become harmless after a few centuries, and it may be buried at
moderate cost. In any event, the effect of radioactive waste is a small
matter compared with the global influence of carbon dioxide and leaked
hydrocarbons. We should re-examine the environmental risks of radiation
with the same radical attitude that is required for our own health.
By S. Fred Singer, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
The
US Senate’s proposed Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) would force
electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of
their power from wind and solar – rising to 15% by 2021. These goals
resemble those of the Waxman-Markey bill that barely passed the House in
June 2009. It’s disturbing that some Republicans on the House Energy
and Natural Resources Committee voted for ACELA (American Clean Energy
Leadership Act). If the Senate were to take up an energy bill, it is
likely that Sen. Brownback (R-KS) will introduce an amendment for RES.
Now,
it is quite clear that wind and solar are not economic -- and probably
never will be competitive, even when fuel prices rise significantly. So
the RES mandate would mean that all of us taxpayers would support even
more the RE rent-seekers and lobbyists, who are already milking the
government for subsidies and tax-breaks for the construction of wind
farms and solar energy projects.
In addition, electricity users
(rate payers) would pay more for electric power to cover the higher
cost. The so-called “feed in tariff” would force utilities to buy
expensive wind and solar electricity and average the cost into the rest
of the power produced. The consumer, meaning all of us, would pay for
this boondoggle. It’s just a huge transfer of money, yet another
regressive tax on consumers, with the electric utilities forced to
become tax collectors.
The hoax part of the RES is that “clean
electricity” is being advertised as a way to save the earth from the
‘dreadful fate’ of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). To accept this
outlandish proposition, one would have to believe that the carbon
dioxide generated in the burning of fossil fuels has a noticeable
influence on climate.
The data argue against it. The
constantly advertised “scientific consensus” is phony; it does not
exist. The evidence that the UN climate panel, the IPCC, puts forward
in support of AGW is pitifully inadequate—and wrong. It is easy to show
that no credible evidence exists; just look at the summary of the NIPCC
report “Nature, not human activity, rules the climate.” It is available
for free on the Internet here
The
fraud relates to the idea that energy produced without CO2 emission is
“clean.” This word ‘clean’ is being misused, and that’s a huge part of
the problem. Of course, removing genuine pollutants like sulfur oxides
and nitrogen oxides and mercury from smokestacks is a real clean up. It
is already mandated by the Clean Air Act and being pursued adequately.
But CO2 is not a pollutant – in spite of the claims of the EPA in its
‘Endangerment Finding’ – which has yet to be tested in court. CO2 is
neither toxic nor irritating nor visible—nor a climate forcer of any
significance, so the idea that we have to stop emitting CO2, or capture
and sequester it, is a pure fraud.
And finally, the whole scheme
is a financial rip-off. We all know that wind and solar energy are
intermittent. If their use should rise beyond the present few percent,
we would require either on-site storage of electricity or large standby
capacity, probably fueled by expensive natural gas, to kick in when the
wind kicks out. Either scheme would impose huge additional costs.
The
biggest part of the swindle is that the RES is being sold on the basis
of creating “green jobs.” But since when does wasting money create
productive jobs? Why not leave it with consumers who can save and
invest it to create real jobs. A study conducted in Spain, which has
gone overboard on renewable energy, shows that each so-called green job
displaces between two and three real jobs.
In any case, the
manufacture of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells is now in the hands
of lower-cost Chinese industry. So the green jobs in the US would
consist of sweeping the mirrors clean from dust and dirt and fixing the
blades and gearboxes of the turbines when they fail.
In all of
this, the proposed legislation ignores nuclear power, which is not only
“clean” in the sense of not emitting carbon dioxide, but is also
competitive in price with most fossil fuels. Nuclear is most likely to
become the major source of electric power once low-cost fossil fuels are
depleted. Yet ACELA explicitly says that new nuclear power and updates
to existing nuclear facilities and generation from municipal solid
waste incineration are not included in the base quantity.
The
hypocrisy of the RES advocates is appalling. It’s OK for the taxpayer
to subsidize low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not
low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear).
If 10% ethanol in gasoline is good, 15% (E15) will be even better. At least for some folks.
We’re
certainly heading in that direction – thanks to animosity toward oil,
natural gas and coal, fear-mongering about global warming, and
superlative lobbying for “alternative,” “affordable,” “eco-friendly”
biofuels. Whether the trend continues, and what unintended consequences
will be unleashed, will depend on Corn Belt versus consumer politics and
whether more people recognize the downsides of ethanol.
Federal
laws currently require that fuel suppliers blend more and more ethanol
into gasoline, until the annual total rises from 9 billion gallons of
EtOH in 2008 to 36 billion in 2022. The national Renewable Fuel Standard
(RFS) also mandates that corn-based ethanol tops out at 15 billion
gallons a year, and the rest comes from “advanced biofuels” – fuels
produced from switchgrass, forest products and other non-corn
feedstocks, and having 50% lower lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than
petroleum.
These “advanced biofuels” thus far exist only on
paper or in laboratories and demonstration projects. But Congress
apparently believes passing a law will turn wishes into horses and
mandates into reality.
Create the demand, say ethanol activists,
and the supply will follow. In plain-spoken English: Impose the mandates
and provide sufficient subsidies, and ethanol producers will gladly
“earn” billions growing crops, building facilities and distilling fuel.
Thus,
ADM, Cargill, POET bio-energy and the Growth Energy coalition will
benefit from RFS and other mandates, loan guarantees, tax credits and
direct subsidies. Automobile and other manufacturers will sell new lines
of vehicles and equipment to replace soon-to-be-obsolete models that
cannot handle E15 blends. Lawmakers who nourish the arrangement will
continue receiving hefty campaign contributions from Big Farma.
However,
voter anger over subsidies and deficits bode ill for the status quo. So
POET doubled its Capital Hill lobbying budget in 2010, and the ethanol
industry has launched a full-court press to have the Senate, Congress
and Environmental Protection Agency raise the ethanol-in-gasoline limit
to 15% ASAP. As their anxiety levels have risen, some lobbyists are
suggesting a compromise at 12% (E12).
Not surprisingly, ethanol
activism is resisted by people on the other side of the ledger – those
who will pay the tab, and those who worry about the environmental
impacts of ethanol production and use.
* Taxpayer and free market
advocates point to the billions being transferred from one class of
citizens to another, while legislators and regulators lock up billions
of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and vast
additional energy resources in onshore and offshore America. They note
that ethanol costs 3.5 times as much as gasoline to produce, but
contains only 65% as much energy per gallon as gasoline.
*
Motorists, boaters, snowmobilers and outdoor power equipment users worry
about safety and cost. The more ethanol there is in gasoline, the more
often consumers have to fill up their tanks, the less value they get,
and the more they must deal with repairs, replacements, lost earnings
and productivity, and malfunctions that are inconvenient or even
dangerous.
Ethanol burns hotter than gasoline. It collects water
and corrodes plastic, rubber and soft metal parts. Older engines and
systems may not be able to handle E15 or even E12, which could also
increase emissions and adversely affect engine, fuel pump and sensor
durability.
Home owners, landscapers and yard care workers who
use 200 million lawn mowers, chainsaws, trimmers, blowers and other
outdoor power gear want proof that parts won’t deteriorate and equipment
won’t stall out, start inadvertently or catch fire. Drivers want proof
that their car or motorcycle won’t conk out on congested highways or in
the middle of nowhere, boat engines won’t die miles from land or in the
face of a storm, and snowmobiles won’t sputter to a stop in some frigid
wilderness.
All these people have a simple request: test E12 and
E15 blends first. Wait until the Department of Energy and private sector
assess these risks sufficiently, and issue a clean bill of health,
before imposing new fuel standards. Safety first. Working stiff
livelihoods second. Bigger profits for Big Farma and Mega Ethanol can
wait. Some unexpected parties recently offered their support for more
testing.
Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA), Ed Markey (D-MA),
Joe Barton (R-TX) and Fred Upton (R-MI) wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa
Jackson, advising her that “Allowing the sale of renewable fuel … that
damages equipment, shortens its life or requires costly repairs will
likely cause a backlash against renewable fuels. It could also seriously
undermine the agency’s credibility in addressing engine fuel and engine
issues in the future.”
* Corn growers will benefit from a higher
ethanol RFS. However, government mandates mean higher prices for corn –
and other grains, as corn and switchgrass incentives reduce farmland
planted in wheat or rye. Thus, beef, pork, poultry and egg producers
must pay more for corn-based feed; grocery manufacturers face higher
prices for grains, eggs, meat and corn syrup; and folks who simply like
affordable food cringe as their grocery bills go higher.
*
Whether the issue is food, vehicles or equipment, blue collar, minority,
elderly and middle class families would be disproportionately affected,
Affordable Power Alliance co-chairman Harry Jackson, Jr. points out.
They have to pay a larger portion of their smaller incomes for food, and
own older cars and power equipment that would be particularly
vulnerable to E15 fuels.
* Ethanol mandates also drive up the
cost of food aid – so fewer malnourished, destitute people can be fed
via USAID and World Food Organization programs.
Biotechnology
will certainly help, by enabling farmers to produce more biofuel crops
per acre, using fewer pesticides and utilizing no-till methods that
reduce soil erosion, even under drought conditions. If only Greenpeace
and other radical groups would cease battling this technology. However,
there are legitimate environmental concerns.
* Oil, gas, coal and
uranium extraction produces large quantities of high-density fuel for
vehicles, equipment and power plants (to recharge batteries) from
relatively small tracts of land. We could produce 670 billion gallons of
oil from Arctic land equal to 1/20 of Washington, DC, if ANWR weren’t
off limits.
By contrast, 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol
requires cropland and wildlife habitat the size of Georgia, and for 21
billion gallons of advanced biofuel we’d need South Carolina planted in
switchgrass.
* Ethanol has only two-thirds the energy value of
gasoline – and it takes 70% more energy to grow and harvest corn and
turn it into EtOH than what it yields as a fuel. There is a “net energy
loss,” says Cornell University agriculture professor David Pimental.
*
Pimental and other analysts also calculate that growing and processing
corn into ethanol requires over 8,000 gallons of water per gallon of
alcohol fuel. Much of the water comes from already stressed aquifers –
and growing the crops results in significant pesticide, herbicide and
fertilizer runoff.
* Ethanol blends do little to reduce smog, and
in fact result in more pollutants evaporating from gas tanks, says the
National Academy of Sciences. As to preventing climate change, thousands
of scientists doubt the human role, climate “crisis” claims and
efficacy of biofuels in addressing the speculative problem.
Meanwhile,
Congress remains intent on mandating low-water toilets and washing
machines, and steadily expanding ethanol diktats. And EPA wants to crack
down on dust from livestock, combine operations and tractors in farm
fields.
“With Congress,” Will Rogers observed, “every time they
make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke.” If
it had been around in 1934, he would have added EPA. Let’s hope for some
change.
Argentina Has Colder Winter Than Antartica, Spurring Record Power Imports
Argentina
is a large country with a population mostly of European origin. I'm
guessing that they won't be convinced to sign on to any global warming
treaty any time soon
Argentina is importing record amounts of
energy as the coldest winter in 40 years drives up demand and causes
natural-gas shortages, prompting Dow Chemical Co. and steelmaker Siderar
SAIC to scale back production.
Electricity supplied from Brazil
and Paraguay rose to a daily combined record of about 1,000 megawatts on
July 12, while consumption peaked at 20,396 megawatts three days later,
according to Buenos Aires-based energy broker Cammesa. Shipments of
liquefied natural gas are set to double this year.
Dow, Siderar
and aluminum maker Aluar Aluminio Argentino SAIC are among companies
closing plants, cutting output or seeking alternative energy sources
after temperatures in parts of Argentina fell below those of Antarctica
on July 15. Rising demand is exacerbating a shortage that began six
years ago as economic growth accelerated and energy investment fell. The
shortage is boosting costs as companies spend more to guarantee
supplies.
“The situation is getting worse, because the shortage
period is growing every year,” Gerardo Rabinovich, a director at the
General Mosconi Energy Institute in Buenos Aires and an adviser to the
opposition Radical Party, said in a telephone interview. “When this
started in 2004, it lasted for about a week, then it was two weeks and
now it’s more than a month.”
In July, temperatures in Buenos
Aires were, on average, 1 degree Celsius below the usual low and high of
8 and 14 degrees (46 and 57 degrees Farenheit), with temperatures
plummeting to about 2 degrees Celsius on July 15.
Renewed Cold
Also
on July 15, temperatures in Mendoza, the wine- producing region in
western Argentina, fell as low as -8.9 degrees Celsius below the
temperature registered that day in the Argentine-controlled area of the
South Pole, according to a national weather institute report.
Argentina
is bracing for a renewed polar front this month. On Aug. 1, almost half
of the country’s 23 provinces registered temperatures below zero, while
the northern city of La Quiaca on the border with Bolivia fell to minus
10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit.) The average low predicated
through Aug. 5 is 1 degree, according to the National Weather service.
Dow
closed a polyethylene plant in July and reduced operations at another
facility to minimum capacity after gas supplies were rationed by the
government, said Soledad Echague, a spokeswoman for the Midland,
Michigan-based company in Buenos Aires. The cuts were more severe than
the company had expected, she said.
The debate over Climate change is another very heated debate which has
captured the views of billions across the globe; on one side we have a
multitude of cataclysmic claims and another emerging group claiming –
“It is a natural cycle”. Could it be the so called consensus of Climate
science maybe wrong?
What are we to make of this when so much
seems to be at stake? After all it’s not like we are talking about a
simple thing like the GFC, we are talking about the possible destruction
of our planet. Is the prudent thing to do to immediately enact a Carbon
trading scheme just to be on the safe side? You know, use precaution,
because the Earth and our children are counting on us to do what is
imperative and nobly right. If the Earth may be in peril should we not
implement a price on carbon even if energy prices rise and cause
economic uncertainty?
On the other hand, we have the Climate
Sceptics (there is even a new political party called, the Climate
Sceptics) also known as Climate Deniers (in a pejorative way). Their
main argument goes something like this: “The climate is always changing
and the recent, albeit miniscule uptick in global temperatures is
nothing to be alarmed about”. This reasoning does not give me the warm
and fuzzies; after all the Earth cannot wait for us to take action. Can
it?
In this debate we have to rely upon scientists for our
information. That is all well and good, but what are we to make of
scientific findings, which seemingly are more and more linked with
politics? More people are starting to speak out and believe that the
science behind the ever increasing climate scare stories are losing
their credibility because it has adopted an authoritarian tone, and has
let itself be co-opted by politics.
Can it be so many expert
scientists could be wrong and maybe, just maybe, the so called Climate
Change Deniers could be right? No, it cannot be so. A consensus of
Climatologist throughout the world could not be wrong!
The
history of science is not one without famous blunders having taken place
throughout our past. Galileo spent more than twenty years under house
arrest for having the temerity to question the noted experts (Priests)
of his era about whether the sun or the earth was the centre of the
solar system.
Climate scientists of today are all learned experts
with a special depth of knowledge which surpasses the knowledge of
other scientific disciplines. Or are they?
In the early 70’s a
young geologist named Walter Alvarez noticed a pronounced layer of
reddish clay which were between two layers of limestone. He took a
sample of this clay and asked a nuclear chemist friend of his, Frank
Asaro, to analyse it in an effort to better understand its composition.
Frank
Asaro the nuclear chemist, and Walter Alvarez the geologist determined
the clay contained a high concentration of a very rare element called
iridium, an element only found in space objects, like meteorites,
comets, or asteroids. They immediately came to the conclusion that a
large object collided with the earth approximately 65 million years ago
causing the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs in a short period of time.
It was conclusive, was it not?
However, the paleontological
community of scientists thought this information was an outrageous
heresy as all real palaeontologist knew the dinosaurs died out over
millions of years, not in a quick extinction. The consensus of the
paleontological community was united in questioning this meddling in
their area of expertise.
It was around 1990 when a geologist,
named Gene Shoemaker, discovered an impact crater near the Yucatan coast
of Mexico which had high levels of iridium. When confronted with the
crater discovery palaeontologists still had a hard time accepting that
they were wrong. Gene Shoemaker noted, “It was like our findings were
against their religion.”
Twenty years elapsed between the
discovery of the iridium clay layer and the locating of the impact
crater before a majority of the paleontological community gave their
blessing to this new science. Even today there are holdouts in the
paleontological community who still do not support the impact theory to
explain the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
What is to be
learned about climate science from this story? Sometimes the experts
get it wrong and sometimes the non-experts get it right.
I do not
feel for one minute the paleontological community had any nefarious
intent by questioning the new science. That is how science works, by
questioning and defending a position based upon the science each party
knows. In a similar way, I do not feel the climatology community is
wrong to strongly defend their scientific consensus, especially as it
relates to the environment.
However, maybe – just maybe – the
climate sceptics, many of whom are established scientists in their own
fields, have judged the climate change story correctly.
World
renowned scientific leaders including Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel
Prize), Robert Laughlin (Nobel Prize), Edward Teller, Frederick Seitz,
Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg have each come forward with their
respective doubts about manmade global warming claims authored by the
now discredited consensus of United Nations sponsored climatologists.
I
for one do not believe we should institute a carbon tax of any kind at
this time as the history of scientific consensus is not one to hang our
whole economic future on.
Received by email from the author.
Mr. Isanhart lives in Rhodes, NSW, Australia and has been involved in
environmental matters for over 30 years
Aaaargh! Controlling Soot Might Quickly Reverse a Century of Global Warming
This is NOT what Greenies want to hear
A
massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution
controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most
of the last century’s temperature change.
Compared to the larger,
longer term task of getting greenhouse-gas pollution under control,
limiting soot wouldn’t be hard. Unlike new energy technology and
profound changes in lifestyle, the tools — exhaust filters,
clean-burning stoves — already exist.
“Soot has such a strong
climate effect, but it has a lifetime in the atmosphere of just a few
weeks. Carbon dioxide has a lifetime of 30 to 50 years. If you totally
stop CO2 emissions today, the Arctic will still be totally melted,” said
Stanford University climate scientist Mark Jacobson. If soot pollution
is immediately curtailed, “the reductions start to occur pretty much
right away. Within months, you’ll start seeing temperature differences.”
Jacobson’s
simulation, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical
Research-Atmospheres, is the latest in a line of studies showing a
powerful climate role for fine soot, also known as black carbon. (That’s
a somewhat misleading appellation, since some carbon is brown, and the
pollution in soot contains a host of other compounds.)
Soot comes
from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and also from the
burning of wood or dung for fuel. Crop residue and forest-burning are
another major source. When aloft, the dark particles absorb sunlight,
raising local temperatures and causing rain clouds to form, which in
turn deprive other areas of moisture. When soot lands on snow or ice,
its effects are magnified, because melts reveal fresh patches of
heat-absorbing dark ground.
In 2003, a NASA simulation blamed
soot for 25 percent of the past century’s observed warming. A study last
year suggested that soot was responsible for almost half of a
3.4-degree Fahrenheit rise in average Arctic temperatures since 1890 — a
greater rise than anywhere else on Earth.
Soot also appears to
be a culprit in drastic melts of Himalayan glaciers which provide water
to much of South Asia, and in disrupting the monsoon cycles on which the
region’s farmers rely. The United Nations puts the soot-related death
toll at 1.5 million people annually.
Jacobson’s simulation, the
culmination of 20 years of research on the dynamics of soot and its
interaction with local, regional and global climate dynamics, reinforces
those findings. It also studies a question implicit in the earlier
studies, but not yet modeled: What would happens if soot pollution
stopped?
“If you just eliminate soot, you get a significant
climate benefit, and you can do it on a short time period, because soot
has a life of just a few weeks,” said Jacobson. “You don’t get the full
response for a while, as there are deep ocean feedbacks that take a long
time, but it’s a lot faster than controlling CO2.”
Jacobson
simulated the effects of curtailing soot from fossil-fuel emissions,
something that’s already possible with tailpipe and smokestack filters.
He simulated the effects of replacing wood- and dung-burning cookfires
with clean-burning stoves. And he simulated both advances
simultaneously.
If soot disappeared overnight, average global
temperatures would drop within 15 years by about 1 degree Fahrenheit,
maybe a little more. That’s about half the net warming — total global
warming, minus cooling from sun-reflecting aerosols — experienced since
the beginning of the industrial age. The effect would be even larger in
the Arctic, where sea ice and tundra could rapidly refreeze.
“It
will take some decades to phase down fossil-fuel emissions, so reducing
dirty aerosols [soot] while we are doing that may help retain Arctic sea
ice,” said NASA climatologist James Hansen, one of the first
researchers to study soot dynamics. But he emphasized that soot control
is only a stopgap measure. “We should reduce soot for several reasons,
especially its health effects, but it is only a modest help in
controlling global warming,” he said.
Nevertheless, soot could
ease the delay between controlling greenhouse gas emissions and cooling.
It might also help “avoid tipping points — nonlinear, abrupt and
potentially irreversible climate change, especially in the Arctic,” said
Erika Rosenthal, a climate policy expert at the progressive nonprofit
Earthjustice.
Soot-control policy, however, is scattered.
