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

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

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21 August, 2008

Australia's welcome to the Great White Fleet helped to forge a strong bond

By Donald C. Winter, Secretary of the US Navy

In the United States, as we honour the 100th anniversary of the Great White Fleet, Americans are learning about the US Navy's historic achievement in sending a fleet of 16 battleships around the world. They are also learning about Theodore Roosevelt's role as godfather of this mission, and about the many positive consequences of his audacious idea. Given that the US Fleet's reception in Australia was considered one of the highlights - if not the highlight - of the world tour, many Australians might be interested to know more about Theodore Roosevelt's historic contributions to the US-Australia relationship.

Roosevelt, before becoming US president in 1902, was assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt was at the time already a famous naval historian, having written the definitive work on the War of 1812. He was a passionate believer in the value of a navy in defending a nation's interests, exemplified in a speech at the US Naval War College on June 2, 1897, where Roosevelt noted that "far from being in any way a provocation to war, an adequate and highly trained navy is the best guaranty against war".

As president, Roosevelt put his ideas into action. He pushed Congress relentlessly to build up the navy, convinced America's role in the world would largely depend on its ability to defend its interests using naval power. In 1907, he conceived the idea of sending the fleet on a round-the-world cruise. Those battleships - whose hulls were painted white - became known as the Great White Fleet.

One of the important objectives of the world tour was to develop relationships with other navies. It was envisaged as a diplomatic outreach to foreign lands, particularly countries such as Australia and Japan, where US Navy ships had seldom gone before.

The Great White Fleet's engagement with Australia - which included port visits to Sydney, Melbourne and Albany in August and September 1908 - was particularly successful. The reception its sailors and marines received was so overwhelming that they came back to the United States with a deep and abiding affection for the Australian people.

Australians opened up their arms and their hearts to their American guests - even commemorating the event on Australian postage stamps. One recent author wrote that Australia's interest in the visit of the American fleet of battleships was so intense that half the population of Sydney "remained awake the entire night, and thousands upon thousands of them long before night was over were on their way to the hilltops outside the city limits, where they massed seemingly in unbroken lines to view the spectacle. Estimates of the number of spectators vary from 500,000 to 650,000."

This experience in diplomatic outreach to Australia set the stage for a century of closer ties and warm relations between the United States and Australia. I have been told that the visit played a very significant role in persuading the Australian and British leadership that it was time for Australia to begin building a navy.

To the extent that America's Great White Fleet played a role in spurring the expansion of the Royal Australian Navy, I am pleased that we had such an impact. We believe that the RAN and the US Navy's global operations have served the interests of both of our nations - in war and in peace. Since the US Navy's historic visit to Australia, a series of significant events have expanded our ties and deepened our relationship, particularly between our two navies. Additional bonds of friendship were forged between us during the Battle of Coral Sea in May 1942, and they continued to strengthen as the war progressed in the Pacific.

We have learned that we can always count on the Aussies, and the Aussies can always count on us. This has proved true during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and operations Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.

On behalf of the US Navy, I would like to thank the Australian people for the extraordinary hospitality you showed us 100 years ago, and which you have continued to show us over these many years. We enjoy a unique relationship with the RAN, and it is one we cherish. May the bonds of friendship between our Navies and our Nations always be strong and based on mutual respect.

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

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21 August, 2008

New climate record shows solar-based climate cycles

A stalagmite in a West Virginia cave has yielded the most detailed geological record to date on climate cycles in eastern North America over the past 7,000 years. The new study confirms that during periods when Earth received less solar radiation, the Atlantic Ocean cooled, icebergs increased and precipitation fell, creating a series of century-long droughts.

A research team led by Ohio University geologist Gregory Springer examined the trace metal strontium and carbon and oxygen isotopes in the stalagmite, which preserved climate conditions averaged over periods as brief as a few years. The scientists found evidence of at least seven major drought periods during the Holocene era, according to an article published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"This really nails down the idea of solar influence on continental drought," said Springer, an assistant professor of geological sciences.

Geologist Gerald Bond suggested that every 1,500 years, weak solar activity caused by fluctuations in the sun's magnetic fields cools the North Atlantic Ocean and creates more icebergs and ice rafting, or the movement of sediment to ocean floors. Other scientists have sought more evidence of these so-called "Bond events" and have studied their possible impact on droughts and precipitation. But studies to date have been hampered by incomplete, less detailed records, Springer said.

The stalagmites from the Buckeye Creek Cave provide an excellent record of climate cycles, he said, because West Virginia is affected by the jet streams and moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean.

Other studies have gleaned climate cycle data from lakes, but fish and other critters tend to churn the sediment, muddying the geological record there, said study co-author Harold Rowe, an assistant professor of geological sciences at the University of Texas at Arlington.