According to Jacobson, climate policymakers have paid little attention
to soot. Compared to well-studied greenhouse gases, its climate role is
new and unfamiliar. “There are international efforts to limit greenhouse
gases, but they completely ignore soot as something to control from a
climate perspective,” said Jacobson.
The draft international
climate treaty negotiated last year in Copenhagen doesn’t contain
soot-specific provisions, but the United Nations Environmental Program
is meeting in February to discuss policy options on soot. A relatively
little-known U.N. effort called the Convention on Long-Range
Transboundary Air Pollution has also established a black-carbon working
group.
In the United States, a rare bipartisan environmental bill
sponsored in 2009 by climate skeptic James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and
environmentalist Barbara Boxer (D-California) foundered after its
inclusion in massive energy legislation that recently died in Congress.
It would have required the EPA to study and possibly regulate
black-carbon emissions.
In anticipation of these legislative
difficulties, the EPA was charged this year with launching a
black-carbon study. More immediately, Congress is now debating
reauthorization of the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, a federal program
that pays for putting clean tailpipes on diesel-fuel–burning
automobiles, a prime source of black carbon. According to Rosenthal, the
program has been fantastically successful, with retrofit requests
exceeding available funds by $2 billion.
Controlling crop and
forest burns isn’t so easy, but clean stoves could be provided to the
developing world for relatively little money. “We have the technology
now. It’s a matter of implementing it,” said Rosenthal.
“It’s low-hanging fruit,” said Jacobsen. “It’s straightforward to address, and it can be addressed.”
Images:
1) Rennett Stowe/Flickr. 2) Average global air temperature decline
following elimination of fossil-fuel–based soot (dotted line) and
fossil-fuel– plus biofuel–based soot (solid line).
Citation:
“Short-term effects of Controlling Fossil-Fuel Soot, Biofuel Soot and
Gases, and Methane on Climate, Arctic Ice, and Air Pollution Health.” By
Mark Jacobson. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, in press.
Texas defies EPA on regulation of greenhouse gases
At
the very least this will tie the issue up in the courts for years --
time enough for a new administration and a new head of the EPA
Texas
officials warned U.S. EPA this week they won't change or reinterpret
their air pollution laws to comply with federal greenhouse gas
regulations, arguing that the Obama administration's climate rules are
illegal.
EPA plans to begin regulating stationary sources of
greenhouse gases next January and asked states to inform the agency by
this week whether they would need to change state laws or regulations to
comply with federal policies.
But Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan Shaw and Texas Attorney General
Greg Abbott (R) blasted EPA for unlawfully attempting to force states to
"pledge allegiance to its rules." The dispute marks the latest in a
series of altercations between the Obama EPA and Texas as federal
officials have moved to overhaul the state's air permitting program.
"In
order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of
industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse
gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the
Environmental Protection Agency's recently enacted greenhouse gas
regulations -- regulations that are plainly contrary to United States
law," the officials wrote in a letter (pdf) sent Monday to EPA
Administrator Lisa Jackson and EPA's Dallas-based Region 6 Administrator
Al Armendariz.
"On behalf of the state of Texas, we write to
inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of
interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the
permitting of greenhouse gas emissions," the Texas officials say.
Specifically,
the officials are taking issue with EPA's "tailoring" rule for
greenhouse gases. The tailoring rule seeks to substantially raise the
Clean Air Act's permitting thresholds for greenhouse gases from the
current limits of 100 or 250 tons per year. Without the rule, even small
facilities would be required to obtain greenhouse gas permits when the
agency officially begins to regulate tailpipes' greenhouse gas emissions
in January.
"Instead of acknowledging that congressionally set
emission limits preclude the regulation of greenhouse gases, you instead
re-write those statutorily-established limits," the letter says.
EPA
air chief Gina McCarthy told Greenwire in June that the final tailoring
rule was written to allow states to avoid regulating except in the
narrow way her agency intended (Greenwire, June 2).
"We wrote it
after talking to the states and realizing that some of the rulemaking
uses the same exact language, and if we interpreted that language at the
federal level to mean that you don't need to regulate, except the way
in which the tailoring rule has designed it, that you can simply decide
when to use our interpretation and move forward," she said. "And we know
that many of the states are perfectly comfortable doing that."
For
states that can't or won't immediately comply with the rules, EPA is
planning to use its authority to bring them into compliance with federal
rules. The agency sent a proposal to the White House regulatory review
office last month that seeks to guarantee authority for federal
implementation plans, or FIPs, that could replace state programs if the
states do not comply with federal requirements by the deadlines
(E&ENews PM, July 9).
For states that do not align with the
federal program, EPA could issue FIPs to curb emissions or issue
sanctions including the withholding of federal highway funding.
The
battle between Texas and EPA "is going to be a shootout at the O.K.
Corral," Becker said. But he said EPA won't give up without a fight. "I
think that EPA is very serious about taking this forward," he said.
The fossil-fuel economy won’t disappear anytime soon
In
the summer of 2008, at a time of widespread anger over historically
high oil prices, Al Gore challenged his countrymen “to commit to
producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly
clean carbon-free sources within ten years.” This wildly ambitious goal
recalled Richard Nixon’s proclamation, issued amid the 1973 global oil
shock, that the United States would aim to become fully energy
independent by 1980. It also brought to mind Jimmy Carter’s pledge, made
during his famous 1979 “malaise” speech, that America would “never use
more foreign oil than we did in 1977,” and would seek to cut its
reliance on imported oil in half by 1990. For those keeping score,
foreign oil accounted for 35 percent of U.S. consumption in 1973 — and
63 percent in 2009.
As University of Manitoba professor Vaclav
Smil writes in his new book, Energy Myths and Realities, the various
targets proposed by Nixon, Carter, and Gore collided with the harsh
reality that “energy transitions are inherently prolonged affairs
lasting decades, not years.” It was probably not until the late 1890s,
he notes, that fossil fuels provided half of all global energy. While we
commonly think of the 1900s as the “oil century,” oil did not become
the world’s largest primary energy supplier until 1965; and during the
20th century as a whole, it contributed slightly less energy than coal
did.
“In global terms,” says Smil, “1800–1900 was still a part of
the millennia-long wooden era, and 1900–2000 was (albeit by a small
margin) the coal century.” Commercial oil production started in the
1860s, but it took roughly eight decades for the black stuff to gain
even a quarter of the global primary energy market. As for the U.S.
market, coal became America’s biggest primary energy supplier in 1885,
Robert Bryce writes in Power Hungry, and it held that crown for 65
years. In the early 20th century, its domestic market share reached as
high as 90 percent. Oil did not surpass coal as the top U.S. supplier
until 1950; its rise was driven largely by the automobile revolution and
military needs during World War II.
By 1958, natural gas had
eclipsed coal to become America’s second-largest primary energy source,
says Bryce, managing editor of the online journal Energy Tribune and a
Manhattan Institute senior fellow. But then, regulatory interventions
hindered its growth and gave new life to the U.S. coal industry. In
recent years, coal demand has been soaring in China, India, and other
developing countries. Smil points out that coal’s portion of the global
primary energy market was higher in 2008 than it was in 1973. Over the
next 20 years, those hoping for a decline in worldwide coal consumption
will almost certainly be disappointed.
Just look at the
International Energy Agency projections. In its latest “World Energy
Outlook,” released in November 2009, the IEA estimated that, if
government policies stayed constant, global demand for coal would
increase by 53 percent between 2007 and 2030. Over the same period,
coal’s share of global electricity generation would swell from 42
percent to 44 percent, while that of renewable fuels would go from 18
percent to 22 percent. Total energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions
would jump by 40 percent, with coal-power emissions growing by 60
percent. Coal would still be “the dominant fuel of the power sector,”
and fossil fuels generally would still be “the dominant sources of
energy worldwide.”
They will also remain the dominant sources in
America. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reckons that, based
on current government policies, fossil fuels will account for 78
percent of overall U.S. energy use in 2035, compared with 84 percent in
2008. Coal will provide 44 percent of U.S. electricity generation (down
from 48 percent in 2008), and renewables will provide 17 percent (up
from 9 percent in 2008). To be sure, the extension of certain tax
subsidies and the establishment of muscular greenhouse-gas regulations
by the Environmental Protection Agency could boost the market share of
renewable technologies and further reduce America’s dependence on fossil
fuels. But even if the U.S. launches an aggressive renewable-energy
drive, its reliance on oil and coal will persist well into the future.
Indeed,
the promise of renewables has consistently been oversold by the
political class. Solar and wind energy both suffer from major structural
deficiencies. As Bryce observes, they are “incurably intermittent” and
very difficult to store, and have low power density. Because of their
low density, solar and wind “require huge swaths of land — which often
becomes unusable for other purposes.” Smil offers a balanced assessment
of wind power: “Conversion of wind’s kinetic energy by large turbines
can become an important contributor to the overall electricity supply,
but, except for relatively small regions, it cannot become the single
largest source, even less so the dominant mode of generation.”
Compared
with solar and wind, nuclear and natural-gas energy boast much higher
power density and can deliver far greater capacity. Bryce argues that
they are the true “fuels of the future,” though he concedes that nuclear
plants are extremely costly to build and take a long time to become
operational. Therefore, he urges a short-term expansion of natural-gas
production and a long-term transition to nuclear. While Smil predicts
that “an early and substantial nuclear comeback is unlikely either in
North America or in Europe” — partly for economic reasons, and partly
because of perennial concerns over plant safety and the disposal of
radioactive waste — he affirms that “nuclear generation is the only
low-carbon-footprint option that is readily available on a
gigawatt-level scale.”
Even if previous energy transitions moved
at a slow, incremental pace, might we be able to accelerate them in the
years ahead? Smil acknowledges that we now “possess incomparably more
powerful technical means to effect faster energy transitions than we did
a century or a half century ago.” But there is a crucial caveat: “We
also face an incomparably greater scale-up challenge. While the shares
of new energies in the global or the U.S. market remain negligible, the
absolute quantities needed to capture a significant portion of the total
supply are huge because the scale of the coming global energy
transition is of an unprecedented magnitude.”
Over the next few
decades, he explains, replacing half of all fossil-fuel energies with
renewable energies would mean replacing the equivalent of approximately
4.5 billion tons of oil. This would effectively require “creating de
novo an industry whose energy output would surpass that of the entire
world oil industry that took more than a century to build.” Smil also
addresses the ten-year plan laid out by Al Gore: Even if America had the
necessary high-voltage transmission interconnections, it would entail
the construction of 1,740 gigawatts of new wind- and solar-power
capacity — in other words, “1.75 times as much as [America] built during
the past fifty or more years.”
Our current national energy
debate is heavy on passion and hyperbole; it could use a sizable dose of
historical perspective and empirical reality. In that sense, Smil and
Bryce have done a valuable service. Their new books should be mandatory
reading for U.S. policymakers.
As
the BP oil spill slips off the front pages, replaced by daily reports
of Lindsey Lohan’s release from jail; as Chelsea Clinton’s marriage is
no longer news; as the war in Afghanistan loses traction with the
public; and as Barack Obama pauses to review his declining approval
rates, it is time once again to ask, whatever happened to global
warming?
Here’s an update. On the basis of legitimate—-not government funded—-science, it is as dead as Marley’s ghost.
There
actually was global warming. It began around 1850 as a Little Ice Age
receded from America and Europe. From about the 1500s on, it caused the
Thames to freeze over in London, widespread crop failures, the fall of
the French monarchy, and the tribulations of Washington’s troops in
Valley Forge, among many other notable historic events. The Earth
continued to warm, very moderately, until the 1990s.
That warming
period is over. The Earth’s overall temperatures have been falling for
the past decade and, since the Earth is at an end of an interglacial
cycle between full-blown ice ages, we better hope it doesn’t tip over
into a new one any time soon. The current cooling is attributed to
another well known cycle, that of sunspot activity. Fewer sunspots means
a cooler climate on Earth.
Plainly stated, there isn’t a damned
thing anyone on Earth can do about this latest cooling, nor was the
alleged “global warming” due to “anthropogenic” causes, i.e., anything
and everything attributable to human beings.
Putting aside the
fact that the creatures of the Earth exhale carbon dioxide after
breathing in oxygen and that various technologies based on coal, oil and
natural gas generate it along with natural events like forest fires,
carbon dioxide (CO2) plays virtually no role whatever so far as the
climate is concerned.
It is, however, along with oxygen, the most
important gas in the Earth’s atmosphere since it is the “food” on which
all vegetation, from forests to jungles, crops of every description,
and grandma’s favorite potted plant depends. No CO2 means no life on
Earth.
Despite this, a huge global warming industry has emerged
thanks to the lies put forth by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. The release in November 2009 of thousands of
emails between a very small band of so-called climate scientists who
provided the IPCC its falsified data was immediately dubbed
“Climategate.”
“Global warming”, a hoax and a fraud, had nothing
whatever to do with climate and everything to do with the creation of a
scam called carbon trading.
By assigning a value to the amount of
CO2 emissions produced by the production of electricity and the
manufacturing of everything, “carbon credits” can be bought and sold on
exchanges set up to trade in them. There is money to be made in
“alternative energy” production such as solar and wind farms, or in
biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. To justify this, any use of coal
or oil has to be demonized.
The worst part of all this is the
role that governments have played in furthering this greatest of all
Ponzi schemes wherein carbon becomes a commodity.
Here’s where it
gets very interesting for a cash-strapped United States of America
where jobs are disappearing faster than ever since the Great Depression
of the 1930s. In an interesting paper published by the Science &
Public Policy Institute, “Climate Money”, some astonishing and appalling
facts are laid out by Joanne Nova, its author.
“The U.S.
government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to
climate change, including science and technology research,
administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.”
“Carbon
trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for
more carbon trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will
reach $2-$10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity trade.”
Based
on her analysis of the money allocated to the global warming scam, “In
total, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the U.S.
government will have poured in $32 billion for climate research—-and
another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies.
These are actual dollars, obtained from government reports, and not
adjusted for inflation.”
Among the billions spent by the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as the Stimulus
Act, $7 billion was allocated to “carbon sequestration experiments.”
That is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and burying it.
This is
as idiotic as it gets, especially when one considers that, despite $30
billion spent on pure science research, “no one is able to point to a
single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a
significant effect on the global climate.”
All that money, taxes paid by Americans, has been a complete and total waste.
It’s
time to stop, but it will not stop if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
has his way and pushes through a stripped-down version of the former
Cap-and-Trade bill that had been pronounced dead on arrival in the
Senate.
There are powerful vested interests devoted to fleecing
the American taxpayer and they, not you, are represented in Congress
and, in particular, in the Obama White House. This is why the
Environmental Protection Agency is doing everything it can to secure the
authorization to regulate “greenhouse gas emissions.”
If that
should occur energy costs will, as President Obama has said,
"skyrocket." It will mark the irreversible economic decline of the
nation.
Comment
from Australia -- where the Left have now put global warming on the
backburner much more decisively than is the case in America
WE
all know both Labor and the Coalition have jettisoned plans to
implement an emissions trading scheme to tame climate change. But
Australia is not alone in failing to put a price on carbon. Global
warming fatigue is setting in all over the world.
Canada's
cap-and-trade legislation is going nowhere. Japan's weak and divided
government has temporarily shelved its ETS in parliament. French
President Nicolas Sarkozy's carbon tax is blocked by the Constitutional
Council. Public opinion polls show higher climate scepticism in Britain
than in western Europe, North America and the Antipodes. Even when an
ETS has been implemented, as in the case of the European Union, the
policy has been a debacle: a collapsed carbon price, higher energy
prices, and increased emissions during the first three years in
operation.
China's leaders, far from leading the world to a
low-carbon future, won't sign a legally binding global deal, because
they want to grow their economy and reduce poverty on the back of the
cheapest form of (carbon) energy.
Senior Indian politicians, meanwhile, criticise US officials when they push for Delhi to adopt binding emissions targets.
Nowhere
is the changing climate more evident than in the US. Last month,
congress could not even agree to a climate bill to debate on the Senate
floor before a vote. Nor was it simply conservative Republicans who
opposed what is called "cap and tax". Democrats from states heavily
dependent on coal, oil and manufacturing are overwhelmingly opposed to
Al Gore's agenda. When the House passed a climate bill a year ago, one
in five Democrats opposed the legislation.
Meanwhile, even
prominent global warming believers have come out against the ETS. US
environmental lobby groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth; the ETS
intellectual architect Thomas Crocker; NASA climate scientist James
Hansen, among others, have repudiated the concept of cap and trade,
saying it protects the big polluters while doing virtually nothing to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Washington's failure to act this
year represents a missed opportunity. If the US, where liberal
Democrats control the White House and have super majorities in the House
and Senate, can't legislate a tiny 4 per cent cut to emissions of 1990
levels by 2020 (with loads of loopholes and pork to industry), what are
the chances of comprehensive climate reform when Republicans make likely
gains in the House and Senate in November's mid-term elections?
All
is not lost. The Environmental Protection Agency could use the 1990
Clean Air Act to regulate emissions, but such action would probably get
bogged down in litigation for years. Beijing has also announced it will
introduce domestic carbon trading programs and it has invested heavily
in renewable energy, but any efforts to reduce emissions are outweighed
by China's meeting the demands of its rapidly industrialising economy.
The
Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. But the global momentum towards a
genuine international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
Mexico later this year is rapidly slowing. Get ready for another
Copenhagen.
Pesky! Ship find shows present Arctic Sea Ice conditions similar to 1853
Maybe even a bit colder now than 150 years ago
The
international news media are hailing the archaeological find of a
British naval ship the HMS Investigator on July 25 in an area far north
(600 km) of the Arctic Circle that was previously unreachable due to sea
ice. The HMS Investigator was abandoned in 1853, but not before sailing
the last leg of the elusive Northwest Passage. The ship had been sent
on a rescue mission for 2 other ships mapping the Northwest Passage.
Now, thanks to "climate change," archaeologists working for Parks Canada
were finally able to plot a small window of time this summer to allow
passage to the ship's location:
Parks Canada had been
plotting the discovery of the three ships for more than a year, trying
to figure out how to get the crews so far north. Once they arrived and
got their bearings, the task seemed easier than originally thought. It
took little more than 15 minutes to uncover the Investigator, officials
told The Globe and Mail last week. “For a long time the area wasn’t
open, but now it is because of climate change,” said Marc-André Bernier,
chief of the Underwater Archaeology Service at Parks Canada.
Interesting
that the ship was lost in 1853, right at the end of the Little Ice Age,
and coincidentally just 3 years after the start of the HADCRU global
temperature record, from which we are led to believe the earth has
warmed about 0.7C. If we are seeing "unprecedented" global temperatures
and changes in Arctic sea ice, how did the HMS Investigator get this far
north at the end of the Little Ice Age?
A Critical Review of Global Surface Temperature Data Products
Layman's summary: The data used to calculate 20th century global temperature is a crock -- JR
By Dr. Ross McKitrick
Summary
There
are three main global temperature histories: the combined CRU-Hadley
record (HADCRU), the NASA-GISS (GISTEMP) record, and the NOAA record. All three global averages depend on the same underlying land data archive, the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). CRU and GISS supplement it with a small amount of additional data.
Because of this reliance on GHCN, its quality deficiencies will constrain the quality of all derived products. The
number of weather stations providing data to GHCN plunged in 1990 and
again in 2005. The sample size has fallen by over 75% from its peak in
the early 1970s, and is now smaller than at any time since 1919.
The collapse in sample size has not been spatially uniform. It has
increased the relative fraction of data coming from airports to about 50
percent (up from about 30 percent in the 1970s). It has also reduced
the average latitude of source data and removed relatively more
high-altitude monitoring sites.
GHCN applies adjustments to try
and correct for sampling discontinuities. These have tended to increase
the warming trend over the 20th century. After 1990 the magnitude of the
adjustments (positive and negative) gets implausibly large.
CRU
has stated that about 98 percent of its input data are from GHCN. GISS
also relies on GHCN with some additional US data from the USHCN network,
and some additional Antarctic data sources. NOAA relies entirely on the
GHCN network.
Oceanic data are based on sea surface temperature
(SST) rather than marine air temperature (MAT). All three global
products rely on SST series derived from the ICOADS archive, though the
Hadley Centre switched to a real time network source after 1998, which
may have caused a jump in that series. ICOADS observations were
primarily obtained from ships that voluntarily monitored SST. Prior to
the post-war era, coverage of the southern oceans and polar regions was
very thin. Coverage has improved partly due to deployment of buoys, as
well as use of satellites to support extrapolation. Ship-based readings
changed over the 20th century from bucket-and-thermometer to
engine-intake methods, leading to a warm bias as the new readings
displaced the old. Until recently it was assumed that bucket methods
disappeared after 1941, but this is now believed not to be the case,
which may necessitate a major revision to the 20th century ocean record.
Adjustments for equipment changes, trends in ship height, etc., have
been large and are subject to continuing uncertainties. Relatively few
studies have compared SST and MAT in places where both are available.
There is evidence that SST trends overstate nearby MAT trends.
Processing
methods to create global averages differ slightly among different
groups, but they do not seem to make major differences, given the choice
of input data. After 1980 the SST products have not trended upwards as
much as land air temperature averages. The quality of data over land,
namely the raw temperature data in GHCN, depends on the validity of
adjustments for known problems due to urbanization and land-use change.
The adequacy of these adjustments has been tested in three different
ways, with two of the three finding evidence that they do not suffice to
remove warming biases.
The overall conclusion of this report is
that there are serious quality problems in the surface temperature data
sets that call into question whether the global temperature history,
especially over land, can be considered both continuous and precise.
Users should be aware of these limitations, especially in policy
sensitive applications.
See full report here.
Ross also notes the following on another paper:
You
might be interested in a new paper I have coauthored with Steve
McIntyre and Chad Herman, in press at Atmospheric Science Letters, which
presents two methods developed in econometrics for testing trend
equivalence between data sets and then applies them to a comparison of
model projections and observations over the 1979-2009 interval in the
tropical troposphere. One method is a panel regression with a heavily
parameterized error covariance matrix, and the other uses a
non-parametric covariance matrix from multivariate trend regressions.
The former has the convenience that it is coded in standard software
packages but is restrictive in handling higher-order autocorrelations,
whereas the latter is robust to any form of autocorrelation but requires
some special coding. I think both methods could find wide application
in climatology questions.
The tropical troposphere issue is
important because that is where climate models project a large, rapid
response to greenhouse gas emissions. The 2006 CCSP report pointed to
the lack of observed warming there as a “potentially serious
inconsistency” between models and observations. The Douglass et al. and
Santer et al. papers came to opposite conclusions about whether the
discrepancy was statistically significant or not. We discuss
methodological weaknesses in both papers. We also updated the data to
2009, whereas the earlier papers focused on data ending around 2000.
We find that the model trends are 2x larger than observations in the lower troposphere and 4x larger than in the mid-troposphere,
and the trend differences at both layers are statistically significant,
suggestive of an inconsistency between models and observations. We also
find the observed LT trend significant but not the MT trend.
Arctic cooler in 1989 than in 1870 -- says Leftist paper
The
Czech media just informed the nation about another study that rules out
the industrial activity as the cause of the bulk of the 20th century
climate change. "Warming is not related to the mankind's industrial
activity, a study shows (novinky.cz)"
That's a pretty clear
title, isn't it? ;-) You may find it even more remarkable if I tell you
that novinky.cz is a top left-wing news server on the Czech Internet -
with loose institutional links to Právo, the newspapers that used to
belong to the Communist Party - and that the story above is the "story
of the day" on the server's main page.
If you want to have an
idea about the discussion under the article, the most favorably rated
comment (Goodvotes - Badvotes = +200 within an hour) was written by Mr
Martin Polá?ek. It says: "So at the end, it turns out that our president
was right. Who will apologize to him for all the mockery?"
A
vast majority of the other comments are anti-AGW, too. The readers point
out that the Goreo-Bursík green industrial complex (Bursík is the most
famous among the ex-chairmen of the Czech Green Party that was just
eliminated from the Parliament) is highly profitable so these folks are
unlikely to make a U-turn anytime soon.
The story is based on an
article: Kononov, Friedrich, Böttger: "Regional Summer Temperature
Reconstruction in the Khibiny Low Mountains (Kola Peninsula, NW Russia)
by Means of Tree-ring Width during the Last Four Centuries" --
previously mentioned at Climate Audit, Science Centric, and Science
Daily.
"A tree-ring reconstruction of the summer temperatures at
the Kola peninsula - near Murmansk and the Arctic (Polar) Circle - by a
German-Russian team has shown diverse changes of the Arctic
temperatures in a recent century or so. The period 1630-1840 has
crystallized as a Little Ice Age. The years 1935-1955 turned out to be
the warmest ones while the years prior to 1990 were cooler than those
around 1870. Warming returned after 1990."
According
to a new report in Nature Geoscience, scientists are beginning to
realize that previously ignored aspects of the terrestrial biosphere can
act as key regulators of atmospheric chemistry and climate. Not only
that, changes in the biosphere can happen quickly—in the course of a few
decades. “Although interactions between the carbon cycle and climate
have been a central focus, other biogeochemical feedbacks could be as
important in modulating future climate change,” states the report.
Because a number of these feedbacks can have a cooling effect, the
impact on global warming predictions could be earthshaking. The problem
is, these feedbacks are only poorly understood and they are so
interrelated that modeling them will be difficult, if not impossible.
The
efforts of climate scientists, particularly the ones who blame human
CO2 emissions for global warming, have concentrated on the carbon-cycle
and the impact of greenhouse gasses on climate. In a new review paper,
entitled “Terrestrial biogeochemical feedbacks in the climate system,”
A. Arneth et al. delve into other, less studied factors involved in
climate regulation. The paper surveys recent progress in understanding
terrestrial biogeochemical feedbacks and their linkages, and provides an
estimate of the potential magnitude of those feedbacks. Motivation for
the review was stated this way:
Research into
land–atmosphere exchange processes in climate science has traditionally
focused on the surface radiation budget and its effects on sensible and
latent heat fluxes, and more recently on carbon-cycle–climate
interactions1. But many more bidirectional land–atmosphere fluxes
modulate atmospheric composition and climate. Biogeochemical feedbacks
are intrinsic to the climate system, owing to the nonlinear stimulation
of all biological processes by increasing temperatures. Many
biogeochemical processes also respond to changes in atmospheric
composition and precipitation. Biogeochemical cycles are therefore
strongly affected by anthropogenically forced climate change and other
human activities.
The interesting point here is that
most of the feedbacks listed have been pretty much ignored by climate
modelers, due to the ill defined nature of the mechanisms. “During past
periods of climate change, vegetation cover and interactions between the
terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere changed within decades.” state
Arneth et al.. “The overall magnitude of the biogeochemical feedbacks
could potentially be similar to that of feedbacks in the physical
climate system, but there are large uncertainties in the magnitude of
individual estimates and in accounting for synergies between these
effects.”
The Temperature Decline That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Let’s
look at the NOAA claim that the surface temperature increased .11° C
during 2000-2009. Although they did everything possible to hide this
information from the public, media, politicians, and even fellow
scientists, by the late 2000s even die-hard alarmists were eventually
forced to accept that the surface temperature record showed no warming
as of the late 1990s, and some cooling as of about 2002. In other words,
overall, for the first decade of the 21st century, there was either no
warming, or no warming and even some cooling.
One of the consistent themes in the Climategate emails was consternation that the planet wasn’t warming as expected
One
of the consistent themes in the Climategate emails was consternation
that the planet wasn’t warming as expected by the models (that is, about
0.2°C per decade). For example, as early as 2005 the then head of the
Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones, wrote in an email: “The
scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I
said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only seven
years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
Fellow
Climategate emailer and IPCC contributor Kevin Trenberth wrote to
hockey-stick creator Michael Mann in 2009: “The fact is that we cannot
account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that
we can’t.” Note the date: 2009, the last year of the decade. As far as
Trenberth knew‚—and he should have known as a leading IPCC author‚—the
planet hadn’t warmed for several years up to that time.
Even Tim
Flannery, author of the arch-alarmist The Weather Makers, acknowledged
in November 2009: “In the last few years, where there hasn’t been a
continuation of that warming trend, we don’t understand all of the
factors that creates Earth’s climate, so there are some things we don’t
understand, that’s what the scientists were emailing about. ... These
people [the scientists] work with models, computer modeling. When the
computer modeling and the real world data disagree you have a
problem.”[1] [italics added]
Yes, you do have a problem, to the
point where, in February 2010, after he’d been suspended as head of the
CRU following the Climategate scandal, and in an attempt to restore his
reputation as an honest scientist, Jones came a bit clean in an
interview with the BBC. For example, Jones agreed with the BBC
interviewer that there had been “no statistically significant warming”
since 1995 (although he asserted that the warming was close to
significant), whereas in his 2005 email he was at pains to hide the lack
of warming from the public and even fellow researchers.
The planet has been cooling
Jones
admitted that from 2002-2009 the planet had been cooling slightly
(-0.12°C per decade), although he contended that “this trend is not
statistically significant.” In short, as far as Jones knew in February
2010‚—and as the keeper of the Hadley-CRU surface temperature record he
was surely in a very good position to know‚—the planet hadn’t warmed on
average over the decade.
In the BBC interview, Jones calculated
the overall surface temperature trend for 1975 to 2009 to be +0.16°C per
decade. Since that includes the warming years 1975-1998, it seems
incredible that NOAA could manufacture a warming of 0.11°C for
2000-2009, as shown in this graph from the 2009 NOAA report:
To
show this level of warming, NOAA must have included the January-March
2010 El Nino. A surge in warming at the end of the decade would tend to
pull the 2000-2009 average up, but this doesn’t negate the fact that for
almost all of the last decade, the planet did not warm.
Curiously,
another part of the NOAA website directly contradicts the NOAA report.
On its site, NOAA offers a gadget that lets browsers check the
temperature trend in the continental United States for any two years
between 1895 and 2010. Here’s what the graph shows for the years
2000-2009 in the United States:
This graph shows a temperature
decline of 0.73°Fahrenheit (-0.4°C) for 2000-2009 in the U.S. To get a
perspective on how large a decline this is: the IPCC estimates that the
temperature increase for the whole of the 20th century was 1.1°F, or
0.6°C. In other words, at least in the United States, the past decade’s
cooling wiped out two-thirds of the temperature gain of the last
century.
While the U.S. isn’t, of course, the whole world, it has
the world’s best temperature records, and a review of the NOAA data
since 1895 shows that in the 20th century the U.S. temperature trends
mirrored, quite closely, the global temperature trends. So, for example,
between 1940-1975, a global cooling period, the NOAA chart showed a
temperature decline of 0.14°F (-0.07°C).
In other words, it
stretches credulity to the breaking point to believe that the global
temperature trend from 2000-2009 could be a full 0.51°C‚—half a degree
Celsius‚—higher than the temperature trend for the United States (that
is, -.4C + .11C).
Until NOAA issues a correction (which isn’t
likely), the cooling of the past decade, which has been such an
embarrassment to the hypothesis that human-caused carbon emissions will
cause runaway warming, is gone, conjured away by a wave of the NOAA
climate fairy’s magic wand.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
A reply to some L.A. Times nonsense
The
article "Climate skeptics confuse, paralyze" from the Los Angeles
Times, needs rebuttal. The article said "a consensus of climate
scientists" identified human-caused greenhouse gases as causing global
warming. Historically, "consensuses of scientists" have agreed on
statements such as these:
* There are only four elements -- air, earth, fire and water.
* The Earth is flat.
* The sun orbits around the Earth.
* We are entering an ice age (1975).
Consensus
is not proof. Honest questioning and testing is. We cannot test whether
man is causing global warming, but we can honestly question the idea,
using facts such as:
* Scientists report that ice-age sea levels
were 175 metres below today's. At the bottom of the Black Sea and
offshore of our West Coast are evidence of human settlement at some time
in the recent past when sea levels were lower. We cannot know whether
we are on the upslope, peak, downslope or bottom of one of the scores of
climate change cycles between then and now.
* There are large,
unpetrified trees on open ground in the Arctic, far north of today's
tree line. They grew there at some time just a geological eye-blink ago,
when our hemisphere was much warmer.
* Greenland's Viking farms are now under thick ice.
*
There was a "little ice age" for several hundred years ending in the
19th century, long before heavy industrialization and cars.
*
Water vapour is more than five times as potent a greenhouse gas as
carbon dioxide. The climate modellers do not know how to account for it,
nor for clouds, in their models.
* CO2 is not a pollutant but is a vital component of all Earth's life cycles.
The
Times article goes on to say the skeptics are "working hand in hand
with big energy companies that profit from the filthy status quo."
We
don't know who these people are who work with the oil companies, but I
personally have not had a recent call from Tony Hayward, the disgraced
outgoing BP boss.
The Times also refers to "a raging international debate."
What debate? The skeptic side has been implacably suppressed. Points:
*
A big meeting of "skeptical" scientists, held to develop an objective
"consensus" of their side, was little, if at all, reported.
*
Skeptical scientists have been denied access to background data for the
infamous and now discredited "hockey stick" graph upon which the
"consensus" was once based. Evidently some of the data had been invented
by the graph's originators to suit their preconceptions.
* In
his book An Appeal to Reason (2008), Lord Nigel Lawson reports
difficulty in getting it published. One publisher wrote: "My fear, with
this cogently argued book, is that it flies so much in the face of the
prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide
market." Note: "fear."
Critics are so afraid of loss of professorships, project funding or citations that they fear to speak.
How can one not be a skeptic when:
*
Scientific fraud has been used by the warm-mongers. Apologists papering
over the evidence of bias in the "climategate" e-mails merely sound
pathetic; the authors of those e-mails clearly attempted to suppress
dissent. Further, it was a panel from the University of East Anglia that
absolved the University of East Anglia of blame.
* One
melodramatic part of a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
report forecasting the melting of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was not
even sloppy science but pure fiction.
* There is gross conflict
of interest. Schemes such as emissions trading are elaborate methods of
transferring billions of dollars out of solvent countries such as Canada
to poorly governed, improvident, in some cases blatantly kleptocratic
nations.
Yes, the climate is changing because it always is. No,
we do not and cannot know if man is causing it. Yes, we are destroying
our planet. No, frantic, horrendously expensive efforts to limit CO2
won't fix that.
The soul of science is to hypothesize, test,
challenge, debate honestly and objectively. This, unhappily, has not
been the history of the global warming controversy. The Times article is
proof.
Supporting in
real life Svensmark's experimentally supported theory. It's difficult
reading for non-specialists but below is the journal abstract. A Forbush
decrease is a decrease in cosmic rays reaching earth due to eruptions
from the sun. A Kolmogorov Smirnoff one sample runs test is a simple
statistical test used in many disciplines that shows how unusual a
sequence of similar events is. I have paragraphed the abstract to make
it a bit easier to follow
Since cloud cover is known even to
Warmists as an influence on temperatures, this provides an explanation
of HOW the sun affects climate. We've known for a couple of hundred
years that there was a correlation between solar activity and climate
changes but in the absence of a connecting mechanism, Warmists have
been able to dismiss the correlation as happenstance. Changes in gross
solar output are tiny percentagewise so that alone could not be the
explanation
A correlation study of high-altitude and midaltitude clouds and galactic cosmic rays by MIPAS-Envisat
By Susanne Rohs et al.
The
cloud index (CI), the cloud occurrence frequency (Occ), and the
extinction data (Ext) of the Michelson Interferometer for Passive
Atmospheric Sounding instrument on board Envisat (MIPAS-E) from July
2002 to March 2004 are used to investigate a possible link between
galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) and midaltitude and high-altitude clouds
(CI, Occ: 9–18 km, Ext: 12–24 km).
The zonally averaged data
with 3 km vertical resolution are averaged over six major Forbush
decrease (FD) events and subsequently correlated with the Climax neutron
monitor data (CNM). In order to allow for nucleation and growth of ice
particles, time lags from 0 to 5 days are applied.
We find several weak but statistically significant correlations with an excess of positive cloud-GCR correlations. Introducing a time lag does not enhance the correlations significantly.
Subdividing
the data in a global grid with 30° × 90° × 3 km resolution shows higher
correlations in some regions. The investigation of the individual FD
events yields a heterogeneous picture.
Overall, there is a weak
tendency toward a positive cloud-CNM correlation. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov
test shows that for time shifts from 0 to +5 days a weak GCR-cloud
effect is evident in the MIPAS-E measurements.
An estimation of
the impact of this effect delivers that a 15% increase in CNM would
result in a small decrease in CI (corresponding to an increase in cloud
opacity) which is most pronounced at 9 km altitude (−9% to +0.5%). For
log(Ext) a decrease of −5 to 0% is calculated at 12 km altitude which
shifts toward weak positive values at higher altitudes.
More pesky news about the Arctic: No sign of climate change in Arctic vegetation -- same as it was in the late '30s
Discussing:
Prach, K., Kosnar, J., Klimesova, J. and Hais, M. 2010. "High Arctic
vegetation after 70 years: A repeated analysis from Svalbard". Polar
Biology 33: 635-639.
Background
In a review of ecological
and evolutionary responses to recent climate change, Parmesan (2006)
wrote that "nearly every Arctic ecosystem shows marked shifts due to
climate change," and as a result, the authors decided to see if such was
the case at a study site in the High Arctic located at 78°38'N,
16°45'E, near Brucebyen at the Adolfbukta Bay in central Spitsbergen
(Svalbard), where the vegetation had been carefully surveyed, identified
and mapped in the 1930s and the results published by Acock (1940).
What was done
In
the summer of 2008, Prach et al. repeated the vegetation mapping and
identification of species "on the same strip of land 2,042 x 521 meters
in size, as surveyed by Acock in 1936-1937 and using the same methods."
What was learned
The
four researchers, all from the Czech Republic, report that their work
"did not reveal any changes in vegetation, since a previous study in
1936-1937, that could be attributed to climate change."
What it means
Prach
et al. write that they "endorse the opinion that the vegetation on
Svalbard is still resistant to climate fluctuations, in line with a
statement of Jonsdottir (2005): 'Svalbard ecosystems are adapted to
extreme fluctuations in climate on different temporal scales and can
thus be regarded as rather robust'."
Then, quoting Parmesan
(2006), who said that "nearly every Arctic ecosystem shows marked shifts
due to climate change," they conclude their paper by writing that
"based on the results presented here, we wanted to note that some Arctic
ecosystems still show no evident change."
We would only add
that maybe it just hasn't warmed as much in this High Arctic land as the
world's climate alarmists would have us believe, which is also
suggested by Prach et al.
With
the Arctic, the Himalayas and the Amazon basin all getting a bit pesky
these days, Warmists and their media dependants are giving more
attention to the oceans. But even the oceans are not helping if you
look at the actual evidence
A plethora of media articles this
morning claim global warming is killing off phytoplankton, which forms
the base of the oceans' food chain. The problem with these articles is
they are all based on a single, very shaky study that is contradicted by
many more rigorous studies that have reached the opposite conclusion.
To
reach the conclusion that global warming is harming phytoplankton,
researchers had to rely on indirect indicators of past phytoplankton
populations, spotty and geographically incomplete samples for current
phytoplankton populations, and speculative theories tying the alleged
reduction in phytoplankton populations to global warming.
By
contrast, many studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature have
shown that higher temperatures and/or higher amounts of atmospheric
carbon dioxide benefit rather than harm phytoplankton. For example:
In
2005, Journal of Geophysical Research published a paper by scientists
who examined trends in chlorophyll concentrations, which are the
building blocks of ocean life. The French and American scientists
reported “an overall increase of the world ocean average chlorophyll
concentration by about 22 percent” during the prior two decades of
increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.
In 2007, Global Change
Biology published a paper by scientists who observed that higher carbon
dioxide levels correlate with better growth conditions for oceanic life.
The highest carbon dioxide concentrations produced “higher growth rates
and biomass yields” than the lower carbon dioxide conditions. Higher
carbon dioxide levels may well fuel “subsequent primary production,
phytoplankton blooms, and sustaining oceanic food-webs,” the scientists
reported.
In 2008, Biogeosciences published a paper by scientists
who had subjected marine organisms to varying concentrations of carbon
dioxide, including abrupt changes of carbon dioxide concentration. The
ecosystems were “surprisingly resilient” to changes in atmospheric
carbon dioxide, and “the ecosystem composition, bacterial and
phytoplankton abundances and productivity, grazing rates and total
grazer abundance and reproduction were not significantly affected by
CO2-induced effects.”
For some strange reason, the media largely
ignored these peer-reviewed studies showing global warming is benefiting
phytoplankton, but are running amuck with articles claiming the sky is
falling based on the single, more speculative claims of phytoplankton
harm.
The blatant lies about temperature and illness continue
Perhaps
because mankind evolved in tropical Africa, people actually handle warm
weather a lot better than cold weather. You can't tell the Warmists
that, though
“Global warming” is rapidly increasing Northern
Hemisphere temperatures, as it does every summer, but alarmists in the
media are doing their best to make it seem like summer heat waves never
occurred before. They are also misleading people into believing hot
temperatures kill more people than cold temperatures.
An article
in the Tuesday, July 27 Washington Post claims “High temperatures claim
more lives in the United States than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and
lightning combined – about 700 a year, according to official estimates.”
Perhaps, but what about high temperatures in comparison to low temperatures?
BBC
News and Department of the Interior analyst Indur Goklany have
published two separate papers this year documenting how cold weather
kills far more people than hot weather.
Federal mortality
statistics show 800 more people die every day in December, January, and
February than occurs on an average day during the rest of the year. The
winter months kill 72,000 more U.S. citizens than the
spring-summer-autumn average.
The three months with the lowest mortality are the hot-weather summer months of June, July, and August.
Heart
attacks and strokes are major culprits. As temperatures cool, blood
vessels contract to preserve heat and blood composition changes. As a
result, BBC News notes, the heart has to work harder to pump blood and
blood is more likely to clot.
Additionally, cold weather makes
the human respiratory more susceptible to viruses. Compounding matters,
influenza becomes more resistant to the human immune system when
temperatures fall.
A July 28 article in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution references the July 27 Washington Post article and
takes the claims a step further.