"(The caves) haven't been disturbed by anything. We can see what happened on the scale of a few decades. In lakes of the Appalachian region, you're looking more at the scale of a millennium," Rowe said.

Strontium occurs naturally in the soil, and rain washes the element through the limestone. During dry periods, it is concentrated in stalagmites, making them good markers of drought, Rowe explained. Carbon isotopes also record drought, Springer added, because drier soils slow biological activity. This causes the soil to "breathe less, changing the mix of light and heavy carbon atoms in it," he said.

In the recent study, the scientists cut and polished the stalagmite, examined the growth layers and then used a drill to take 200 samples along the growth axis. They weighed and analyzed the metals and isotopes to determine their concentrations over time.

The data are consistent with the Bond events, which showed the connection between weak solar activity and ice rafting, the researchers said. But the study also confirmed that this climate cycle triggers droughts, including some that were particularly pronounced during the mid-Holocene period, about 6,300 to 4,200 years ago. These droughts lasted for decades or even entire centuries.

Though modern records show that a cooling North Atlantic Ocean actually increases moisture and precipitation, the historic climate events were different, Springer said. In the past, the tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean also grew colder, creating a drier climate and prompting the series of droughts, he explained.

The climate record suggests that North America could face a major drought event again in 500 to 1,000 years, though Springer said that manmade global warming could offset the cycle.

"Global warming will leave things like this in the dust. The natural oscillations here are nothing like what we would expect to see with global warming," he said.

Though some climate and drought records exist for the Western and Midwest areas of North America, the eastern Appalachian region hasn't been studied much to date, Rowe said. The research team plans to examine additional stalagmite records from West Virginia and Tennessee to paint a better picture of North American climate cycles.

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RUSSIA KILLS KYOTO II

Benny Pieser's CCNet brings our attention to this Globe and Mail item today. In it, the authors note some of the repercussions to Europe's own energy strategy from Russia's bloody Georgian gambit, which is the latest move in its expanding play to recover lost influence through energy (read this book for a discussion of how the Bolshies actually did the same thing to solidify their initial, not-so-dissimilar coup into a recognized nation-state).

The impacts go further, as I detail in a forthcoming Energy Tribune piece. Without spoiling it: Brussels' Kyoto agenda demands that Poland, the Czechs, and everyone else with very good reasons to distrust the Russians leave their coal in the ground and rely instead on gas . . . which in practice would be mostly Russian gas. As I have detailed in this space before, the EU was already having a hard time wrestling those pesky new member states to the ground on this dangerous proposal. Now, they can forget about it.

Russia turned off the supply to Poland more than a decade before pulling the plug on Ukraine. For the reasons I cite in ET, those who are in the business of finding silver linings have Russia to thank for finally slaying the Kyoto beast.

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Global cooling hits New Zealand

Records continue to fall as fast as the snow in New Zealand, with Turoa on Mt Ruapehu yesterday recording the deepest snow base in the history of commercial skiing in the Shaky Isles. Turoa's snow stake at 2000m measured 455cm, and with yet another storm brewing for this weekend, an incredible 5m upper-mountain base is possible for spring.

More snow is also on the way locally today as this impressive winter continues, with the flakes to fall to low levels (around 900m) overnight, continuing through to early Saturday. The weekend should feature sunshine and light winds.

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Climate awareness really goes awry! 'Too cold' for global warming torch relay

Who says that Mother Nature doesn't have a sense of humor? First we have an August 14 report from the Lithgow Mercury in Australia announcing a Climate Torch relay to draw attention to the importance of global warming:

The Olympic torch relay might not have made it to our part of the world but tomorrow Lithgow will share in another torch relay of global importance. And you are invited to take part.

An organisation called GetUp! has arranged a Climate Torch relay from Hassans Walls lookout to Queen Elizabeth Park as part of a nation-wide campaign to focus even more attention on the impact and urgency of global warming. A spokesman said that through GetUp! the community has an opportunity to show the nation's leaders how important the issue is to the man and woman in the street. "By taking part in this Australia wide campaign the people of Lithgow can show the rest of the country that we are prepared to stand up - and walk -for what we believe in," she said.

Anyone who can't make it to Hassans Walls for the start is welcome to join in anywhere along the route to the park.

The Climate Torch was designed by the same people who designed the Olympic Torch. "It is solar and wind powered, just in case the pollies need a hint, and people power will get it to its final destination in Canberra," she said.

Climate events coordinator Richie Merzien said Lithgow had been chosen to be part of the relay because of its unique environmental significance.