“We’d better get used to
miserable, scorching summers. We can stop using the term ‘heat wave’ to
describe what will become a routine pattern of high temperatures,
overtaxed electricity grids and epidemics of heat strokes. According to
NASA, all but one of the ten hottest years on record were since 1999,”
writes Cynthia Tucker.
According to National Weather Service
data, however, record high temperatures were prevalent the 1930s, 1940s,
and 1950s than they are today. The warming that has occurred (much of
it overstated by placing temperature stations on asphalt, next to
buildings, etc.) has primarily been during the winter and at night. High
temperatures are not getting hotter, but rather the much more deadly
extreme low temperatures are becoming more moderate.
Panic! Mt Everest is melting! Australia's public broadcasater says so
Except that they have no evidence for the claim
In
early June we requested ABC substantiate claims it made in its report
titled, Melting ice making Everest climbs dangerous, that: "Studies show
temperatures are rising faster at Mount Everest than in the rest of
South Asia." We requested ABC provide details of the studies. ABC have
now replied with the following (the full reply is shown with the
original post):
Received 2 August 2010
"On receipt of your
complaint, we have investigated whether it could be established that a
significant error had been made that warranted correction, as required
by section 5.2.2(c)(ii) of the ABC’s Editorial Policies. Audience and
Consumer Affairs note that studies do appear to show temperatures are
rising faster at Mount Everest than in the rest of South Asia, as
illustrated in Table 10.2 of the Contribution of Working Group II to the
Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change 2007. See here
In view of this, we are unable to conclude that a significant error has
been made which warrants correction. However, should you have specific
further information which you feel is relevant to our decision on this
point, we would be happy to consider it." We have sent ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs the following email:
The
ABC report states: "Studies show temperatures are rising faster at
Mount Everest than in the rest of South Asia." You have now provided the
IPCC table 10.2 as a reference for this information, however for South
Asia this table indicates temperature rise in Sri Lanka at "2°C increase
per year in central highlands " while the annual increase for the
Himalaya is given as "0.09°C per year in Himalayas".
Clearly the
values for Sri Lanka greatly exceed those of the Himalaya, and Sri
Lanka, not the Himalaya, is the area where temperatures are rising
faster in South Asia. Clearly both trends are also worthy of further
journalistic inquiry for if continued both would greatly exceed IPCC
forecasts.
We
wait ABC's reply. In the meantime we are investigating the source of
the warming trends proposed for the Himalayas cited by the IPCC. The
three references provided for the Himalaya trends in Table 10.2 are as
follows...
Strangely and contrary to IPCC practice, only one of
these is peer reviewed and it deals with precipitation, not temperature;
the other citations are conference presentations. The actual
temperature values quoted in the table originate from the following
paper:
Shrestha, Arun B.; Wake, Cameron P.; Mayewski, Paul A.;
Dibb, Jack E.. Maximum Temperature Trends in the Himalaya and Its
Vicinity: An Analysis Based on Temperature Records from Nepal for the
Period 1971--94. Journal of Climate, 9/1/99, Vol. 12 Issue 9
pp:2775-2786
This paper makes for interesting reading. It appears
that the stations used to calculate Himalayan trends come from east
Nepal and on face value these do not appear to confirm the warming
trends claimed.... the closest weather station to Mt Everest used in the
Shrestha et al 1999 paper is Chialsa, 59 km away. ABC's claims that
"Studies show temperatures are rising faster at Mount Everest than in
the rest of South Asia" are based on a study that has no data at Mt
Everest!
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Enviro torture
DDT
eliminated bedbugs in the first place but now that bedbugs are back in
major Western cities (particularly NYC) maybe DDT will be brought back
too
Do you have a bedbug problem? This actually might be a
good thing. Not for you, of course. But it might be good for
millions of poor people.
Increasingly, bedbugs bother more
rich people in influential parts of America. This might be what finally
wakes people up to the damage done by enviro-morons who spread
poisonous smears against the pesticide, DDT.
Paul Driessen
explains that if new York City residents discover bedbugs, the city’s
Bedbug Advisory Board recommends a bedbug team and an educational
Web site. Residents, it advises, should monitor and report
infestations. Use blowdryers to flush out (maybe 5 percent of) the bugs,
then sweep them into a plastic bag and dispose properly. Throw away
(thousands of dollars' worth of) infested clothing, bedding, carpeting
and furniture.
Hire (expensive) professionals who (may)
have insecticides that (may) eradicate the pests -- and hope you don't
get scammed.
But thanks to New Yorkers’ bedbug problems
Eco-myths are being replaced with more informed discussions about
the alleged effects of DDT and other pesticides on humans and wildlife.
Thankfully, bedbugs haven't been linked to disease … But [now]
imagine what it's like for some 2 billion people who live 24/7/365 with
insects that definitely are responsible for disease: malarial
mosquitoes.
Malaria infects more than 300 million people
annually. For weeks on end, it renders them unable to work, attend
school or care for their families -- … It kills more than a million
annually, most of them children and mothers.
Fortunately,
we don’t have that problem in America, because we killed off America’s
malaria carrying mosquitoes by spraying the insecticide DDT. DDT is
not anywhere near as dangerous as Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring led us
to believe.
DDT is the most powerful, effective,
long-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Spraying the eaves and
inside walls of mud huts and cinderblock homes every six months keeps 80
percent of the flying killers from entering. It irritates most that do
enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land.
Yet many aid agencies refuse to encourage, endorse or fund spraying. …
Since the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, billions
have been stricken by malaria and tens of millions have died. This is
intolerable.
... We can no longer leave those decisions to
anti-chemical activists in unaccountable pressure groups and government
agencies. These zealots are making decisions that affect the quality of
life for millions of Americans -- and life itself for billions of poor
people worldwide.
TOURISTS
and residents at a popular vacation resort in the French Alps have been
warned that they could be drowned if a giant water pocket under a
glacier on Mont Blanc bursts.
The pocket, under the Tete-Rousse
glacier on the French Alpine slopes, contains the equivalent of 26
Olympic swimming pools and was described by the National Center for
Scientific Research as a “pressure cooker.”
It would take just 15
minutes for the pocket to flood St. Gervais valley, a noted vacation
spot and home to 3000 people, researchers said.
There would be “a
brutal emptying of water which carries along everything in its path,”
said Christian Vincent, a geophysics engineer with the center. Vincent
said a torrent of mud six to eight times bigger than the original volume
of water would be created if the water was released.
At least
175 valley dwellers were drowned by an estimated 80,000 cubic meters of
water the last time a similar pocket burst, on July 12, 1892.
The
pocket, which contains 65,000 cubic meters of water, was discovered by
scientists using magnetic resonance imaging. Glaciologists will spend
two months trying to pump out 25,000 cubic meters of water from one part
of the pocket and hope to obtain a precise location for the remaining
40,000 cubic meters.
Vincent said that the most likely
explanation for the formation of the pocket was a period of particularly
cold temperatures within the glacier, freezing the water’s escape
routes. This may be a result of global warming, which has reduced the snow covering on the glacier and exposed it to the cold.
So
where did all that extra "cold" come from that was exposed by the
global warming? And was there global warming in 1892 as well?
Predictive accuracy: Proof that the Sun controls our weather and climate
Generating
accurate predictions is the ultimate test of a scientific theory.
Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn shows that solar-based theory does so. The
Warmists have never predicted anything accurately yet. Britain's Met
office tried but failed so badly that they now make forecasts only a
few days ahead
When I think of all the evidence I have been
presented with over the past several years regarding the main driver of
our climate, one man stands tall. That would be Piers Corbyn, founder of
WeatherAction.com in the UK. He does long range weather and climate
predictions and his accuracy is amazing, especially for the extreme
events all based on the Sun.
I had seen his forecasts on the web
but I had my first chance to talk with him in person at the 2008
International Conference on Climate Change in New York put on by the
Heartland Institute. It was March and Piers had saved his first public
trial forecast in the USA for the conference.
The prediction was
for a record Midwest snowfall in the middle of March, then 2 or 3 weeks
away. There was nothing about it from the national weather people. This
forecast was way out there. What was more the data for the prediction
was available more than a month, as much as 3 months in advance and it
was based on the Sun! It was such an extreme prediction that it made
eyeballs roll.
For those of you who recall that storm, you know
it came true. Did it ever! Since then I have observed the outcomes of
the predictions Piers has made and he has been amazing in his
performance. There have been a few misses but his success is around 85%
around the world and a bit higher in the USA. He regularly posts on You
Tube, so you can see his predictions come true several times during the
year. Let’s get to the discussion:
That pesky Medieval Warm period keeps popping up -- and not only in the North Atlantic region
Discussing:
"Ely, L.L. 1997. Response of extreme floods in the southwestern United
States to climatic variations in the late Holocene. Geomorphology 19:
175-201.
What was done
In an attempt to determine the
environmental origins of extreme flooding events throughout the
southwestern United States, according to the author, "paleoflood records
from nineteen rivers in Arizona and southern Utah, including over 150
radiocarbon dates and evidence of over 250 flood deposits, were combined
to identify regional variations in the frequency of extreme floods,"
which information "was then compared with paleoclimatic data to
determine how the temporal and spatial patterns in the occurrence of
floods reflect the prevailing climate."
What was learned
Ely
reports that "long-term variations in the frequency of extreme floods
over the Holocene are related to changes in the climate and prevailing
large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns that affect the conditions
conducive to extreme flood-generating storms in each region," which
changes, in her view, "are very plausibly related to global-scale
changes in the climate system."
With respect to the Colorado
River watershed, for example, which integrates a large portion of the
interior western United States, she writes that "the largest floods tend
to be from spring snowmelt after winters of heavy snow accumulation in
the mountains of Utah, western Colorado, and northern New Mexico," such
as occurred with the "cluster of floods from 5 to 3.6 ka," which
occurred in conjunction with "glacial advances in mountain ranges
throughout the western United States" during the "cool, wet period
immediately following the warm mid-Holocene."
The frequency of
extreme floods also increased during the early and middle portions of
the first millennium AD, many of which coincided "with glacial advances
and cool, moist conditions both in the western U.S. and globally." Then
came a "sharp drop in the frequency of large floods in the southwest
from AD 1100-1300," which corresponded, in her words, "to the widespread
Medieval Warm Period, which was first noted in European historical
records." With the advent of the Little Ice Age, however, there was
another "substantial jump in the number of floods in the southwestern
U.S.," which was "associated with a switch to glacial advances, high
lake levels, and cooler, wetter conditions."
What it means
In
distilling her findings down to a single succinct statement, and
speaking specifically of the southwestern United States, Ely states that
"global warm periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period, are times of
dramatic decreases in the number of high-magnitude floods in this
region."
Judith Curry still has fire in her belly: Still standing up for the scientific method and against science as power politics
It
sounds like she has a genuine concern for the environment instead of a
political motivation. The interview below seems to be from a site with
some sympathy for Warmism
Judith Curry, a climate scientist
at Georgia Tech, has a knack for setting off tremors in the climate
blogosphere. There was a lot of rumbling last week after Curry got into a
rather contentious exchange with Gavin Schmidt and readers at Real
Climate. Other notables, such as Joe Romm and William Connolley jumped
into the fray. All this was precipitated by a review of Andrew
Montford’s book, The Hockey Stick Illusion, posted at Real Climate. As
Roger Pielke Jr. observed, these debates over the hockey stick
controversy “can be arcane, technical and simply impenetrable due to
years upon years of perceived slights, a practice of in-group shorthand
and a chorus of followers on either side cheering on the spectacle.”
Last
week’s ritual bloodletting of Curry in blogland was remarkable for how
unrestrained it was. I am struck by the phenomena of this respected
climate scientist who is being met with increasingly derisive scorn from
prominent members of her own community and from many climate advocates.
I’m curious as to what drives her to keep engaging in what appears to
be a very lonely battle.
Earlier today, we had an email exchange,
in which I pressed Curry to explain what is driving her to keep banging
away on certain issues and themes.
KK: Why do you feel the need
to revisit the hockey stick debate? It’s not central to our
understanding of climate science, nor does it factor into the policy
debate. The general public is surely not paying attention to it anymore.
So why do you feel so compelled to defend this particular book by
Andrew Montford?
JC: I am not so much defending this book as
recommending that people read it. Climate scientists can learn a lot
from Montford’s book. Not in terms of who is “right” or “correct” in
terms of the science (that is still being debated), but how to avoid
unnecessary conflict in the climate debate. While the hockey stick is
not of any particular scientific importance, Montford’s book explains
why the hockeystick became a big deal, owing to the IPCC’s choice to
make the hockey stick a visual icon for the IPCC in its marketing of the
IPCC. Therefore, in the public’s mind, challenges to the hockeystick
metaphorically became challenges to the entire global warming argument.
And
the Climategate emails, while not illuminating any actual scientific
misconduct, provided a view into the underbelly of how the consensus was
actually built: upon human judgment that was influenced by petty
rivalries, a sense of self importance, a political agenda, and the
brutal dismissal and even sabotage of competing viewpoints. Not a
pretty picture.The fundamental mistake made by the climate researchers
involved in the hockey stick debate was to mistake McIntyre et al. as
merchants of doubt (a la Oreskes and Collins), when instead they were
motivated over a concern for public accountability of the research.
The response of the climate researchers to McIntyre and McKittrick, by
attacking their qualifications and motives rather than trying to work
with them or at least understand what they were trying to say, backfired
big time and arguably culminated in Climategate.
KK: I’m still trying to understand what gave rise to this latest round of Curry bashing?
JC:
My hypothesis is that the level of vitriol in the climate blogs
reflects the last gasp of those who thought they could influence
national and international energy policy through the power politics of
climate science expertise. The politics of expertise is about how
scientific information is used in the policy making process, including
how diverging viewpoints are interpreted and how science is weighed
relative to values and politics in the policy debate.
The
problem comes in when the “power” politics of expertise are played.
Signals of the “power” play include: hiding uncertainties and never
admitting a mistake; developing a consensus with a high level of
confidence; demanding that the consensus receive extreme deference
relative to other view points; insisting that that science demands a
particular policy; discrediting scientists holding other view points by
dismissing them as cranks, trivializing their credentials and say that
they are not qualified to hold an opinion; and attacking the motives of
anyone that challenges the consensus.
Sound familiar? In the
case of climate change, the authoritarianism of “science tells us we
should . . . ” could not withstand the public perception of scientists
engaging with pressure groups, lack of transparency that meant people
were unable to evaluate the information themselves, and then the
climategate affair that raised questions about the integrity of the
scientists.
Romm quickly honed in on the view that it was far
more important to discredit me than Montford or McIntyre. Romm is
“America’s fiercest” practitioner of the power politics of climate
expertise, making brutal attacks on scientists and others that diverge
from climate orthodoxy. My comments rankle so much with Romm because I
used to be in the stable of experts that he cited. My putting the
spotlight on uncertainties and too much confidence, plus listening to
other view points and posting on rival blogs, and now calling people out
on the power politics of science issue, has to be mighty uncomfortable
for Romm. Romm didn’t just stop with his “Shootout at the RC corral”
post. Now he has dredged up an interview I gave a few months ago to a
Brazilian reporter. I wrote out my replies to the questions of the
Brazilian reporter. My answers were then translated into Spanish.
Which were then translated back to English. Has anyone ever played the
game of telephone?
KK: I question if there is really this breach
of trust between the climate science community and the general public.
Again, the average person is probably not paying much attention to these
fractious debates between skeptics and a subset of the climate science
community. I mean, every profession gets dinged by its share of
controversies. The foundation for anthropogenic global warming rests on
numerous solid pillars, which you agree with. So how is that a batch of
intemperate emails and a decade-old scientific controversy over the
hockey stick can rock this foundation, which is what you seem to be
arguing?
JC: Evidence that the tide has changed include: doubt
that was evidenced particularly by European policy makers at the climate
negotiations at Copenhagen, defeat of a seven-year effort in the U.S.
Senate to pass a climate bill centered on cap-and-trade, increasing
prominence of skeptics in the news media, and the formation of an
Interacademy Independent Review of the IPCC. Concerns about uncertainty
and politicization in climate science are now at the forefront of
national and international policy. There is an increasing backlash from
scientists and engineers from other fields, who think that climate
science is lacking credibility because of the politicization of the
subject and the high confidence levels in the IPCC report. While these
scientists and engineers are not experts in climate science, they
understand the process and required rigor and the many mistakes that
need to be made and false paths that get followed.
Further, they
have been actively involved in managing science and scientists and in
assessing scientists. They will not be convinced that a “likely” level
of confidence (66-89% level of certainty) is believable for a relatively
new subject, where the methods are new and contested, experts in
statistics have judged the methods to be erroneous and/or inadequate,
and there is substantial disagreement in the field and challenges from
other scientists. The significance of the hockey stick debate is the
highlighting of shoddy science and efforts to squash opposing
viewpoints, something that doesn’t play well with other scientists.
Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu made this statement in an
interview with the Financial Times:
First, the main findings
of IPCC over the years, have they been seriously cast in doubt? No. I
think that if one research group didn’t understand some tree ring data
and they chose to admit part of that data. In all honesty they should
have thrown out the whole data set.
But you don’t need to be a
Nobel laureate to understand this. I have gotten many many emails from
scientists and engineers from academia, government labs and the private
sector. As an example, here is an excerpt from an email I received
yesterday: “My skepticism regarding AGW has been rooted in the fact
that, as an engineer/manager working in defense contracts [General
Dynamics], I would have been fired, fined (heavily) and may have gotten
jail time for employing the methodology that [named climate scientists]
have used.”
KK: Are you suggesting that the methodology of
certain climate scientists rises to the level of a crime? Also, I have
to ask you to defend this assertion that the failures of Copenhagen and
the Senate climate bill are somehow tied to rising skepticism of climate
change by policymakers. I don’t see the evidence for that, though I
realize that climate skeptics make for convenient scapegoats by
advocates such as Joe Romm.
JC: I am not suggesting that at all.
Scientists make mistakes all the time, that is actually how science
progresses, provided that the mistakes are acknowledged and learned
from. If you want to understand the palpable impact of Climategate on
European (particularly Dutch) politics, read this paper.
Skepticism
has been rather unfortunately defined to be anyone who diverges from
IPCC orthodoxy, not only in terms of the science, but in terms of
accepting the policies that science “tells us” we must have. The revolt
is more in the sense of breaking this linear link between science and
policy (see also this post by Pielke Jr.).
KK: The majority of
comments at both Real Climate and Climate Progress were quite
disparaging of you, which in my mind, speaks more to their readerships,
since I have no way of knowing how the respective blog hosts chose to
moderate the comments. After experiencing this latest blogospheric
hazing, you have to wonder, what’s the point? Are any of your colleagues
advising you to move on to a more constructive venue, and if so, what
would that be?
JC: Well, first I have to comment on the
moderation of RC and CP on this. They chose comments that consisted of
personal attacks, while rejecting many comments that were supportive of
my viewpoints or asked challenging questions. The reason that I know
what comments were rejected because many of these people subsequently
posted on climateaudit or emailed me. In one instance, a comment was
rejected by CP from someone who had previously made a guest post at RC.
So this reflects not only on their readership, but reflects specific
choices made by the moderators at RC and CP, that I personally interpret
as an attempt to discredit me.
The point is this. I have gotten
hundreds of emails from practicing scientists and engineers in a range
of different fields and holding positions in academia, government, and
the private sector. I have also had discussions with a number of
climate researchers who are concerned about the politicization of the
field and the overconfidence in the IPCC. They are encouraging me to
continue standing up for the scientific method and against the
politicization of science. I’m sure that there are some of my
colleagues that don’t like it or wonder what the point is, but they are
not talking to me about it. I am getting feedback from scientists that
like what I’m doing.
In terms of something more productive to do,
I would encourage climate scientists to reflect on how to dig out from
the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Time to listen to some new ideas and
some new experts. This time, I suggest listening to a plurality of
viewpoints, and for scientists to make sure their data and methods are
transparent to the public. And stop trying to simplify all this into a
straight climate change science drives global energy policy strategy,
which was misguided and naïve, to say the least.
The real
problem is sustainability, which is a complex confluence of ecosystems,
food, water, energy, population growth, finite natural resources, and
the desire for economic development. Sustainability is a value that
nearly everyone can share. The fundamental spatial unit of
sustainability is the region, which makes it easier for people to
identify their common concerns and secure their common interests.
Yes,
there are global elements to all this in terms of climate change and
finite natural resources, and the realization that regional
instabilities can have global consequences. It’s not a simple problem,
and there is no silver bullet, but there are millions of little
solutions that can all add up. Climate change needs to be considered as
but a single element in the context of all these issues. And
independently of the broader sustainability issues, we need rational
energy policies that account not only for environmental issues, but also
economic and national security issues.
Once you start thinking
about sustainability and the broader issues of energy policy as the main
challenges, and not climate change, then the overwhelming barrier of
politics and economics becomes less monolithic. And more importantly,
climate science can get back to being science rather than being about
politics. My citations of Feynmann on the RC thread were to remind
people of the difference. Climate science is a fascinating and
important scientific problem. Lets step back and figure out how to do a
better job so that our field can regain the respect of the Nobel
laureates in physics, scientists and engineers from other fields, and
credibility of the public. Most importantly we need to stop playing the
power politics of climate science by saying “Here is what science says
we must do” and start saying “Here is our best understanding, and here
is where our uncertainties are . . .”
While the oil and
gas companies are bearing the brunt of taxation, regulation and
environmental angst, others are doing just fine, thank you. If you think
cap-and-trade is dead, just follow the money.
According to a
recently released Center for Responsive Politics review of reports filed
with the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, General Electric and its
subsidiaries spent more than $9.5 million on federal lobbying from April
to June — the most it's spent on lobbying since President Obama has
been in office.
Why? As the fight over cap-and-trade grows, so
does lobbying. Since January, GE and its units have spent more than
$17.6 million on lobbying — a jump of 50% over the first six months of
2009.
GE is just one of many organizations and individuals that
stand to make money if cap-and-trade makes it through Congress. GE makes
wind turbines, not oil rigs, and has a vested interest in shutting down
its fossil fuel competitors.
In an Aug. 19, 2009 e-mail obtained
by Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, General Electric Vice Chairman John
Rice called on his GE co-workers to join the General Electric Political
Action Committee "to collectively help support candidates who share the
values and goals of GE."
And what are those goals, and just what
has GEPAC accomplished thus far? "On climate change," Rice wrote, "we
were able to work closely with key authors of the Waxman-Markey climate
and energy bill, recently passed by the House of Representatives. If
this bill is enacted into law, it will benefit many GE businesses."
GE
is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which advocates
cap-and-trade legislation and leads the drive for reductions of
so-called greenhouse gases. One of its subsidiaries was involved in
Hopenhagen, a campaign by a group of businesses to build support for the
recent Copenhagen Climate Conference, which was supposed to come up
with a successor to the failed Kyoto Accords.
To be fair, coal and gas companies lobby too, both out of self-preservation and self-interest.
But
they produce a useful product that creates jobs and boosts GDP.
Alternative energy, even after huge subsidies, adds little to our energy
mix. Evidence suggests alternative energy is a net job loser, siphoning
resources from productive areas of the economy.
Renewable energy
sources like wind, solar energy and biomass total only 3% of our energy
mix. Spain's experience is that for each "green" job created, 2.2 jobs
are lost due to the siphoning off of resources that private industry
needed to grow.
There's money to be made in climate change even
if the climate doesn't change, and the profit motive may now be the main
driver of cap-and-trade.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) was
formed to buy and sell carbon credits, the currency of cap-and-trade.
Founder Richard Sandor estimates the climate trading market could be "a
$10 trillion dollar market."
It could very well be if
cap-and-trade legislation like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed
into law, making energy prices necessarily skyrocket, and as companies
buy and trade permits to emit those six "greenhouse" gases.
As we
have written, profiteering off climate change hysteria is a growth
industry as well as a means to the end goal of fundamentally
transforming America, as the President has said was his goal.
Czech
President Vaclav Klaus has called climate change a religion whose
zealots seek the establishment of government control over the means of
production. It reminds him, he said, of the totalitarianism he once
endured.
After the Climate-gate scandal broke, Lord Christopher
Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, said of the scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit at
the University of East Anglia and those they worked with: "They're
criminals." He also called them "huckstering snake-oil salesmen and
'global warming' profiteers."
Like the scientists who lived off
the grant money they received from scaring us to death with manipulated
data, others hope to profit off perhaps the greatest scam of all time.
Von Storch: "The concept that science tells politics what’s necessary has failed"
Here
is an outstanding interview given by Prof. Hans von Storch, one of
Germany’s leading climate scientists, in an interview with Germany’s
Handelsblatt (Germany’s equivalent to the Wall Street Journal)
yesterday.
Although a warmist, Professor Hans von Storch, much
to his credit, has always kept an open ear and mind to serious climate
sceptics. Here are some paraphrased excerpts of yesterday’s HB
interview.
HB: Are today’s hot and cold extreme events a sign of global warming?
HvS:
It’s important to keep weather separated from climate. The media have
certainly been focussing more on the weather. And unfortunately there
are plenty of activists who like to connect heat waves and storms with
climate change. And then these activists wonder why sceptics do the same
when there’s a cold winter, using it as evidence against warming. It’s
intellectually low. The fact of the matter is that it is trending
warmer.
HB: Who recommends the scientists for participation in the IPCC?
HvS:
In Germany it’s the Federal Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection
and Reactor Safety and the Ministry of Research and Science in Bonn.
Here one can apply to participate, and this is what I’ve done. I offered
to be a part of WG2. That’s where most of the errors occurred and I’d
like to help out this time around to prevent such errors from happening
again. My name has been sent, along with 80 others, to the IPCC in
Switzerland.
HB: The IPCC has come under fire because it
dramatised climate change. How can we prevent such errors and what
should quality control look like?
HvS: We have to look very
closely at the literature that is handed to us. We have to be very
careful with grey literature. It has to meet the highest scientific
standards. Under no circumstances can literature from interest groups
like reinsurers, coal industry or environmental groups be accepted.
HB: And what about the WWF’s Amazon Rainforest report?
HvS:
One cannot claim that this was a neutral scientific report. The IPCC
made that mistake, and it cannot be blamed on the WWF, who have
legitimate interests.
HB: Could there be a benefit in allowing studies from interest groups?
HvS:
I would not agree to that. In WG2 it would not be necessary to include
material from interest groups. There’s already enough scientific
literature at hand.
HB: And what about critical opinions from
the scientific community? In the wake of the hacked e-mails from the
CRU, some scientists complained that their publications had been
blocked.
HvS: Here we have to differentiate between 2 kinds of
gate-keeping. In the case of the Climate Research Unit, it is alleged,
or indeed it was attempted, to keep an article with a contrary opinion
from being published. Thus it was possible to assure that some results
would not flow into the IPCC report.
In the IPCC report itself,
minority opinions also must be allowed to be shown. We have to determine
just where there is consensus, and where there are contrary opinions.
This has to be done scientifically, without any prejudice.
HB: A
report for the political decision makers probably has to be summarised:
But isn’t that walking on a tight rope between what is scientifically
exact and what the politicians understand?
HvS: A summary by
the scientists for the politicians is in my opinion, not necessary. The
summary emphasis takes place at a later time when the decision makers
wish to present the matter to their clientel. The politicians that I’ve
been involved with know what climate research is about –and especially
on questions of adaptation. Personally I’m quite impressed by their
competence.
HB: Last fall after errors were found in the IPCC
report and the disclosure of the CRU e-mails, climate science skidded
off track and came under heavy fire.. What does this branch of science
need to do in order to regain respect?
HsV: There are two
strategies – and I’m afraid not much is happening for the most part. It
is simply being claimed that evil media outlets and the fossil fuel
industry are behind the unjust discrediting of the science. But this
assertion simply is not sustainable. In the past, climate science
attempted to work too much with catastrophe reports. But that bubble
blew last fall. As a result, trust suffered immeasurably.
We
have to take a critical view of what happened. Nothing ought to be swept
under the rug. Some of the inquests – like in Great Britain - failed at
this. They blew an opportunity to re-establish trust.
The second
strategy us scientists have to consider is what role it is we wish to
play. Are we supporters of a certain political process, or supporters of
a certain brand of politics? I’m emphatically for the first, whereby we
are the providers of special knowledge. We must not say that this is
right, and that is wrong. This is not the competence of a climate
scientist. We are merely experts in climate dynamics, and not
specialists for competing political or ethical problems. Fundamentally a
debate has to take place. That’s what climate scientists want, and that
is what is expected from the public.
HB: Is there a danger that
climate science falls on the wayside because the sceptics take up very
popular slogans against the subject of anthropogenic climate change?
HsV:
Many alarmists do the same– both sides don’t hold back much. We have to
accept the challenges the sceptics present and step into the debate
with them in order to win them over.
Many physicists, chemists,
engineers or geologists have open questions about climate change which
they view as unanswered. Here there is a considerable and legitimate
potential at hand, which unfortunately is not addressed often enough.
Instead, they sometimes get attacked and called sceptics, which only
serves to aggravate them. It’s no way to build trust. We have to find a
way back to a reasonable discussion.
HB: Do you have any hope
that progress can be made with the next IPCC report with respect to
climate protection, especially after the spectacular failure of
Copenhagen?
HsV: I don’t expect that the next IPCC report will
significantly improve the chances for a comprehensive climate protection
program. The last report was already so emphatic that there is no way
to top it. The concept that science tells politics what’s necessary has
failed. We have to give up on the idea of making an agreement from top
down for 150 countries, and that they will abide by it. Change has to
come from the bottom.
The Burning Woman Festival of Global Warming: Step up to the stake, Ms. Curry
Judith
Curry, who has been kind enough to give interviews here before, has now
crossed the line in the minds of the climate hysterics who have
polluted this discussion with invective and hatred for so long.
Her
crime has been to read a book. Really. The book is The Hockey Stick
Illusion by Andrew Montford, who blogs under the nom de guerre (it's a
war now...) of Bishop Hill. The book, which reads like a detective
thriller (it has been described as Stieg Larssen without the lesbian
sex, which is just about the best one-line review in history),
chronicles the exposure of Michael Mann's famous Hockey Stick chart as
irretrievably flawed.
Curry will pay--she's already paying, in
fact. She is now being described as a skeptic, a denialist, someone who
has gone over to the Dark Side. Tim Lambert, who runs a blog that is
arguably the worst of the climate hysteria genre, has a post up on his
site devoted to criticism of Curry. The comments there are summed up by
this: "Her comments at RC and CP do not read like those of a scientist,
or even of a rational person. They read like those of the typical
denialist."
Now get this straight. Curry is not pronouncing that
Montford's book is the definitive source. She does not endorse the book.
(I do, but I'm not a respected climate scientist...) Curry's
crime--what makes here a `denialist' and `skeptic' and `irrational'--is
to say that people should read the book to get an understanding of what
happened, how it happened and why it's important.
Judith Curry
actually had to say that people should read a book. That's because some
of the hysterics published phony studies saying it was not necessary to
read a book to understand why they were right and their opponents were
wrong. I am not making that up. Everybody from Brian Angliss to Michael
Tobis is inventing reasons why they don't need to read criticism of the
position they support--that Michael Mann is a saint and the Hockey Stick
chart is a holy relic.
There is no better vignette explaining
the intellectual dishonesty of the hysterical position, championed by
Joe Romm and Tim Lambert, supported by Real Climate, Tamino and Michael
Tobis, and egged on from the sidelines by Eli Rabett and countless
commenters.
Montford's book shows how Steve McIntrye identified
the errors in sample selection and analysis that made the Hockey Stick
chart untrustworthy, and the efforts Michael Mann and his colleages went
to to hide the defects of their study (which led to Climategate, which
Montford covers at the end of his book).
Montford's book is good.
Curry's recommendation to the community that they read it is a very
good recommendation. I have seen too many defenses of the consensus and
attacks on its opponents that showed an appalling ignorance of what
happened to think otherwise.
Judith Curry is a respected climate
scientist (who does not dispute the theory or existence of climate
change due to human emissions of CO2). She holds respectable positions
and has published well-respected papers in the literature.
She's
getting dragged through the mud by political hacks for the crime of
telling these hacks that they should read what exactly their opponents
are saying.
As I said above, there is no episode in all the
climate wars that shows more clearly the cheap partisan political nature
and moral bankruptcy of hacks like Joe Romm, Real Climate, Tim Lambert,
Tamino and Eli Rabett. The question now is will Curry get burnt at the
stake professionally and personally before people say `that's enough'?
A
new study by University of Guelph (Canada) Professor Ross McKitrick
(see here) shows that the temperature data upon which the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relied in its Endangerment Finding
has significant flaws and uncertainties that undermine that Finding.
Since
the EPA Endangerment Finding is the basis for far-reaching EPA
greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation, the McKitrick study also undermines
EPA's decision to regulate. The study also undermines confidence as to
whether any particular year or decade is the warmest "on record."
EPAs
Endangerment Finding to a large extent was based on EPA's analysis of
20th century temperature records. According to EPA, these records show a
warming trend in the latter three decades of the century of fractions
of a degree Fahrenheit per decade. EPA believes this trend is of
sufficient enough magnitude as to necessarily be caused by human
emissions of GHGs. But Professor McKitrick reveals a number of
significant problems in the underlying data sets. Any of these problems
introduce a margin of error that is comparable to, if not greater than,
the very trend that EPA perceives and therefore may eliminate or
significantly lessen the trend on which EPA relies.
Professor
McKitrick reviews how both land and sea surface temperature records were
created for the 20th century. He finds that the methodology by which
temperatures were determined and the geographic regions covered have
changed substantially over the years, with the result that different
records have essentially been spliced together to create a single,
continuous global record.
The fact that different types of
records have had to be combined in an attempt to create a single record
is not surprising because, historically, land-based temperature monitors
and the methods used to measure sea surface temperatures were not
designed as part of a systematic and standardized program to produce
comparable data that could be used to produce a long-term global
climatic record. They were designed instead to produce reasonably
accurate local data.
The combination of these different data sets
requires data adjustments so that the data "it" with each other. These
adjustments are based on uncertain assumptions that introduce a high
margin of error in the overall record.
The temperature trend for
the last three decades of the 20th century, which EPA says was of such
magnitude as to be unequivocally caused by human-emitted GHGs, was just
0.30F per decade. This cmpares with warming rates of 0.25F per decade
during a number of 30-year periods spanning the 1910s to the 1940s,
which EPA says were not caused by human-emitted GHGs. Thus, temperature
increases of a mere 0.05F per decade are given decisive weight by EPA in
concluding that anthropogenic GHGs caused warming during the 20th
century. Professor McKitrick, however, shows that the uncertainties in
the data undermine confidence in the accuracy of temperature differences
this small and therefore the conclusions that EPA reaches.
Based
on the McKitrick study, Peabody Energy Company has today filed a
petition (see here) with EPA under the Information Quality Act (IQA) in
which it asks EPA to correct the temperature records on which the
Endangerment Finding is based and to reconsider its GHG regulations. The
IQA requires agencies to correct information that it uses for
regulation.
John
Dawson presents below the story of the hockey stick fraud in a highly
readable form that should be easily accessible to the average reader
The Hockey Stick Illusion
is the shocking story of a graph called the Hockey Stick. It is also a
textbook of tree ring analysis, a code-breaking adventure, an intriguing
detective story, an expos‚ of a scientific and political travesty, and
the tale of a herculean struggle between a self-funded sceptic and a
publicly funded hydra, all presented in the measured style of an
analytical treatise. The hero of the story is Steve McIntyre, honourably
assisted by fellow sceptics, especially by Ross McKitrick. The villain
is Michael Mann, dishonourably assisted by global warming alarmists,
especially by his "Hockey Team". The bare bones of the Hockey Stick
story are as follows.
In its First Assessment Report published in
1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented
the conventional view of climate history: that around a thousand years
ago there was a Medieval Warm Period, followed by a Little Ice Age,
followed by the Current Warm Period that has not yet reached the
temperatures experienced during the Medieval Warm Period. In 1995 the
IPCC's Second Assessment Report presented that view again but introduced
some doubt about the Medieval Warm Period, suggesting that further
investigation was required. It had dawned on global warming crusaders
that the Medieval Warm Period was a huge problem for the Anthropogenic
Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis and that fame and fortune awaited a
scientist who could get rid of it.
The scientist who took the
prize was a brash and ambitious American paleoclimatologist, Dr Michael
Mann. With two of his more senior colleagues, Mann set about
investigating the earth's temperature over the last millennium by
scouring the world's research projects that had detected past
temperatures by way of temperature "proxies" such as tree rings. The
amount of data they collated and the sophistication of their statistical
analysis, claimed Mann, ensured that their conclusions would be more
"robust" than those of previous studies. Their first peer-reviewed paper
(MBH98) was published in the prestigious journal Nature in 1998 and
their second (MBH99) was published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL)
in 1999. The graphed summation of these papers wiped the Medieval Warm
Period and the Little Ice Age out of the picture and replaced them with a
flat-lined handle declining slightly from 1000 to 1900 then bending
upwards into a twentieth-century blade of rapidly rising temperatures.
This
"Hockey Stick" graph was immediately seized by AGW crusaders. Typical
of the reaction was that of Gerry North of Texas A&M University who
enthused: "The planet had been cooling slowly until 120 years ago, when,
bam!, it jumps up . We've been breaking our backs on [greenhouse]
detection, but I found the 1000-year records more convincing than any of
our detection studies." Almost overnight the Hockey Stick became the
new gold standard of paleoclimatology.
As we now know (or will
know after reading The Hockey Stick Illusion) what glittered was not
gold but fool's gold. The Hockey Stick was not "robust". It was the
product of a pseudo-scientific mindset, faulty data selection, erroneous
data identification, dubious statistical methodology, flawed
mathematics, a perverted peer-review process, a frenzied propaganda
campaign and unscrupulous defence mechanisms. But so insatiable was the
demand for this product that it swept all before it and challengers into
the sceptic sin-bin.
Michael Mann was an incorrigible scientist,
but he was an indomitable politician. His hegemony over
paleo-climatologists, peer reviewers, journal editors, and some key
politicians and lobbyists was none too subtle but amazingly effective.
He quickly became a referee for eleven scientific journals and three
grant programs, he was appointed scientific adviser on climate change to
the US government, and he appeared regularly in the media. His crowning
achievement was his appointment by the IPCC as contributing author of a
number of chapters of the Third Assessment Report, and lead author of
its "Observed Climate" chapter.
As Hans von Storch understated
it, to have a scientist who already dominated a debate also authorising
the key review of that debate was a sure road to trouble; the situation
demanded the involvement of scientists who really were independent. As
McIntyre stated it, this situation would be entirely unacceptable in a
commercial situation, and in fact illegal outside a banana republic.
Since
it would have been too blatant, even for Mann, to have his own
paleoclimatology papers as the only ones to be taken seriously in the
IPCC report, he sought the collaboration of paleoclimatologists from the
University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit who had been doing
tree ring analysis for many years. So Mann and his American colleagues
joined forces with Phil Jones and his English colleagues to form an
informal alliance that came to be known as the "Hockey Team". After some
initial argy-bargy the pecking order was sorted out: Mann was captain,
Phil Jones vice-captain and the team's all-for-one-and-one-for-all
effort and prestige were harnessed to spearhead the cause of galvanising
the world's attention on "the great moral and economic challenge of our
time", as Kevin Rudd described AGW alarmism.
While expressing
doubts and concerns amongst themselves from time to time, the team was
driven inexorably on by Mann's bluster about their common commitment to
"the science" and the need to fend off dark forces he imagined being
aligned against them by big energy companies, and references to the
support the team could count on from unidentified "friends in high
places". But the team was driven past the point of no return-the
scientists' reputations and careers became so attached to the Hockey
Stick that its defence overwhelmed their professional integrity and
scientific objectivity. Time and again the goal of enshrining the Hockey
Stick as the robust "consensus" view took precedence over due
scientific process and disclosure.
The English members of the
team produced some tree ring graph lines that could be added to Mann et
al's graph to bolster its intergovernmental credentials. When evidence
of the Medieval Warm Period became apparent it was rationalised away as
likely to be localised rather than worldwide. When proxy tree ring graph
lines declined inexplicably in the late twentieth century they were
cropped short and replaced with instrumental lines-sometimes the
replacement was noted, sometimes it was hidden. Borehole studies that
showed higher temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period than during
the Current Warm Period were shunted out of the picture, except for a
consolation prize of being used to demonstrate rising temperatures since
the Little Ice Age.
When the Third Assessment Report was
released to great fanfare in 2001 the Hockey Stick was its centrepiece,
appearing seven times in the report. The version that appeared in the
"Synthesis Report", as the finale to its "Summary for Policy Makers",
was particularly awesome. A single line traced northern hemisphere
temperatures along a nine-century handle, then bent upward through the
twentieth century, then continued skyward through the twenty-first
century to make a blade nearly as high as the handle was long. The
graph's caption began:
Variations of the Earth's surface
temperature: years 1000 to 2100. From year 1000 to year 1860 variations
in average surface temperature of the Northern Hemisphere are shown
(corresponding data from the Southern Hemisphere not available)
reconstructed from proxy data (tree rings, corals, ice cores, and
historical records). The line shows the 50-year average, the grey region
the 95% confidence limit in the annual data .
The Hockey Stick
was quickly adopted as the AGW crusaders' banner. It appeared on
posters, PowerPoint presentations, in schools, on trucks, and in 2002 it
was referred to in a pamphlet sent to every household in Canada to
promote ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. In his documentary An
Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore showed it as dramatic "evidence" and claimed
that all scientists agreed with its message. Others said: well, all
legitimate scientists anyway. And woe betide any scientist or politician
who disagreed.
A few scientists and statisticians and
journalists and politicians refused to be cowed. Not many of them were
financed by public institutions. None involved in the Hockey Stick war
were financed by big energy companies, despite the mantra recited by the
likes of Mann and Gore that they all were. (Personally I think sceptics
should be financed by big business as a counterbalance to the almost
limitless public funding for climate alarmism.) Steve McIntyre had
worked for a mining company, but his work on the Hockey Stick was done
from home and was self-funded.