So how effective was this relay in stressing the importance of global warming? You can get an idea of how it turned out by reading the August 19 headline of the same Lithgow Mercury: "Too cold for global warming relay." Here is their report on actual relay field conditions as written by Len Ashworth:

Climate change may be THE hot international issue of the moment but enthusiasm for the cause clearly wanes on a freezing Friday afternoon when the campaign moves to a mountain top where the wind chill factor is below zero.

This was perhaps the predictably disappointing outcome when the GetUp! climate change lobby group organised an enviro torch relay from Hassans Walls Lookout to Queen Elizabeth Park to focus public attention on the issue.

Ironically, global warming would probably have been welcomed by the handful of hardy souls who turned up to lend their support to the campaign on one of the coldest Lithgow days of this or any other year.

It is unknown if Al Gore was one of those carrying the global warming relay torch in the freezing weather.

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Old King Coal may be our saviour yet

Britain is not alone in finding it hard to come to grips with reconciling the need for energy to fuel economic growth with the emerging consensus that something must be done about global warming, while moving away from the dependence on oil. The Democratic-controlled Congress slunk out of Washington last week without even voting on the various policy proposals before it.

So be kind to your own politicians. Making energy policy is a tough job, made tougher by politicians' refusal to acknowledge facts. The most basic is that the promotion of nuclear, solar, wind and other forms will do nothing in the near or medium term to end reliance on oil to propel cars and lorries. For as far ahead as a planner should try to see, we will depend on oil to move ourselves and our products around the country.

You can't fill up at a wind machine or a nuclear plant - and won't be able to until the electric car becomes economic, and that is a long way off. Which means that one ingredient of energy policy is the ability to defend oil supply routes, a job that the world has so far largely out-sourced to America.

No good saying Britain has plenty of oil in the North Sea - which might prove to be the case if oil prices stay high enough to make development of smaller, more difficult-to-access fields profitable, and if the Government resists the siren call of windfall taxes.

Oil markets are international, and if the Iranians try to close the Straits of Hormuz, or the crazies take over Saudi Arabia, prices would reach levels that will have us pining for the good old days of $150 oil.

Which is why the Government's decision to go ahead with the construction of new aircraft carriers is a sensible form of energy policy, assuming it does not come out of an already stretched military budget.

The next reality check is to accept that nuclear power is far dearer than the Government is anticipating. The cost of a nuclear plant is now estimated to be significantly more than twice the figure put about by the industry only five years ago - and rising. Many nuclear advocates have been pinning their hopes for cost reductions on the next-generation nuclear plant being built in Finland by Areva, a French company that Gordon Brown has announced might be allowed a monopoly of nuclear plant construction.

The Finnish project is two years behind schedule and $1.5 billion-plus over budget. High construction costs mean that electricity from nuclear plants can be competitive with the output of fossil fuel plants only if the price of carbon emissions rises and if investors are somehow guaranteed that those prices will stay high for the 20- to 40-year life of the nuclear plants. No such guarantee is possible, given the volatility of carbon markets, so pay no heed to industry promises that it will not seek subsidies.

Most likely, owners of the massive amounts of capital required to build these facilities will insist that they be guaranteed above-market prices for their power, a covert subsidy that will be hidden on electricity bills.

Nuclear's need for subsidies is not unique. Wind and solar, currently receiving large inflows of investment capital, also remain heavily dependent on subsidies. As does ethanol, part of the programme that has contributed to soaring food prices by giving farmers an incentive to transfer acreage to growing fuel.

Which leaves only natural gas, an efficient fuel, but one on which western Europe is overly dependent, to Vladimir Putin's delight - and coal. The world has limitless supplies of coal, most located in nations friendly to the West. But coal is an abomination in the eyes of environmentalists because of its alleged contribution to global warming.

Nevertheless, it will be a key ingredient in the world's energy future: India and China between them have 700 plants planned or under construction; the Government has sensibly authorised a new plant in Kent; and European countries plan to build 50 new coal stations in the next five years.

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Dark green barbarians

By Craig Emerson (Craig Emerson is the Minister for Small Business in Australia's Rudd Government)

When we look around the world and find that prosperity is rising strongly in some countries but not in others, seekers of the secret formula for success ask why. Lots of temporary causes come into play: oil discoveries, tourism fads such as safari experiences and even countries setting themselves up as tax havens. But these passing influences don't really tell us what overall government policy approaches will give a country its best chance of success in the prosperity stakes.

Since about 1990 a new body of economic thinking has attributed rising prosperity to the development and application of new ideas. These new growth theorists point out that if the history of the human race were represented by the length of a football field, then living standards were basically unchanged for the entire length of the field other than the last 5cm before the far goal line. But over that last few centimetres, living standards have increased astronomically.