During his career McIntyre had
applied his Oxford education in mathematics to data analysis and the
auditing of statistically analysed surveys of prospecting and mining
projects. When he retired he educated himself in paleoclimatology, then
decided to cast an auditor's eye over the Hockey Stick. This required
that he examine the data on which the research papers were based and the
methods that had been employed to analyse it, so he e-mailed Michael
Mann to ask for them.
Mann responded politely and arranged for a
colleague to send some data. It was not enough data to do a proper
audit, but it was enough for McIntyre to start detecting significant
problems with the Hockey Stick, which he started exposing on the web.
From then on his requests for the information required to audit papers
were ignored, fobbed off, delayed, obstructed, belittled, rejected or
grudgingly complied with in part. He doggedly persisted with the
frustrating time-consuming process of politely pursuing researchers,
their employers, journals and freedom-of-information claims, in order to
gain access to information that should have been made readily available
according to the policies of the journals and institutions involved.
With a few exceptions the non-disclosure reality confounded the
full-disclosure policy that is essential to the pursuit of scientific
truth.
With only part of the data and procedures available to
him, McIntyre's first task was to fill in the gaps as best he could by
working backwards from the graphs to try and figure out how they had
been arrived at. This task made me think of a code breaker with a coded
message and some idea of what it might mean who then has to decipher
what the code is. Not until he had broken the code could McIntyre start
examining what it had been used to do and analyse whether its results
were valid. This required many hours of trial and error using
sophisticated statistical analysis programs-at least they sound
sophisticated to a layman like me.
McIntyre's discoveries were
numerous, and startling, and damning. When he started posting them on
the web, the Hockey Team scathingly dismissed them as ignorant nonsense
that would never get past a peer review; but as soon as McIntyre and
fellow Canadian Ross McKitrick had their first peer reviewed paper
(MM03) published in Environment and Energy the debate escalated into a
Hockey Stick war. Mann furiously orchestrated a campaign of denunciation
and sabotage. His "friends over at Nature", as he called them, treated
McIntyre and McKitrick particularly badly, accepting their paper,
delaying it, then rejecting it and publishing Mann's exculpatory
corrigendum instead.
While their paper was languishing at Nature
the Canadians were constrained from responding to attacks by the team.
Mann declared that a paper by Scott Rutherford "completely discredited"
MM03. But in 2005 McIntyre and McKitrick had their second paper
published in Energy and Environment (MM05EE) and another one in
Geophysical Research Letters (MM05GRL) and another one in a Dutch
magazine. Mann's response was to claim that Energy and Environment was
not a legitimate scientific journal and that MM05GRL had "managed to
slip through the imperfect peer review filter at [GRL]". He didn't
explain how he knew this about the allegedly confidential peer review
process, but thanks to Climategate we know the sort of influence he
could wield over that process, and what sort of filter he had in mind.
The
war that raged between McIntyre and the hydra, in the journals, on the
net, and in the media, came to a head, to one of them at least, when
Mann once again refused to disclose his computational codes. As long as
McIntyre had to rely solely on the codes he had broken, Mann could claim
that he hadn't got them right, so McIntyre asked Mann to provide the
right ones-and was again refused. Hence Mann's stance amounted to: no
one can understand my methods and reproduce my results without my codes,
and I am not going to allow anyone else to examine or use them.
When
Mann's ridiculous statements on this matter (for example, that big oil
companies were behind the request and that he would not be intimidated)
were reported in the Wall Street Journal the tussle became political.
The key politicians involved were Joe Barton, a sceptic, and Sherwood
Boehlert, an AGW alarmist. To cut a long story short, Barton set up the
Wegman committee to investigate and Boehlert set up the North committee
to investigate.
The Wegman panel was made up of three
statisticians from three different universities, none of whom had any
professional connection to paleoclimatology or the AGW debate. The North
panel was made up of eleven paleoclimatologists and two statisticians,
most of whom had been professionally connected to the IPCC or the Hockey
Team, some of them closely connected. So this jury was well and truly
stacked in Mann's favour. He acknowledged this to Keith Briffa in an
e-mail urging him to appear before it as a witness:
"I think you
really should do this if you possibly can. The panel is entirely
legit[im]ate, and the report was requested by Sherwood Boehlert, who as
you probably know has been very supportive of us in the whole Barton
affair . The panel is solid. Gerry North should do a good job in
chairing this, and the other members are all solid. Christy is the token
skeptic, but there are many others to keep him in check".
But
despite its AGW bias, when the North panel presented its report in June
2006 it acknowledged that the Hockey Stick's depiction of temperatures
before 1600 was invalid. It reported that the Hockey Stick depended on
bristlecone pine proxies that "should be avoided for temperature
reconstructions". That its reliance on single validation statistics was
unacceptable. That its short-centring methodology was biased, towards a
hockey stick shape. That it used methodology that was "unconventional"
and "problematical" such that it "introduced certain distortions"-that
is, was wrong. And more. It concluded that: "Some of these criticisms
are more relevant than others, but taken together, they are an important
aspect of a more general finding of this committee, which is that
uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been
underestimated." This was a highly euphemistic summary of the report's
specific findings. The panel made no criticism of McIntyre or McKitrick
or of the papers they presented.
Since the Wegman panel had not
been stacked with AGW crusaders with allegiances to the team or the
IPCC, and since its brief was confined to Mann's Hockey Stick rather
than to climate history as such, its report was not compromised like the
North report. (A brief summary of its findings may be found here.)
The
Wegman report identified a hard core of seven authors and a "social
network" of forty-three authors with direct ties to Mann, and reported
that this network had compromised independent research, perverted the
peer review process, and so tied researchers to their public positions
that they had become incapable of reassessing them. It criticised the
team's isolation from mainstream statisticians in other disciplines, and
its grudging and haphazard release of the data required for
verification of its findings. Most importantly it found that "the
decentered methodology" used to produce the Hockey Stick "is simply
incorrect mathematics", that the Hockey Stick has "a validation skill
not significantly different from zero", and that its obliteration of the
Medieval Warm Period and contention that the 1990s was the hottest
decade in a millennium were "essentially unverifiable".
The team
attacked the Wegman report on the grounds that it was not peer reviewed,
which was ridiculous since it was a peer review-a proper independent
one by three of the most distinguished statisticians in the country. And
they made maximum use of the wiggle room in the North report summary.
Although it had validated McIntyre and McKitrick's criticisms of Mann's
data selection and methodology in the body of the report, its brief was
to form an opinion about the world's temperatures over the last 2000
years, and the panel was not about to explicitly contradict the IPCC in
this regard. It got around the conflict of interests by deciding that
there was evidence other than Mann's Hockey Stick that twentieth-century
warming is "para-normal". What they didn't do, however, was to
scrutinise that "other evidence" very carefully, because of the examples
they presented, all bar one included bristlecone pines in their data
sets, which they had agreed should not be used. It was in fact those
bristlecones and other "Mannian parlor tricks", as McIntyre called them,
that produced the hockey stick effect in all their "other evidence".
Oppenheimer's immigration scare was recycled from a 1970's global COOLING scare
Earlier this week a new paper was published for the National Academy of
Sciences by Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and lead author
of the forthcoming IPCC report. Oppenheimer made the following claim in
his paper: "Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate
to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and
agricultural production in Mexico...The number could amount to 10% of
the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65."
Flashback to
1975, when a Newsweek article called "The Cooling World" published a
similar claim from the National Academy of Sciences: "There are ominous
signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change
dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in
food production - with serious political implications for just about
every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon,
perhaps only 10 years from now.
35 years ago environmentalist
were claiming that our agriculture was doomed due to upcoming freezing
temperatures. Today, they've only changed their tune by saying
increasing temperatures will destroy crops, and tacking on the threat of
mass migration to cause more alarm.
Phelim was invited on to the
Neil Cavuto show to rebut these ridiculous claims. The newest claims
are worse than the Global Cooling scare because they ignore what history
taught us from the medieval warm period-warmer temperatures brings
prosperity to nations.
Additionally, Oppenhiemers' research
methods have been referred to as "guesswork piled on top of 'what ifs.'"
In short, the type of research we've come to expect from IPCC authors.
As Phelim said, "Immigration is the last great hope of these alarmists."
A
Warmist says that his fellow Warmists will have to play down that
science thang if they want to persuade people to act on Warmist scares
The
battle to get Americans to accept the science behind climate change has
been "lost," an expert at the Aspen Environment Forum declared
Wednesday, but there's still a way to win the war to reduce carbon
emissions.
Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the
Environment at the University of Minnesota, said leaders on climate
change need to concentrate on changing behavior in ways that appeal to
people - and also happen to reduce carbon emissions.
"Climate
scientists - stop talking about climate science. We lost. It's over.
Forget it," Foley told a surprised audience during a featured panel
discussion on the last day of the three-day forum.
He said he
likes nothing more than addressing conservatives and trying to win them
over. "I like to walk into rooms like that and say, `Forget about
climate change. Do you love America?'
"And they'll go, `Yeah.'
I'll say, `Doesn't it kind of tick you off that we borrow money from
China, send it to Saudi Arabia to prop up this energy industry ...
You're pushing a lot of buttons. They agree on that," Foley said.
Environmentalists
and climate deniers should stop fighting and take action they agree on,
even if they approach the issue from different sides, he said.
"The
skepticism around climate change has created a trap for us," Foley
said. "Stop digging yourself into the hole. Get out of it. Talk about it
a different way. Reframe the issue."
The Environment Forum was
presented by The Aspen Institute and National Geographic Magazine. It
attracted more than 300 attendees along with scores of speakers in its
third year. The first two days featured dire assessments of various
environmental maladies, from the oceans acidifying to the challenge of
feeding a hungry planet when the population is supposed to surge from 7
billion to 9 billion by 2050.
Wednesday was designed to look more
at solutions. Foley was part of a panel assessing how behavior can be
changed to encourage stewardship of the planet in a time of
"anthropocene," or the time when humans are the dominate evolutionary
force on Earth.
The key to cultivating that change is stopping
the battle over whether or not science backs the concept of climate
change, Foley said. A handful of audience members challenged the wisdom
of his strategy, insisting that people must be educated about the
details of climate change science before they truly get behind efforts
to reduce carbon emissions.
Foley stuck to his claims. Discussing
changes in global mean temperature makes people's eyes glaze over and
does little to help them understand the issue, he said. "Talk about
things that matter - food, water, your way of life, the place you live,
that kind of thing. "I'm not saying ignore the issue. Turn it around,
reframe it," Foley persisted.
About 10 percent of Americans will
align with you if you rally around climate change, he later added, but
70 percent will be on your side if you talk about energy security.
The
stakes in the debate are too high for bickering. Foley said meaningful
action must be taken to ease carbon emissions in less than a decade.
Another
panel member, Rev. Richard Cizik, president of New Evangelical
Partnership for the Common Good, agreed that the war on climate change
must be waged in ways people can understand.
People will only
change behavior when they are uncomfortable with something happening in
their lives or the world - and if they're given a solution that works.
"You have to be really careful because if you give them an answer that
doesn't work and doesn't resonate, then you're in trouble," Cizik said.
Such
threats seem to have faded away in most of the rest of the world but
the mental world of many ABC "intellectuals" still seems to be fixed
somewhere in the old East Germany so their polemical primitivism is no
great surprise.
My immediate response is "Bring it on". I am
sure most skeptics would LOVE to present their case before a court --
where it is evidence, not abuse, that counts.
Meanwhile, however, Jo Nova has some derisive comments on the ABC effusions. The ABC Talking Head concerned was Kellie Tranter:
Kellie
Tranter attacks imaginary deniers who she doesn't name, cite, or
reference. All her inferences and innuendo are backed up by assertive
confidence, a pile of convenient guesses, and nothing else. Everything
she accuses the Deniers of is something that those on the Big Scare
Campaign do-and if the Deniers do it at all, those who sell-the-scare do
it 100 times more.
And countermanding her legal speculation:
sanctions for those who provide inaccurate or misleading information are
surely more appropriate for the workers who are paid by the citizens to
give balanced and careful reporting - rather than those who offer a
product for voluntary purchase in the private market.
The
citizens are, after all, forced to pay for the services of the
Department of Climate Change, the CRU, the CSIRO, BOM and ABC. No
citizen is forced to buy Heaven and Earth. The official organisations
are chartered to provide the whole truth, not just their favorite parts.
Who in their right mind expects a single speech or book from a private
individual to encompass the entirety of scientific knowledge?
Last time I looked, there were no laws saying non-fiction items must be impartial and unbiased.
The
Brown-washing article was incorrect, inaccurate, based on fallacies of
ad hominem, reasoned by mere authority, and was stocked with countless
unsubstantiated claims about imaginary malfeasant authors. It's so
vacant, and lacking in any reasonable argument that it doesn't just
reflect not-too-well on the author, it begs us to ask why our tax
dollars are being used to propagate this kind of abject literary and
logical failure.
I'm not calling for anyone to be silenced, it's
just a question of value for money.Why did the editors of ABC Unleashed
think a generic unresearched smear was worth publishing?
It's the
sheer lack of research that marks this as mindless. Tranter addresses
her imaginary unnamed denier, imagining how rich they must be becoming:
"Now suppose you're a "brown washer" and you put yourself up as an
expert on the issue of climate change. You knock up a book on the
subject. You're paid to deliver lectures, and you're using the lectures
to promote your profession or trade as an author. Hundreds attend and
many purchase your book because they are relatively unsophisticated in
scientific matters and want to know more. You're in "trade or
commerce"."
But as I noted in Climate Money, the money for those
with lectures, books, junkets and committees vastly outdoes the rewards
of skepticism by 3500 : 1. It's not just a vague ad hom by Tranter, its
so wrong, it springs back to hit those she defends who write the
manifestos of doom instead. Al Gore is making millions from things
proven in court to be wrong, and Tranter seems to think that's ok.
This point had already been negated by well referenced material already published on. the Drum [an ABC site] itself.
Tranter
doesn't just do inadequate research, she must have actively avoided
reading anything written by the group she writes about. She might
despise "deniers" but watch her become one while talking to her
imaginary friend: "You don't mention, nor do you offer any evidence to
refute or alternative hypotheses to explain, that carbon dioxide affects
global temperature due to the well-known greenhouse effect, or that no
known factor apart from greenhouse gases can account for the past
century of warming - not solar cycles, nor cosmic rays, not magnetic
fields, not urban heat effects."
Tranter sure can muster the
bluster. Skeptics don't even mention evidence.? With 10 seconds of
Googling, a ten year old could prove her wrong.
Try to imagine
which skeptical book Tranter actually read: was it Heaven and Earth with
2000 references? Could it be Steve Goreham's Climatism with er. only
1079 end notes. I guess it wasn't Bob Carter's new book Climate: The
Counter Consensus, because its references and notes run for 57 pages.
I'm
not suggesting an argument is right because it has hundreds of
references, but if Tranter wanted to research whether skeptical books
are based on evidence, she might actually have to thumb through one. Her
imaginary-theoretical-skeptic offers no evidence, but that's just it,
anyone can write about their imaginary friends, let's not use taxpayers
dollars and pretend their opinion is worthy of a national discussion.
Skeptics
don't just discuss the evidence, we discuss what evidence itself is.
(And also what it's not.) Has Tranter heard of the word empirical?
We
could ask Kellie why she didn't bother reading a single skeptical
argument before trying to smear the unpaid grassroots volunteers who are
trying to save her freedom and money. She's pinned her status to
defending one scientific theory without reading anything from the
prosecution. Perhaps she answers this herself: "Why don't you deal with
this evidence? Could it be incompetence or ignorance, that you're not
aware of it? Could it be ineptitude or cowardice, that you can't answer
it or won't try to? Could it be cowardly self-interest, that facing it
would make the premises of your arguments untenable and your output
unsaleable? Could it be calculated deception, that acknowledging
scientific truth would invalidate your fallacious assertions and hence
your entire position, so that self preservation requires that you deny
its existence?"
Except I wouldn't suggest anything so dark and
premeditated. It's more Pavlovian. Tranter has learned that in the right
circles you can say baseless smears and you win applause. She's just
being obedient.
Excerpts from Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
On
Thursday afternoon, the ten groups that petitioned EPA to reconsider
its finding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and
welfare received notice that the petitions have been denied. This was
not unexpected.
The notice quotes the May 2010 report of the
National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, Advancing
the Science of Climate Change:
"[T]here is a strong, credible
body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that
climate is changing, and that these changes are in large part caused by
human activities... . Climate change... poses significant risks for –
and in many cases is already affecting – a broad range of human and
natural systems."
The June 5, 2010 TWTW’ Science Editorial
discussed this report. “The report … claims that the climate is warming
and that the cause is human.” “The first claim of this federally funded
$6-million exercise is meaningless and trivial, the second claim is
almost surely wrong. Their recommendation is that the United States
should put a price on carbon to staunch emissions of CO2; it is
pointless, counterproductive, and very costly.”
Clearly, the
leadership for the National Academy of Sciences has placed that
venerable organization in the camp of those demanding expansion of
government power and control over the American economy. This entire
exercise requires abandoning knowledge of the earth’s history.
The
EPA notice opens with this sentence: “EPA determined in December 2009
that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens
the public's health and the environment.” [Bold face added] The
Constitution discusses protecting public health and welfare, not the
more nebulous term the environment which could be used to justify
regulation of virtually all human activity.
The response to the
petitions is some 590 pages long. In addition to the NAS study the
notice references other studies including the IPCC Assessment Report,
the 2009 study by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and a NOAA
study released on July 28, 2010, no doubt especially prepared for the
occasion. Also the notice references the three British inquiries into
Climategate, the Netherlands assessment of the IPCC report, and the Penn
State investigation of Michael Mann. It will not be a quiet August for
those who have petitioned the courts to review the EPA endangerment
finding.
********************************************
It
appears that US tax-and-cap is dead, at least for now. A clear
indication is the speed in which many of the proponents are disavowing
any association with Kerry-Lieberman. Of course the “greedy
corporations” that participated in drafting the bill are receiving much
of the blame. Little is said about the big corporations in the Green
Industry that spent millions of dollars in promoting Kerry-Lieberman.
These include National Resources Defense Council, Pew Center on Global
Climate Change, Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy.
Future letters from these corporations soliciting donations will be an
interesting read.
Still of concern is the possibility of an
energy bill that includes a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), namely
solar and wind. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid states he does not
have the votes for RES, but someone may try to sneak one in. RES will
have disastrous economic consequences. The Federal government greatly
contributed to the sub-prime mortgage disaster by requiring lenders to
offer sub-prime loans, but consumers were not forced to take them. RES
will require utilities to provide sub-prime electricity that the
consumers will be forced to buy at premium prices.
EPA Climate Proposals Threaten Pursuit of Happiness and Justice
Paul Driessen
Environmental
justice demands that the United States address global warming, the
gravest threat facing minority Americans, insist the EPA, Congressional
Black Caucus and White House. Are they serious?
The alleged
threat pales next to unwed teen motherhood, school dropouts, murder and
other crime. But even assuming human carbon dioxide emissions will cause
average global temperatures to rise a few degrees more than they have
already since the Little Ice Age ended, it is absurd to suggest that any
such warming would harm minorities more than policies imposed in the
name of preventing climate change.
Human activities have not
replaced the complex natural forces that drove climate change throughout
Earth’s history. But even if manmade greenhouse gases do contribute to
planetary warming, slashing US emissions to zero would bring no benefit,
because steadily rising emissions from China, India, Brazil and other
rapidly growing economies would almost instantly replace whatever gases
we cease emitting.
Most important, fossil fuels power the
economic engine that ensures justice and opportunity in America today.
Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable reduce business
revenues and profits, shrink investment and innovation, imperil economic
recovery, and hobble job creation, civil rights, and the pursuit of
happiness and the American dream.
Whether they take the form of
cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, restrictions on drilling and coal mining,
or EPA rules under its claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” human
health and welfare, anti-energy policies frustrate the natural desire of
poor and minority Americans to improve their lives.
As to coping
with higher temperatures, restrictive energy policies send electricity
prices skyrocketing, making it harder for low-income households to
afford air conditioning, and putting lives at risk. They send poor
families back to pre-AC misery of bygone eras, like the 1896 heat wave
that killed 1,300 people in New York City’s sweltering tenements. In
wintertime, they make heating less affordable, again putting lives at
risk.
I recently documented the connection between energy
policies and civil rights. My “Justice through Affordable Energy for
Wisconsin” report focuses on the Dairy State, where I grew up. However,
its lessons apply to every state, especially the 26 that get 48-98% of
their electricity from coal or have a strong manufacturing base. (The
full report can be found at www.CFACT.org)
Energy is the
foundation for America’s jobs, living standards, and everything we make,
grow, eat, wear, transport and do. Climate change bills, energy taxes
and renewable energy mandates deliberately restrict supplies of
reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy – sending shockwaves through the
economy.
Fossil fuels generate three-fourths of Wisconsin’s
electricity, keeping costs low and enabling its $45-billion-a-year
manufacturing sector to compete in a tough global marketplace.
Hydrocarbons sustain thousands of jobs in agriculture, tourism and other
sectors of the state’s economy. They ensure that hospitals and clinics
can offer high-tech diagnostic, surgical and treatment services.
They
enable school districts, families, churches, shops and government
offices to operate in the black. Soaring fuel and electricity prices
would force schools to spend millions more for buses, heating and
lighting. That would mean higher taxes – or reduced music, sports,
language and special education programs. Poor and minority neighborhoods
would be impacted worst.
Small and minority businesses are often
young and undercapitalized. Increasing their operating costs, while
decreasing the disposable income of their customers, puts them on the
verge of bankruptcy.
“A single worker in our Rhinelander
fabrication plant can do the work of ten who do not have access to
cranes, welding machines, plasma burners and all other machinery that
allows us to cut, bend and fabricate steel up to six inches thick, and
make all kinds of heavy equipment,” says Oldenburg Group executive vice
president Tim Nerenz. But the machinery and facilities are
energy-intensive. If energy costs rise, the company would have to cut
wages and benefits or lay off workers, as contract prices are fixed and
overseas competition is fierce.
Indoor pools and other facilities
make tourism a year-round industry, sustaining local economies during
frigid Wisconsin winters, making resorts like the Chula Vista Resort in
Wisconsin Dells popular jumping-off points for cross country skiing,
snowmobiling and dining. Rising energy costs would reduce family
vacations, hammer bottom lines, force layoffs, and cause foreclosures
throughout these communities.
In every case, it is blue-collar
workers, low and moderate income families, minorities and the elderly
that are affected most severely.
Nor are these impacts likely to
be offset by “green” jobs. As Spain, Germany and other countries have
discovered, wind and solar power require constant infusions of money
from increasingly strapped taxpayers and energy consumers. When the
economy sours, the subsidies disappear, and so do the jobs.
Wind
and solar electricity is expensive, intermittent and unreliable –
necessitating expensive gas-powered backup generators, and further
damaging family and business budgets. Plus, most of the jobs will be in
China and India, where low energy and labor costs, and access to rare
earths and other raw materials that America refuses to mine, supply wind
turbine and solar panel factories that easily under-price US firms.
The
entire cap-tax-and-trade, renewable energy and green-jobs edifice is a
house of cards, propped up by claims that humans are affecting the
Earth’s climate. As EPA and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson repeatedly
assert, “Climate change is already happening, and human activity is a
contributor.”
However, that is not the issue. The issue is
whether our use of fossil fuels is now the dominant factor in global
warming and cooling, and whether future manmade climate change will be
catastrophic. There is no replicable or credible evidence to support
that proposition.
Headline-grabbing disaster scenarios forecast
for 50 or 100 years in the future are the product of speculation,
assumptions, unreliable computer models, and articles by climate
activists falsely presented as peer-reviewed scientific papers in IPCC
reports, news stories and political speeches. As my Wisconsin study
explains, they are not supported by actual data and observations
regarding historic and current global temperatures, ice caps, glaciers,
sea levels, rainforests or cyclical weather patterns.
Energy
taxes and subsidies, renewable energy mandates, soaring prices for
everything we need – and severe impacts on families, businesses, jobs,
opportunities, living standards and basic civil rights – might be
justified if we did indeed face a manmade climate disaster. But even
then we should carefully examine the costs and benefits of any proposed
actions.
We should determine whether slashing fossil fuel use
will stabilize our planet’s ever-turbulent climate, and whether our
limited resources might be better spent on adapting to future changes,
natural and manmade, just as our ancestors did.
If global warming science is inaccurate, dishonest, slanted or fraudulent, there is even less justification.
We
cannot have justice without opportunity, or opportunity without energy.
We cannot have justice by sharing scarcity, poverty and skyrocketing
energy prices more equally – especially on the basis of erroneous,
speculative or manipulated climate science.
We must therefore be
forever vigilant, to ensure that Congress does not slip
cap-tax-and-trade proposals through during a post-election lame-duck
session – and EPA does not shackle our economy and civil rights progress
with its job-killing “endangerment” rules.
As
we are told of yet another “hottest year on record”, our daily news
reports are full of “hot testimony”, for example the heatwave in Moscow,
Russia is described in this report:
“The heat has caused asphalt
to melt, boosted sales of air conditioners, ventilators, ice cream and
beverages, and pushed grain prices up. Environmentalists are blaming the
abnormally dry spell on climate change. On ‘black’ Saturday,
temperatures in Moscow hit a record high of 38 degrees Celsius with
little relief at night, making this July the hottest month in 130 years.
The average temperature in central Russia is 9 degrees above the
seasonal norm.”
As usual, WWF regard this as proof of global
warming: “Certainly, such a long period of hot weather in unusual for
central Russia. But the global tendency proves that in future, such
climate abnormalities will become only more frequent”, says Alexey
Kokorin, the Head of Climate and Energy Program of the World Wide Fund
(WWF) Russia.
He fails, of course, to say what caused the
previous heat wave of similar magnitude 130 years previously, as was
mentioned in the report. Such is the nature of environmental reporting
these days, that such questions equally do not arise in the minds of
those willing reporters who swallow every crumb of global warming thrown
to them. Never ever mentioned are historical instances such as the
seven month long European heatwave of 1540, when the River Rhine dried
up and the bed of the River Seine in Paris was used as a thoroughfare.
It
seems to be axiomatic, that whilst reports such as the Moscow Heatwave
make the headlines, there is scant reporting in the popular media of the
severe cold in the South American winter, with loss of life and
livelihoods, due to temperatures in some places reaching minus 15
celsius, or 5 deg F.
“The polar wave that has trapped the
Southern Cone of South America has caused an estimated one hundred
deaths and killed thousands of cattle, according to the latest reports
on Monday from Argentina, south of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and
Bolivia. Even the east of the country which is mostly sub-tropical
climate has been exposed to frosts and almost zero freezing
temperatures.”
But not to worry, it is still global warming, as explained by the Moscow head of WWF:
”I
think that the heat we are suffering from now as well as very low
temperatures we had this winter, are hydro-meteorological tendencies
that are equally harmful for us as they both were caused by human impact
on weather and the greenhouse effect which has grown steadily for the
past 30-40 years.”
The “cold is hot” approach can be traced back
to a working document by the UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change back
in 2004, when they said:
* Only the experience of positive
temperature anomalies will be registered as indication of change, if the
issue is framed as global warming.
* Both positive and
negative temperature anomalies will be registered in experience as
indication of change if the issue is framed as climate change.
* We propose that in those countries where climate change has become
the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold
temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate
change/global warming.
It certainly works for WWF and the
mainstream media, although surprisingly, the UK Guardian did a slight
volte face when it changed a headline from: “2010 on track to become
warmest year ever“ to the slightly less dramatic “2010 could be among
warmest years recorded by man”
Since, by decree of James Hansen,
there were no reliable thermometers prior to 1880, this is a pretty
short record in the overall scheme of things. However the UK Central
England Temperature Record goes back to 1659, when the “non-existent”
Little Ice Age was producing extremely low temperatures, with winter
averages barely above zero deg C. A Press Release from 1698 could have
said for example: 1698 – “Eight of the coldest years have occurred in
the last 15 years”
An enterprising environmental journalist of
the time could then have totally forgotten that period, and produced
this headline, as temperatures recovered: 1733- The UK has heated by a
massive 3.2 degrees over the last 4 decades,
There are many more
temperature periods where such specious claims can be made, if the right
starting and ending points are selected and of course they are all
meaningless, as are the current headlines.
In fact the Central
England temperature average for the thirty year period 1971-2000, was
just 0.51 deg C higher than the thirty year period 1701-1730, some 270
years earlier. If you consider the impact of urban heat islands on the
temperature record since that time, you can only ask, “what global
warming”?
The average Central England summer average for 1961-90,
the baseline period used by CRU, is actually –0.15 deg C lower than the
summer average for 1721-1750, and under current definitions, thirty
years counts as climate, but don’t tell anyone, it might spoil the
story.
Suggesting that they are not really measures of temperature at all
NASA
blogger Gavin Schmidt as part of his ongoing attempt to rehabilitate
Mannian paleoclimate reconstructions, characterized here as
dendro-phrenology, has drawn attention to a graphic posted up at Mann’s
website in November 2009. In this graphic, Mann responded to criticisms
that his “no-dendro” stick had been contaminated by bridge-building
sediments despite warnings from the author (warnings noted by Mann
himself but the contaminated data was used anyway.) I’ll show this
figure at the end of the post, but first I’m going to show the “raw
materials” for this “reconstruction” and my results from the same data.
I’m
going to show a lot of plots of “proxies” today. The intuitive idea of a
proxy is that the thing being measured (tree ring width, sediment
thickness, ice core O18, etc) has a linear relationship with a
temperature “signal” plus low-order red noise. Therefore, if the
temperature “signal” is a hockey stick, the various proxy plots should
look like a hockey stick plus low-order red-noise. I encourage readers
to look at the no-dendro no-Tilj data for Mann’s November 2009 example
with that in mind. If the topics were being discussed by proper
statisticians, the properties of the “noise” would be discussed, rather
than ignored.
To illustrate the calculation, I’ve picked the
AD1000 Mann 2008 data set as an example since it covers the MWP. I’ve
used the late-miss version (calibration 1859-1949) to work through,
since it will give a look at any potential “divergence problems” in
non-dendro data.
There were 29 “proxies” in the data set- 11
sediments, 2 “documentary” (both Chinese), 9 speleo and 7 ice core.
Eleven of these were annually resolved; the other 18 were “decadal”
resolution. 22 were NH; 7 SH.
The first step in Mann’s algorithm
is determining the orientation of speleo and documentary proxies through
their after-the-fact correlation to instrumental data. (The orientation
of other proxies is presumed to be known a priori). In this network,
there were 11 speleo+documentary proxies and 5 of 11 were flipped.
(Interestingly, it is possible in Mann’s algorithm for the same proxy to
have opposite “significant” orientations depending on the calibration
period.)
The next step is to screen out proxies that do not have a
“significant” correlation to gridcell temperature. Although we’ve heard
much invective against the meaningful of r^2 statistics from Mann,
Schmidt and others in the context of MBH98, Mann then uses correlation
(r) to screen series in Mann et al 2008. (Perhaps it is the squaring of
the correlation statistic that Schmidt takes exception to.)
There
were 16 proxies that “passed” Mannian significance: – 3 of 11
sediments, both “documentary (Chinese), 7 of 9 speleo and 4 of 7 ice
cores. Seven of 11 annually resolved passed; nine of 18 decadally
resolved passed. 12 of 22 NH passed; 4 of 7 SH passed.
In the
figure below, I’ve plotted all 22 NH “proxies” (standardized), coloring
the “rejected” proxies in green. I don’t think that anyone can
reasonably look at these 22 series and say that the individual “proxies”
can be reasonably interpreted as different linear transformations of a
Hockey Stick plus low-order AR1 red noise or that the individual proxies
look much like one another. They are a hodge-podge to say the least.
This is the problem of proxy inconsistency that I’ve talked about
frequently and that Ross and I reported in our comment at PNAS in Mann
2008. Mann either didn’t understand or pretended not to understand the
problem, which is fundamental to the entire enterprise of proxy
reconstructions and readily apparent merely by plotting the “proxies”.
While
“ex post screening” by correlation is accepted as a given by
realclimatescientists, ex-post screening by correlation is not a
statistical procedure that is recommended or discussed in Draper and
Smith or standard statistical texts. The tendency of this procedure to
produce sticks from red noise is well known in the technical blogosphere
(Jeff Id, David Stockwell, Lubos Motl and myself have all more or less
independently noticed and reported the phenomenon, with David publishing
a short note in an Australian mining newsletter that Ross and I cited
in our PNAS comment. However professional climate scientists appear
unaware of the effect and it remains unreported in the
PeerReviewedLiterature.
The top left proxy (192) is an
interesting one. It is Baker’s speleothem record from Scotland that was
discussed at CA in early 2009 and here as an interesting example of
Upside-Down Mann. In the orientation applied in Mann’s no-dendro
no-Tiljander reconstruction endorsed by Gavin Schmidt, Scotland is shown
as having experienced the unique phenomena of the Medieval Cold Period
and Little Warm Age – bizarro Hubert Lamb, as it were.
The “proxies” show little evidence of an overall pattern, let alone a Stick.
BOOK REVIEW: "Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming" by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore
Review by S. Fred Singer, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Anyone who has seen the smears on DeSmogBlog
will find more of the same in this hastily-written book which continues
to smear on an even larger scale. For example, on page 39 it describes
me as a “tobacco-sponsored scientist” which is totally untrue.
Later,
on page 80, it mentions me again as a “hard working climate change
denier who has done no obvious scientific work in the field for years.”
It lists me as an advisor to the organization “TASSC” (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition)
which is also completely untrue. In fact, I have never been associated
with TASSC in any way --although I do commune with many of the other
groups listed, all respected conservative think tanks.
I gladly
take credit for conducting, in 1992, what may have been the first survey
of expert opinions on global warming. It included all of the members of
technical committees of the American Meteorological Society and showed,
for the first time, the existence of considerable professional
skepticism about global warming promotion. The 1995 Leipzig Declaration
carries this further; and contrary to Hoggan, all of the signatures are
on file. Of course, Leipzig was outdone by the Oregon Petition Project, which eventually garnered over 31,000 signatures from American scientists and engineers (p.108).
Not
surprisingly, Hoggan puts a great deal of stock in the claims of
journalist Ross Gelbspan, who asserts in his book “The Heat is On” that
climate skeptics were drawing major financial support from coal and oil
interests. While I cannot speak for others, this is simply not true in
my case. And would it have mattered?
One whole chapter is devoted
to my libel suit against one Justin Lancaster. Of course, Hoggan
misrepresents the facts, which are fully laid out in the book
“Politicizing Science” (Michael Gough, ed. Published by Hoover
Institution, Stanford, 2003).
It all started when Al Gore was
running for Vice President. He faced great embarrassment since his guru,
Professor Roger Revelle, had published a somewhat skeptical article in
an obscure journal, together with me and Chauncey Starr.
This
led to an attack on Singer by Lancaster, a Gore groupie, who first
claimed that Revelle was not a coauthor. When this did not work, he then
claimed that Singer had taken advantage of Revelle’s advanced age.
When
this didn’t work either, he was finally forced to retract and apologize
in order to avoid a trial that would have cost him a great deal of
money and ruined his reputation forever.
More recently, however,
Lancaster has retracted his retraction and has left himself open to
another lawsuit; but it may not be worthwhile to sue him. In any case,
there is ample evidence in Revelle’s writings of his skeptical views on
the global warming issue -- sufficient to undermine any claim that
Lancaster might have.
Hoggan has his heroes, people like Gelbspan
and Naomi Oreskes, who are fully expert in smearing people. And he also
has his enemies, whom he tries to pull down: Freeman Dyson, Sallie
Baliunas, Tim Ball, Stephen Milloy, and of course me.
But always
it’s the same story: accusations of being in the pay of the oil industry
or tobacco lobby or worse. Lyndon Larouche makes an appearance, in
connection with a story about melting glaciers, traced to Singer’s
website and based on a wrong reference. As a result, another Hoggan’s
hero, British smear artist George Monbiot, is credited with breaking
“one of the all-time-great climate disinformation stories” (p.162). We
haven’t heard much from George Monbiot since exaggerations of glacier
melt in the Himalayas was exposed.
It’s too bad that Hoggan’s
book appeared just before ClimateGate broke. His book title would have
fitted perfectly, by changing only a single word: “Climate Cover-up: The
Crusade to Hype Global Warming.”
Closing out dissent: The phenomena of disinvitation and the brotherhood of silence
by Bob Carter
Scientists
who venture to make independent statements in public about
environmental myths soon come to learn about two post-modern-science
tactics used to suppress their views – namely, disinvitation and the
application of a brotherhood of silence. How these tactics work is
explained in this article.
The modus operandi
A member of
the organising committee for one or another conference comes to one of
my talks, or chances to meet a friend who has attended. Enthusiasm
thereby arises for me to speak at the conference that is being planned.
Prompted by the member, the conference committee approves an invitation,
which I accept. Later, the Council or governing body of the society in
question gets to “rubber stamp” the conference program and someone says:
“Bob Carter as a plenary speaker! You must be joking”. The
disinvitation follows, sometimes well after the talk has been written
and travel booked.
In a variation on this, earlier this year I
was invited by our ABC to contribute an opinion piece about climate
change to their online blog site, The Drum. The piece was duly written
and tendered, only to be declined.
Similarly, strong control has
long been exercised by public broadcasters ABC and SBS against the
appearance of independent scientists on their TV and radio news and
current affairs programs. I first encountered this in 2007, when I
participated in a broadcast discussion about Martin Durkin’s
epoch-making documentary film, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Before
the broadcast I had the astonishing experience of being successively
invited, disinvited, prevaricated with and then finally invited to
participate again, as competing interests inside the ABC battled, as
they obviously saw it, to control the outcome of the panel discussion.
I
have generally viewed these and similar experiences over the years as
amusing irritations that go with the territory of scientific
independence. But the matter starts to become offensive, and indeed
sinister, when it transpires that scientists from CSIRO, and other
IPCC-linked research groups in Australia, have been behind particular
disinvitations; or, even more commonly, have refused to participate in
public debate on climate change.
The same self-appointed
guardians of the sanctity of IPCC climate propaganda also strive
ceaselessly to prevent invitations from being issued in the first place.
For example, when it was suggested to a Sydney metropolitan university
that I might give a talk on the campus, their Distinguished (sic)
Professor of Sustainability responded that:
he would not
be interested in allowing anyone to present a point of view which did
not support the fact that human-generated carbon dioxide has caused
global warming.
Que?
Engineers Australia (Sydney)
On
July 8th this year, at the invitation of the Chairman of the Electrical
& ITE Branch, Engineers Australia Sydney, I delivered a lecture on
climate change in Chatswood to an attentive audience of about 55
practicing engineers, retired engineers and engineering students.
EA
(Sydney) run a series of about 22 such lectures every year for the
continuing professional development of their members. The intent is to
impart knowledge to the engineering fraternity on current subjects of
interest, and lecturers are generally recognized as leaders in the field
of the subject that they present.
When controversial topics are
involved, the institute attempts to attract speakers who will illustrate
different aspects of the debate, as indeed they did on this occasion.
For the lecture that I delivered was intended to be one of a pair, in
which the other speaker would explain the reasons behind the federal
government's preference for using United Nations (IPCC) advice as the
basis for Australian climate policy.
Significantly, CSIRO were
asked, and declined, to provide such a speaker, thereby exemplifying the
brotherhood of silence, i.e. the long-held ban that all IPCC-linked
research groups strive to inflict upon independent scientists by
refusing to debate with them as equals on a public platform. Earlier
this year, CSIRO chairperson Megan Clarke boasted that her organisation
had 40 persons involved in advising the IPCC, yet not one of them was
available to talk to Australia’s major engineering professional
institute? Pull the other one, Megan.
Well, if CSIRO is not
prepared to explain the basis for government’s science policy then
there’s always the universities, so a Director of the Climate Change
Research Centre at another Sydney metropolitan university was approached
to participate as the second speaker. He too declined on the grounds
that the envisaged two-lecture format was "flawed", adding:
You
would not have an "anti-gravity" person debate gravity and since there
honestly is no debate in this space in SCIENCE the offer I made a little
while ago of offering a full day to detail the science to your members
stand(s).
Your society risks falling into the trap of the media in believing there is debate and that is sad, misleading and unfortunate.
This
stance was supported by an experienced NSW power engineer who wrote to
EA at about the same time to malign my professional standing, and who
included, for good measure, a gratuitous remark about the well-regarded
London publisher of my recent book on climate change, viz.:
It
appears that Bob Carter is representative of the group of the
relatively little-published 2% group of scientists who generally are not
mainly working in real climate science (Bob Carter is a geologist not a
climate scientist, and is published in You-tube and popular magazines,
not peer-reviewed journals), who oppose the real climate science
consensus. This appears to be correct based on your notice of the
meeting and his website. In this case he does not deserve equal time to
the 98% of scientists regularly published on climate change in
peer-reviewed journals. There is no counter consensus! I question the
wisdom of giving this man the Engineers Australia podium.
Furthermore, Stacey International is a publisher of popular works and has no specific scientific credibility.
These
examples both involve the citation of private letters. Other engineers
blatantly attain the same ends of denigration or censorship in full
public gaze. For example, ANU’s Tony Kevin wrote recently in an invited
address in Canberra to the Australian Council of Engineering Deans:
I
am not going to dwell on climate change denialism. The science is in.
Climate crisis denialism should simply be condemned as a socially
disruptive cognitive disorder. It seduces people who are psychologically
unwilling to admit limits to economic growth. Denialists cling to the
arrogant “mechanical philosophy” of mankind’s infinite right and
capacity to exploit and transcend his natural environment. Or, they
suffer from a kind of morally indifferent, fatalistic nihilism.
Like
other cognitive disorders that have in the past caused great suffering
to humanity, climate denialism is impervious to observed facts. As the
climate crisis worsens, denialism perversely flourishes even more,
confusing the community and eroding public support for sound risk-averse
policies.
Needless to say, all these statements, both
the private and the public, are a confused farrago of mostly ad hominem
nonsense. It is disturbing, to say the least, that organisations and
persons who would be quick to claim professional status consider that it
is their current duty to disparage, or to refuse to debate with, or to
muzzle scientists whose views on climate change they apparently disagree
with.