This period of rapidly improving living standards began with the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century. New ideas were encouraged and a critical mass of thinkers and inventors was achieved. Enlightenment thinkers repudiated the mysticism and superstition of pre-Enlightenment Europe, advocating instead personal freedom, open, competitive markets and scientific endeavour.

David Hume, one of the Enlightenment figures, and a close friend of Adam Smith, summed up with his statement that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. Isaac Newton understood the cumulative power of ideas when he said: "If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." James Watt's steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution and the rest, as they say, is history.

Deadly diseases were conquered and life expectancy increased. Yes it was a blood-stained 5cm, fouled by slavery, the exploitation of child labour, two world wars, state-sponsored mass starvation and genocide. Yet through the period living standards rose inexorably.

But now mysticism and superstition are making a comeback. Their revival began in the '80s with attacks on economic rationalism. Rational economic thinking was condemned in favour of economic irrationalism: ongoing protectionism, deficit financing by printing money, maintaining airlines and banks in public ownership and expanding the role of the state in the commercial world through clever devices such as WA Inc and the Tricontinental merchant bank.

By the '90s, economic irrationalists had declared competition as the new heresy, attacking the Keating government's National Competition Policy which is estimated to have increased household incomes by $3500 per annum. Twenty-first century mysticism and superstition is finding expression in the big environmental debates. Deep green extremists yearn for a return to a pre-industrial society, before the Enlightenment when faith and dogma prevailed over rational thinking and evidence-based science. In this gentle agrarian society (absent environmentally destructive hard-hoofed farm animals), human beings are tolerated, as long as they leave no carbon footprint. These deep-green crusaders have declared their opposition to coalmining even if emerging technologies were to reduce its emissions to zero, since coal is regarded as an ugly reminder of an industrial society.

Governments of Europe and the US have draped a green cloak of respectability over their farm-subsidising biofuels policies that divert massive amounts of food grain into the production of ethanol. In the name of saving the Earth from ecological disaster, these brutal policies have been responsible for an estimated 70 per cent of the sharp increases in world food prices over the past few years, plunging an extra 100 million people into poverty.

Recycling, we are told, is a good way to do our bit saving the environment. Anyone questioning the environmental benefits of recycling is branded a heretic. In some cities, up to 80 per cent of glass collected for recycling actually ends up in landfill because the cost of separating the different colours of glass is too high. But we feel good.

As director-general of the Queensland environment department in the early '90s I inquired into the life-cycle benefits of container deposit legislation. Glass bottles destined for reuse need to be many times the thickness of those that are melted down or disposed of in landfill. We discovered that by the time account was taken of the energy and water costs of collecting, transporting and washing the bottles, reuse of bottles was bad for the environment. We dared not release the results of the study for fear of being howled down as environmental vandals.

Recycling of some materials makes good environmental sense but of others it does not. Recycling proposals should be evaluated on the basis of good scientific evidence and not pursued simply because they make us feel good.

Consumer magazines such as Choice have begun to expose as greenwash the claims companies make about their products in an attempt to cash in on environmental ignorance. A bottle of air freshener is claimed to be biodegradable, but only the cardboard packet is. Products are promoted as being CFC-free, a true but irrelevant claim since all CFCs were banned in the late '90s. Some items are said to be made from renewable forest products, as if some species of trees are non-renewable.

Free-range chickens and organic fruit are good. But watch out for the next innovation: free-range fruit. Can you imagine the advertisement featuring dancing fruit trees all singing in harmony: "give me land, lots of land 'neath the starry skies above, don't fence me in." And remember, when you're told a product is 90 per cent fat-free, they're really telling you it's 10 per cent pure fat. The message is clear: irrationality sells and any questioning of spurious environmental claims is an act of heresy. It's time for an Australian Enlightenment, where once again reason and facts prevail over mysticism and ignorance.

Criticised for changing his mind on monetary policy during the Depression, John Maynard Keynes retorted: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

An Australian Enlightenment would demand the best available facts as a basis for public debate and public policy making. It would find no place for hired guns: any business consultancies that are willing to distort the facts to suit the requirements of their commercial clients and to promote them on the basis of the result of computer modelling. In computer modelling the enduring truth applies: garbage in, garbage out.

Self-serving consultants who change their assumptions to suit their clients do a great disservice to any endeavour to raise evidence-based policy over policy based on faith and superstition. One of the Enlightenment figures enthused that an army cannot defeat a good idea.

An Australian Enlightenment would restore ideas to the place they have occupied over the last 5cm of the football field: creating prosperity and raising living standards, including those of the most vulnerable in our society.