Disturbing too is the fact that for at least the last
twenty years the practitioners of environmentalism and climate alarm
have made it their business to exert special influence on our younger
citizens. Many parents have shared the experience of being horrified by
the imbalance of information that their children from time to time come
home from school with about iconic environmental issues. The
indoctrination continues, of course, at university, and through into the
junior workforce.
An exemplary case follows next of the way in which the views of young Australians are manipulated.
AMUNC, Sydney
On March 18th this year (4 months ahead), I was invited by a student organizer to
speak
as a panelist at the Asia-Pacific Model United Nations Conference 2010
being hosted by the Sydney University Model United Nations Society in
July this year. The event is a large, annual tertiary student conference
attended mainly by law and politics students …. Each year it attracts
500- 600 university students from across Australia, New Zealand, East
and South-East Asia and beyond. AMUNC 2010 will be a celebration of
academic excellence, youth diplomacy and cross-cultural understanding.
Model
UN is a special form of tertiary student conference in which delegates
engage in a simulation of the practices, actions and debates of a number
of global multilateral institutions. Delegates represent assigned
countries across a number of committees of the United Nations and
associated bodies, from the archetypal Security Council to the
International Court of Justice, International Monetary Fund and the
World Health Organisation.
The invitation continued:
Issues
related to the environment and the effects of climate change are now
dominating discussions across all international institutions. As such,
with your expertise on climate change and your position as an Adjunct
Professional [sic] Research Fellow at James Cook University, the AMUNC
2010 Secretariat would be honoured to have you partake in our
Environment and Technology panel discussion. The recent UN Climate
Change conference in Copenhagen has provided much debate for university
students and questions over the integrity of scientific evidence cited
by governmental bodies and institutions such as the IPCCC are also on
the rise. In response to this, our panel will be discussing issues
surrounding Australia’s environmental policies, as well as the
correlation between human activity and global warming, and other topics
pertaining to climate change.
Having spent an entire
professional career educating young persons, I was of course delighted
to accept appointment to the panel on "The Challenge of Climate Change",
the purpose of which is further outlined in the following programme
extract:
The disinvitation
Arriving in Sydney on other
business about a week before the conference, I received a letter from
AMUNC Secretary General which, inter alia, conveyed the following:
In
light of some concerns which have been brought to my attention, the
AMUNC Secretariat have determined that there is a need to try and
separate out the issues of climate change science and solutions to
climate change. This is because the other speakers on the panel may lack
the capacity to advocate the majority view on climate change in
response to any arguments you might make. While we have endeavored to
find a climate change scientist to include on the panel, because we have
been unable to do so, there is a risk that discussion could become
quite uneven.
As a compromise, one of our panelists, Dr Mark
Diesendorf, who while not a climate change specialist, has agreed to
debate with you on climate change science in the lead up to the
Environment & Technology panel (so from about 13:00-13:20). I would
propose this would include an opening statement from each, questions and
answers from the audience followed by closing remarks. However this
would mean that you would not be able to participate in the Environment
& Technology panel as a speaker.
Between my initial
invitation in March and the receipt of this letter I had published an
entire book that “separate(s) out the issues of climate change science
and solutions”; this was apparently an inadequate qualification to
participate in the AMUNC panel. The sweet irony appeared to escape the
Secretary General that the purpose of the pivotal Chapter 11 – in what
has been described as “an enthralling book, a sunrise of calm analysis
and penetrating good sense“ - was precisely to provide a sensible,
effective and politically realistic policy path on climate change.
Mega-pesky: New German/Russian Temperature Reconstruction Shows NIL correlation With CO2 levels.
And
it also shows that it is the sun wot did it. This would be the end of
global warming if it were a scientific question. It is precisely (very
selective) tree ring data that the Warmists rely on for their
"hockeystick" -- yet once again we find in trees the sort of "decline"
that Jones & Co. tried to "hide"
A new temperature
reconstruction carried out by a team of German/Russian scientists has
yielded interesting results. It finds no correlation over the last 400
years between atmospheric CO2 and the temperature in the Arctic regions
studied.
Yuri Kononov of the Institute of Geography, Russian
Academy of Sciences in Moscow and Michael Friedrich of the Institute of
Botany, University of Hohenheim collect tree samples of Scots pine in
the Khibiny Low Mountains of the Kola Peninsula in Arctic Russia
Recall
that CO2 concentrations have been rising steadily since the start of
the Industrial Revolution, 1870, yet the press release starts with:
"Parts of the Arctic have cooled clearly over the past [20th]century,
but temperatures have been rising steeply there since 1990"
Rising
since 1990? That’s more than 100 years after the start of the
Industrial Revolution. The press release continues: "The reconstructed
summer temperature on Kola in the months of July and August has varied
between 10.4°C (1709) and [peaking at] 14.7°C (1957), with a mean of
12.2°C. Afterwards, after a cooling phase, an ongoing warming can be
observed from 1990 onwards".
The temperature fluctuated between
10.4°C and a peak of 14.7°C in 1957 , and then cooled until 1990. The
scientists say it correlated very well with solar activity until 1990.
Then beginning in 1990, the temperatures started to rise rapidly again.
Does anyone see a CO2 correlation there? I don’t.
The only time
we have a correlation between CO2 concentrations and temperature is from
1990 until…? Unfortunately the press release does not even mention
that. Until today? 2005? 2000? It really is annoying that they didn’t
specify the end of the time scale. If the reconstruction was only up to
2000, then we are only speaking about a 10-year period - a completely
meaningless time period. Even 20 years would be highly dubious.
I
called UFZ early this afternoon here in Germany to try to find out, but
the secretary said that all scientists had already left for the
weekend.
UPDATE! The German press release now has the following
graphic. The dataset ended 2001! The press spokesman just told me on the
phone. So there was warming from 1990 until 2001! As you see, the
graphic iteself is misleading. It almost looks as if the curve goes
until 2010.
Press
spokesman Tilo Arnhold informed by telephone that the dataset goes only
up to 2001, yet the press release graphic clearly shows a curve beyond
2001
Interestingly, also, the graphic shows warming since 1650.
The
press release also states: "What stands out in the data from the Kola
Peninsula is that the highest temperatures were found in the period
around 1935 and 1955, and that by 1990 the curve had fallen to the 1870
level, which corresponds to the start of the Industrial Age."
The temperature fell to 1870-levels by 1990? Wait a minute – the CO2 theory say it’s supposed to go up, and not down.
The
team compared their Kola region data to Swedish Lapland and the Yamal
and Tamimyr Penninsula temperature reconstructions: Here’s what they
found: "The reconstructed summer temperatures of the last four
centuries from Lapland and the Kola and Taimyr Peninsulas are similar in
that all three data series display a temperature peak in the middle of
the twentieth century, followed by a cooling of one or two degrees."
Cooling from the middle of the twentieth century until 1990. Cooling!
So
if it’s not CO2, then what could be driving temperature? The press
release goes on: "What is conspicuous about the new data is that the
reconstructed minimum temperatures coincide exactly with times of low
solar activity."
Data from yet another part of the world confirming big medieval climate change
Discussing:
Escobar, J., Curtis, J.H., Brenner, M., Hodell, D.A. and Holmes, J.A.
2010. Isotope measurements of single ostracod valves and gastropod
shells for climate reconstruction: Evaluation of within-sample
variability and determination of optimum sample size. Journal of
Paleolimnology 43: 921-938.
What was done
In the words of
the authors, "sediment cores from Lakes Punta Laguna, Chichancanab, and
Peten Itza on the Yucatan Peninsula were used to (1) investigate
'within-horizon' stable isotope variability (?18O and ?13C) measured on
multiple, single ostracod valves and gastropod shells, (2) determine the
optimum number of individuals required to infer low-frequency climate
changes, and (3) evaluate the potential for using intra-sample ?18O
variability in ostracod and gastropod shells as a proxy measure for
high-frequency climate variability."
What was learned
The
five researchers report that their results "allow calculation of mean
isotope values and thus provide a rough estimate of the low-frequency
variability over the entire sediment sequence," and these results
indicated that "relatively dry periods were persistently dry [italics
added], whereas relatively wet periods were composed of wet and dry
times."
What it means
Escobar et al. state that their
findings "confirm the interpretations of Hodell et al. (1995, 2007) and
Curtis et al. (1996) that there were persistent dry climate episodes
associated with the Terminal Classic Maya Period." In fact, they find
that "the Terminal Classic Period from ca. AD 910 to 990 was not only
the driest period in the last 3,000 years, but also a persistently dry
period [italics added]." And in further support of this interpretation,
they note that "the core section encompassing the Classic Maya collapse
has the lowest sedimentation rate among all layers and the lowest oxygen
isotope variability."
We additionally note, in this regard, that
the AD 910 to 990 time period falls very close to the central section
of the frequency plot of the time-of-occurrence of the Medieval Warm
Period for many of the locations where it has been detected (to date)
throughout the entire world, as may be seen from the Interactive Map and
Time Domain Plot of our Medieval Warm Period Project, which observation
suggests that the climate of the Yucatan Peninsula during that time
period likely was also persistently warm. And that "double whammy" of
persistent warmth and persistent dryness appears to have been just a bit
too much for the Mayans of that trying time to endure.
That dreaded "ocean acidification": Jellyfish unaffected by large variations in pH and temperature
Discussing:
"Winans, A.K. and Purcell, J.E. 2010. "Effects of pH on asexual
reproduction and statolith formation of the scyphozoan, Aurelia
labiata". Hydrobiologia 645: 39-52.
Background
The authors
write that "scyphozoans have two main stages in their life cycles, the
benthic polyps and pelagic jellyfish." The polyps reproduce asexually by
budding polyps and through the process of strobilation, in which
ephyrae (juvenile jelly fish) are produced by transverse fission." And,
as they continue, "like many other marine invertebrates, jellyfish have
statocysts, balance organs that enable them to sense gravity," and they
say that "inside these statocysts are numerous statoliths of trigonal
crystals of calcium sulfate hemihydrate that are formed during
strobilation."
What was done
Polyps produced by medusae
collected from the moon jellyfish (Aurelia labiata) in Dyes Inlet,
Washington (USA) were arbitrarily assigned (18 each) to one of six
treatments comprised of all combinations of two water temperatures (9
and 15°C) and three pH levels (7.2, 7.5 and 7.9), where they were
allowed to develop under controlled conditions for 122 days.
What was learned
The
two researchers report that "polyp survival was 100% after 122 days in
seawater in all six temperature and pH combinations;" and because few
polyps strobilated at 9°C and "temperature effects on budding were
consistent with published results," they say they "did not analyze data
from those three treatments further." At 15°C, there were also no
significant effects of pH on the numbers of ephyrae or buds produced per
polyp or on the numbers of statoliths per statocyst." However, they
state that "statolith size was significantly smaller in ephyrae released
from polyps reared at low pH."
What it means
Winans and
Purcell conclude that "A. labiata polyps are quite tolerant of low pH,
surviving and reproducing asexually even at the lowest tested pH," which
degree of "acidification" is not expected to occur (even by climate
alarmists) until about AD 2300.
But to not come up empty-handed
with respect to potential bad news, they note that "the effects of small
statoliths on ephyra fitness are unknown," which means that the
phenomenon could bode poorly for earth's jellyfish.
On the other
hand, they acknowledge that many organisms "may be able to acclimate or
adapt to slowly changing pH conditions." And in this context they
report that in Puget Sound "pH fluctuates from 7.2 to 9.6 in 2.4-meter
deep water over the span of a couple of days," stating that "with such
large pH fluctuations due to plant photosynthesis during the day and
respiration at night, many organisms may be exposed to low pH conditions
routinely." And, obviously, they are also successfully dealing with
those low pH conditions routinely, as are an enormous amount of other
marine organisms.
Recent
reports claim June was the warmest on record, but it seems to fly in
the face of reports of record cold from around the world. Reports from
Australia say, “Sydney recorded its coldest June morning today since
1949, with temperatures diving to 4.3 degrees just before 6:00 a.m.
(AEST).” “Experts say it is unusual to see such widespread cold weather
in June
In the southern hemisphere reports of cold have appeared
frequently but rarely make the mainstream media. “The Peruvian
government has declared a state of emergency in more than half the
country due to cold weather.” “This week Peru’s capital, Lima, recorded
its lowest temperatures in 46 years at 8C, and the emergency measures
apply to several of its outlying districts.”
“In Peru’s hot
and humid Amazon region, temperatures dropped as low as 9C. The jungle
region has recorded five cold spells this year.
Hundreds of
people – nearly half of them very young children – have died of
cold-related diseases, such as pneumonia, in Peru’s mountainous south
where temperatures can plummet at night to -20C.”
“A brutal and
historical cold snap has so far caused 80 deaths in South America,
according to international news agencies. Temperatures have been much
below normal for over a week in vast areas of the continent.”
“It
snowed in nearly all the provinces of Argentina, an extremely rare
event. It snowed even in the western part of the province of Buenos
Aires and Southern Santa Fe, in cities at sea level.” (Source)
Evidence
of the cold is reflected in the fact that Antarctic ice is continuing
to reach record levels. “Antarctic sea ice peaks at third highest in the
satellite record”
The same contradictory evidence is happening
in the Arctic. They claimed the most dramatic warming was occurring in
the Arctic but this contradicts what the ice is doing. Ice continues its
normal melt of the summer with a slowing rate slowed in the months of
June and July. (Figure 1)
So where are the stories coming from?
It goes back to the manipulation of temperature data by the two main
generators the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) and the Hadley
Climate Research Unit (HadCrut). They use data provided by individual
countries of the World Meteorological Organization. This is supposedly
raw data, but in fact it has already been adjusted for various presumed
local anomalies.
But the arctic warming is even more problematic.
The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) is the source of data for
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change yet it tells us there is no
data for the entire Arctic Ocean Basin. Figure 2 shows the diagram from
their report.
So how do they determine that the Arctic is warming
at all, let alone more rapidly than other regions? The answer is, with
GISS at least, they use computer models to extrapolate. They do this by
assuming that a weather station record is valid for a 1200 km region.
Figure 4 shows the 1200 km smoothing results for the Arctic region. (The
green circle is 80°N latitude.)
Then we see what happens when the interpolation or smoothing is done using a more reasonable 250 km (Figure 5).
None
of this is surprising because GISS have consistently distorted the
record always to amplify warming. The problem of data adjustment is
best illustrated by comparing the results of GISS and Hadcrut (Figure
6).
The Hadcrut data shows what Phil Jones, former Director of
the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) confirmed to the BBC that global
temperatures have not increased since 1998. However, the GISS data shows
a slight warming over the period and a significant increase from 2007.
How can two records both using the same weather data achieve such
different conclusions? The simple answer is they use different stations
and adjust them differently, especially for such things as the Urban
Heat Island Effect (UHIE).
There is another problem.
The
number of stations used to produce a global average was significantly
reduced in 1990 and this affected temperature estimates as Ross
McKitrick showed (Figure 7). He wrote, “The temperature average in the
above graph is unprocessed. Graphs of the ‘Global Temperature’ from
places like GISS and CRU reflect attempts to correct for, among other
things, the loss of stations within grid cells, so they don’t show the
same jump at 1990.” McKitrick got the idea for the problem from an
article by meteorologist Joe D’Aleo.
The challenge is to produce
meaningful long-term records from such interrupted data, but that is not
the only problem because the loss of stations is not uniform. “The loss
in stations was not uniform around the world. Most stations were lost
in the former Soviet Union, China, Africa and South America.” This is
may explain the distortions currently occurring because it adds to the
distortions that already exist toward eastern North American and western
European stations.
The pattern of temperatures of the Northern
Hemisphere in the early spring and summer saw heat in eastern North
America and Western Europe. There is a greater density of weather
stations in these regions and they have the greatest heat island effect.
The rest of the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere had
cooler conditions but in the deliberately distorted record this was
minimized.
McKitrick, Essex and Andersen, in “Does a global
temperature exist?” concluded, “The purpose of this paper was to explain
the fundamental meaninglessness of so-called global temperature data.”
“But nature is not obliged to respect our statistical conventions and
conceptual shortcuts.”
That is clearly the case this year and it
confirms Alfred Whitehead’s observation that, “There is no more common
error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate calculations
have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is
absolutely certain”.
Global warming scam systematically propped up by Leftist journalists
The
Journolist story demonstrates active, covert collaboration among
leftists to plant political themes in the media. Long-time listeners of
conservative talk radio are aware of audio montages where old-line media
talking heads repeat verbatim a set of words that can't be anything
other than shared talking points. A perfect example was the 2000-era
Dick Cheney "gravitas" showcased by Rush Limbaugh.
It's one thing
to ask how proper reporting of Obama might have changed the outcome of
the election. I'll ask a bigger question: Did old-line media journalists
share talking points to prop up the global warming issue?
In his
August 2007 American Thinker article "Global Warming Propaganda
Factory," Christopher Alleva described the coordinated efforts of the
Society of Environmental Journalists: "I have often wondered how the
media are in such lock step on Global Warming. Well, I wonder no more.
Recently, I came across a website for the Society of Environmental
Journalists (SEJ). This website is veritable tool box for any budding
reporter assigned to the global warming beat. If you're an editor at the
Palookaville Post, all you have to do is send your cub reporters to
this site and they'll have everything they need to write an article that
fits the template and action line perfectly."
In my own
simpleminded quest to find out why skeptic scientists did not appear on
one of the last bastions of fair-and-balanced news outlets, the PBS
NewsHour, I received a reply from the PBS ombudsman in a phrase eerily
repeated by others in the media dismissing the need to present skeptics:
"Yes, we *could* have one of them [skeptics] in a story, or on a show,
and have a representative of the "other side." But that would be false
balance."
The concept of a "false journalistic need for balance"
goes as far back as 1995, generated by a journalist named Ross Gelpspan
and spread by a network of activists and institutions. The story is
detailed in my American Thinker article earlier this month, "Smearing
Global Warming Skeptics."
After writing that article, I still
wanted to find out just how biased the NewsHour was in its global
warming presentations, so I copied and counted online transcripts of the
NewsHour going back to 1996. Out of 212 global warming-centered program
segments, including some online background info pages, only three
on-air segments had discussion of basic skeptic science, featuring
Western Fuels CEO Fred Palmer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute's
Chris Horner, and Joe Barton (R-TX), respectively, along with one web
page. Barton's science quotes were very brief. All the other segments
and web pages offered virtually no rebuttal to statements about
man-caused global warming.
IPCC scientists Michael Oppenheimer,
Stephen Schneider, and Kevin Trenberth spoke unopposed a great length
about man-caused global warming seven, four, and two times,
respectively. No skeptic scientists ever had an opportunity to present
the myriad faults in the idea of man-caused global warming.
The
most disturbing revelation was found in the December 5, 1997 interview
of Fred Palmer, fourth-from-last paragraph: "MARGARET WARNER: ...but
that because carbon dioxide, once it's up in the atmosphere, really
doesn't disappear for a hundred years or more, that by the time the
buildup gets enough--high enough to prove it--it's almost too late to do
anything[.]"
Her statement seems eerily paraphrased from Ross
Gelbspan's The Heat is On book, released earlier that same year, top of
page 12: "And since carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for one to
two hundred years, it will continue to disturb the global climate long
after we drastically cut our fuel emissions ... By the time we actually
feel the heavy brunt of climate-driven catastrophes, it may well be too
late for us to preserve any semblance of democratic order....."
The
"Journolist" problem is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it
comes to the manipulation of global issues by a small number of people.
A "Green" government in Australia that is dangerously reluctant to do backburning to prevent wildfires
California is not alone
The
NSW government is under fire for its "appalling" record on hazard
reduction. The opposition said NSW must learn the lessons of the the
900-page Teague report on Victoria's Black Saturday disaster and
massively increase backburning efforts in the state.
Opposition
spokeswoman for emergency services Melinda Pavey accused the Keneally
government of tying up the process of hazard reduction in "green tape".
"If we can believe the government's own statistics, on average only
around 115,000 hectares of hazard reduction has taken place in each of
the past four years, representing a mere 0.4 per cent of fire-prone land
in the state annually," Ms Pavey said. Royal commission chairman
Bernard Teague said backburning in Victoria must be nearly tripled to
bring the total area of public land backburnt to 5 per cent.
Ms
Pavey called on the NSW government to increase funds to ensure
backburning in NSW could be similarly expanded. "The $17 million the
Keneally Labor government spends on hazard reduction each year
represents only about 8 per cent of the Rural Fire Service expenses of
$220.2 million, which is clearly not enough," she said. "With the smell
of an election in the air the state Labor government has been
desperately playing catch up during autumn and winter, however wet
conditions have delayed this process."
Ms Pavey said there were
now significant fuel loads in many areas including the Blue Mountains,
central coast, south coast and the Monaro.
Emergency Services
Minister Steve Whan said NSW would carefully review the final
recommendations of the Teague report, saying the state had already
developed strong fire prevention and management practices. "It is
important that we now take stock of the events in Victoria and look at
opportunities for further improvement as we continue to build on our
experience and expertise in bush fire management."
Mr Whan said
since Black Saturday NSW had introduced the nationally agreed system of
fire danger ratings, which provide clearer information and trigger
points for the public before a fire starts. [Big deal!]
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. Though, now that we know how deliberate the
hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....
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!
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.