Source

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

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20 August, 2008

'It is a blatant lie' by media that all scientists agree on climate - says blunt Spoken NOAA Atmospheric Scientist

Despite a number of conflicting research findings, the general consensus among weather and climate researchers is that global warming, whether natural or man-made, is unlikely to increase the frequency of hurricanes in the years to come.

In consensus statements found on the Web site of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), scientists involved note that, "Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point. No individual tropical cyclone can be directly attributed to climate change."

Indeed, according to Stanley Goldenberg, meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, based in Miami, "Numerous hurricane meteorologists agree that the historical data has not produced any evidence of changes [due to climate change] in the number or intensity of hurricanes, particularly in the Atlantic Basin, and even globally.

"There are some who have done studies that do claim a link, [but] virtually all those studies have been heavily rebutted by others in the hurricane community," he noted. "In my opinion, the flaw in those studies is an improper utilization of historical databases. I have been a specialist in hurricane climate data for close to three decades, and others who know the databases well agree with what I am saying."

Mr. Goldenberg pointed to a number of confounding problems in such studies, including the time frame chosen, the techniques available now and in the past to measure hurricane activity, the ways in which such activity was recorded, and the availability of satellite data-or lack thereof.

"The biggest fallacy is that people think that a hurricane feeds off a warm ocean, and if the ocean gets warmer, we will have more intense hurricanes," he explained. "But there are other factors involved, such as vertical wind shear, which is the difference between the upper and lower layers of the atmosphere. You could also have drier air. These are far more critical factors than the ocean being warmer.

"Everything else being equal, if you warm the ocean under a storm, you might get a stronger storm-but everything else is not equal," said Mr. Goldenberg. "Warming may increase vertical shear and therefore inhibit storms. The ocean itself warming is such a little effect."

He added that while many of today's forecasts for future climate and hurricane activity are based on computer climate models, "We can't even reliably forecast El Nino. When you look 50 years into the future, you're getting a picture, but could you be totally wrong? Yes!"

Some climate models, he noted, say that if there is continued warming, higher vertical shear would reduce the frequency of hurricanes, but might result in stronger storms. "I am skeptical of those who would state those results as something like an undeniable fact for the future," he stated. "It is a possible guide for the future. But certainly the models are not pointing to increased activity.

Natural or man-made?

"I did not say if there is global warming, it would be man-made," Mr. Goldenberg emphasized. "Not all scientists agree that the warming we've seen is necessarily anthropogenic. It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming."

According to Peter Dailey, director of Atmospheric Science at AIR Worldwide, based in Boston, "There is now a near consensus that global air temperatures are increasing, however, there is no consensus on how this has affected the temperature of the world's oceans, and in particular in the Atlantic Ocean, or how much of the recent warming trend is attributable to man's activities. This is critical for scientists to understand the impact of climate change on land-falling hurricanes that affect North America.

"Recent scientific research indicates that in a future warming world, the Atlantic may experience two primary effects related to hurricane development," he explained. "First, a warmer environment may continue to elevate sea surface temperatures (SSTs), thereby providing more fuel for tropical cyclones to develop and intensify. Second, there may be a trend for more frequent or more intense El Nino events which in turn increase wind shear in the Atlantic-an unfavorable environment for tropical cyclones to develop.

"So, while it is true that warmer SSTs may lead to more frequent hurricane activity, elevated wind shear may counteract, or possibly even overturn this effect," he continued. "Which of these factors critical to the development of tropical cyclones will ultimately win out is the subject of lively debate within the scientific community and beyond."

Mr. Dailey also reported that recently published studies indicate that hurricane activity could decrease as a result of other competing factors. "For example, simulations of tropical cyclone activity carried out at the GFDL using climate conditions projected for the 21st century indicate the potential for decreased hurricane activity under more pronounced global warming conditions, and cautions against a reliance on statistical extrapolations of recently elevated activity levels through the end of the century," he said.

Although she asserted that global warming "is driven primarily by human activities," Christine Ziehmann, director of model management for Risk Management Solutions, based in Newark, Calif., cautioned that, "It is not clear what effect global warming is having, and will have, on the frequency, intensity and geographical distribution of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin." According to Ms. Ziehmann, computer models of the global climate tend to suggest that global warming should, in the long term, lead to less frequent but more intense tropical cyclones globally. "However, models are less clear about hurricane activity in individual ocean basins," she noted. "For instance, in the Atlantic, some models suggest a long-term increase in frequency with others suggesting a decrease." She added that, "The evidence shows that there has been an increase in the average intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic since the 1970s and an increase in frequency since 1995, but it is not clear what contribution, if any, global warming has made to these changes."

In an interview in 2001, renowned hurricane researcher Prof. William Gray told National Underwriter that a complex combination of factors including ocean temperature, ocean currents and the salt content of the ocean at a given time is most likely to affect the frequency of hurricanes. He emphasized that changes in these factors are "natural" and not man-made.

"Professor Gray is absolutely correct that hurricane formation and development depend on factors such as sea surface temperature," said Ms. Ziehmann. "However, it would be wrong to suggest that these factors could only be affected by natural changes in climate and not by man-made global warming. "Both natural climate variability and man-made global warming influence hurricane formation and development," she stated. "The real question is to what extent they contribute over the time-scale of interest. This is still an open scientific question."

The researchers also addressed the political debate that has attached itself to aspects of climate change. "For the layman, there is sometimes a tendency to regard every new `discovery' or scientific finding from the latest published paper as an inviolate fact," said Mr. Dailey. "In reality, rarely is there ever a last and final word in studies of complex systems such as earth's environment. Rather, science is a dynamic process based on the scientific method in which researchers test hypotheses leading to new discoveries, but also reexamine earlier theories and try to improve, build upon, or extend them."

Mr. Goldenberg of NOAA added, "There are those who want to attribute any perceived increase in natural disasters to anthropomorphic global warming. I predict that if we have an active hurricane season, someone will attribute it to AGW. They're not really looking at the science; they're looking at the disaster."

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Greenie thugs

Coercion or attempted coercion seems to come naturally to Greenies. Report below from The Netherlands

Political activism involving criminal acts can lead, years later, to deep regrets for a politician. That's been made amply clear by the resignation of the Dutch GreenLeft MP Wijnand Duyvendak. But while the rebellious acts of one politician can lead to his downfall, others suffer no consequences, and in some cases even benefit from a turbulent past.

Wijnand Duyvendak resigned his parliamentary standing on Thursday in the wake of the controversy stirred up by his activist past. Two weeks earlier, he had confessed that during the 1980s, he took part in a break-in to a ministry to steal plans for nuclear power centres.

Femke Halsema, GreenLeft's chairwoman, reacted angrily to the first revelations about her colleague. It makes clear that the political climate, and attitudes to illegal actions in 2008, is totally different to those of the 1970s and 1980s. In the past, such actions were usually dismissed as 'youthful transgressions'. But following the September 11 attacks in the United States, and the murder of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, that's all changed.

Investigative journalist Peter Siebelt has been writing for years about what he calls 'the excrescences of leftist activism' and he believes that Duyvendak has a lot more to answer for. "I keep in regular touch with colleagues abroad, who are experts in combating terrorism. If I tell them who we have sitting in our Lower House, they look at me as if I've come from another planet."

By way of example, he mentions the Socialist Party's Krista van Velzen. In the 1990s, Krista van Velzen let fly with a hammer at a nuclear submarine in the Faslane naval base in Scotland. She was arrested and earned herself a criminal record. Her Socialist Party (SP) colleague, Arda Gerkens, explains why this has never been a problem for the SP.

"The big difference with Wijnand Duyvendak is that Krista has always been honest. Both the party and the voters have always known about her actions. We have never tried to keep them secret. With Wijnand Duyvendak, the situation is different. First, I find break-ins and the intimidation of people far more serious than the actions of my colleague. But more than that, the voters never knew about Duyvendak's past. GreenLeft knew about it, but chose not to make any of the details public. That's the big difference between them and the SP."

Femke Halsema's initial sharp reaction has not been well received by everyone in her party. GreenLeft's European MP, Joost Lagendijk, thinks his party's upper ranks reacted in far too panicky a manner to the news of Duyvendak's illegal past. In a newspaper, he says: "In the 1980s I was involved, as many GreenLefters were, in the squatter's movement. Squatting is also breaking in. But does that mean that everything outside the law is also unacceptable? I don't think so."

Across the border, the German politician Joschka Fischer is the classic example of a politician who has profited from his activist past. At the beginning of the 1970s, Fischer was the leader of the left wing, radical Revolution„rer Kampf. The movement participated in several protest marches which often ended in violence that left several police officers severely injured. There's a photograph of Fischer taken at the time, wearing a crash helmet and fighting. Despite all the coverage of his activist past, the Green politician has now made it all the way to Foreign Minister and to the Vice Chancellorship of Germany.

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More details on the above

Leftwing Green (GroenLinks) MP Wijnand Duyvendak orchestrated threats, violence and intimidation of six top civil servants at the economic affairs ministry in 1985. The ministry's director-general of the day, George Verberg, stated yesterday that an attempt was made to set fire to his house. Under Duyvendak's leadership, the anarchists publication Bluf published a list on 11 July 1985 giving the names, addresses and telephone numbers of six top civil servants. This was accompanied by the text: "Disturb the peace of these trouble-makers," newspaper De Telegraaf reported yesterday.

The call in Bluf resulted in telephone threats and intimidation of the civil servants of the nuclear energy directorate. One of them had his windows broken by stones thrown at them, according to De Telegraaf.

Verberg, the then director-general of the ministry, added yesterday afternoon in evening newspaper NRC Handelsblad that an attempt was made to set fire to his home following the publication of his personal details in Bluf. Also, his wife received phone calls saying 'we now where to find your husband'. Verberg published a letter in NRC Handesblad yesterday that he has sent to Duyvendak as well. In it, the former top civil servant states: "Your call to terrorise me was successful. An arson attempt to my home was made by shoving rags drenched in petrol and set on fire through my front door. Luckily, we had a tile floor".

Prior to the publication of Verberg's revelations in NCR Handelsblad, Economic Affairs Minister Maria van der Hoeven said she was "unpleasantly surprised" by the report in De Telegraaf that Duyvendak incited violence against civil servants of her ministry. She termed the call to violence "unacceptable."

Two weeks ago, Duyvendak confessed that he was one of the burglars who broke into the economic affairs ministry in 1985. The personal data of the six civil servants were seized in that crime, as well as documents on plans for the construction of nuclear plants - these were never built.

Duyvendak had denied being involved in the break-in for years. He made his U-turn two weeks ago in an announcement of an upcoming autobiography he is presenting on 20 August. The break-in is now so long ago that he cannot be prosecuted any more. The GroenLinks MP complained on Wednesday he has already been pursued for 10 days by a storm of negative publicity on his activist past. It annoys him that his address has also been published, he said - apparently unaware of the irony of this remark....

Duyvendak is a very senior GroenLinks member. His wife is former party chairman Mirjam de Rijk and his brother is a key party strategist. Some insiders have suggested Duyvendak wanted to come clean in his book because he had ambitions to become GroenLinks leader.

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UK Scientist: As Earth faces cooling, media exhibits 'cognitive dissonance'

"Un experto de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico pronostico que en alrededor de diez anos la Tierra entrara  a una `pequena era de hielo' que durara  de 60 a 80 anos y sera  causada por la disminucion de la actividad solar." [Milenio, August 16]

I must ask a very serious and urgent question of our media. Why do you continue to talk glibly about current climate `warming' when it is now widely acknowledged that there has been no `global warming' for the last ten years, a cooling trend that many think may continue for at least another ten years? How can you talk of the climate `warming' when, on the key measures, it isn't? And now a leading Mexican scientist is even predicting that we may enter another `Little Ice Age' - a `pequena era de hielo'.

Such media behaviour exhibits a classic condition known as `cognitive dissonance'. This is experienced when belief in a grand narrative persists blindly even when the facts in the real world begin to contradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, our media have come to have a vested interest in `global warming', as have so many politicians and activists. They are terrified that the public may begin to question everything if climate is acknowledged, on air and in the press, not to be playing ball with their pet trope.

But that is precisely what is happening. Since 1998, according to all the main world temperature records, including the UK Met Office's `HadCRUT3' data set [a globally-gridded product of near-surface temperatures consisting of annual differences from 1961-90 normals], the world average surface temperature has exhibited no warming whatsoever. Indeed, the trend has been a combination of flat-lining and cooling, with a particularly marked plunge over the last few months. Many parts of the world, including Canada, China, and the US, have just experienced their worst winter in years (as is currently Australia), while skiing in Scotland has benefited from the trend, and the summit of Snowdon carried snow even up to the end of April.

To put it simply, since 1998, there has been no `global warming', despite the fact that, during this same period, atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise, from c. 368 ppm by volume in 1998 to c. 384 ppmv in November, 2007. Moreover, another `greenhouse gas', methane, has also been rising, following a period of relative stability, by about 0.5% between 2006 and 2007.

Of course, little can be gleaned from a short data run of only 10-years, a fact, I might add, which `global warming' fanatics have too often failed to stress. Nevertheless, recent work demonstrates that the Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for at least a further decade through the workings of a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). The cause of this oscillation, which is related to the currents that bring warmth from the tropics to Europe, is not well understood, but the cycle appears to have an effect every 60 to 70 years. It may well prove to be part of the explanation as to why global mean temperatures rose in the early years of the 20th Century, before then starting to cool again in the late-1940s. Thus, according to the new model, cooling remains on the cards for another ten years at least, making a potential 20 years of cooling in all.

But the sun isn't playing ball either. The big question is: "What has happened to Solar Cycle 24?" Solar-cycle intensity is measured by the maximum number of sunspots. These are dark blotches on the Sun that mark areas of heightened magnetic activity. The more sunspots there are, the more likely it is that major solar storms will occur, and these are related to warming on Earth; the fewer the sunspots, the more likely there is to be cooling. The next 11-year cycle of solar storms [Solar Cycle 24] was predicted to have begun in autumn, 2006, but it appears to have been delayed. It was then expected to take off in March last year, and to peak in late-2011, or mid-2012. But the Sun remains largely spotless, except for an odd fading spot. This delayed onset has somewhat confused the official Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel, leaving them evenly split as to whether a weak or a strong period of solar storms now lies ahead.

However, some other scientists are deeply concerned, including Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, who comments: "Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously."

Chapman then explains why the absence of sunspots might exacerbate this cooling trend: "The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots." Thus, all the immediate signs and portents are pointing in the direction of a cooling period, not a warming one.

So, why are newspapers, magazines, radio, and television not telling us all this? Because they have invested so much effort over the last ten years in hyping up the exact opposite. Moreover, it is especially pathetic sophistry to claim, as dedicated `global warmers' are wont to do, that `natural forces' are having the temerity to "suppress" `global warming'. The fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor is as misguided as it gets.

And now a Mexican expert, Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera (National Autonomous University of Mexico), is warning that the Earth will enter a new `Little Ice Age' for up to 80 years due to decreases in solar activity [see: `Auguran breve era del hielo en 2010', Milenio, August 16]. He describes the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "erroneous".

If this cooling phase really does persist, it will be illuminating to observe how long our media can maintain its befuddled state of `cognitive dissonance'. Mind you, I jolly well hope that we aren't entering a cooling period - it's the very last thing we need! Give me warming any time. Brrrr!

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Global Warming Skeptics Prominently Featured At International Scientific Meeting

Indian Scientist Mocks Nobel Prize Award to Gore

A major international scientific conference prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. The International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Oslo, Norway, from August 4-14.

[The conference was criticized by the activists at RealClimate.org (who apparently are threatened by any challenges to their version of `consensus' on global warming science) for being too balanced and allowing skeptical scientists to have a forum. RealClimate's Rasmus E. Benestad lamented on August 19 that the actual scientific debate during the conference "seemed to be a step backwards towards confusion rather than a progress towards resolution." ]

During the Geologic conference, Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia of the Center of Advanced Study in Geology at Punjab University and a visiting scholar of the Geology Department at University of Cincinnati, openly ridiculed former Vice President Al Gore and the UN IPCC's coveted Nobel Peace Prize. [An online video of an August 8, 2008, conference climate change panel has been posted and is a must-see video for anyone desiring healthy scientific debate. See: HERE ]

"I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists," Ahluwalia, a fellow of the Geological Society of India, said during a question and answer panel discussion.

Ahluwalia, who has authored numerous scientific studies in the fields of geology and paleontology, referred to the UN climate panel as the "elite IPCC." "The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds."

Ahluwalia, a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet (http://www.yearofplanetearth.org) also criticized the promoters of man-made global warming fears for "drawing out exaggerated conclusions" and took the UN to task for failing to allow dissenting voices.

"When I put forward my points in the morning, some IPCC official got up to say that what I was [saying was] `nonsense.' See, when we have that sort of attitude, that sort of dogma against a scientific observation that would not actually end up in very, very positive debate. We should maintain our sense of proportion, maintain our sense of objectivity, allow a discussion -- not have fixed mindset about global warming," he said to applause from the members.

Panel participants at the August 8 debate included skeptical Physicist Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Centre and Paleoclimate scientist Dr. Bob Carter of Australia's James Cook University, former chairman of the earth science panel of the Australian Research Council, who has published numerous peer-reviewed papers and is an outspoken dissenter of Gore and the UN IPCC's climate claims.

Prominent scientist Professor Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University, was also on hand during the panel's question and answer session.

A Canadian paleoclimatolgist/sedimentary geologist openly dissented from UN IPCC views during the panel's Q & A session. "I think the scientific community is putting way too much faith on these models, especially given the fact that they have not been able to predict 5-day weather forecasts yet and weather systems are simpler than the climate, and every 5 days they have a chance to test the model and improve it," the Canadian scientist said. [ At 43:30 and 44:35 of online video]

"A lot of the predictions made by modelers and models do not match very well to the longer term geologic record and even more scary, most atmospheric scientists are not aware of that," he explained.

Another scientist stood up to a key question about the recent global cooling trend. "We know temperature goes up and down, we know there is tremendous amount of natural variations, but for how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand -- we politicians and scientists-- that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" the scientist asked to applause from the audience.

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Vocal Australian Doomster Tim Flannery repeatedly shown to be a false prophet

With his long and remarkable track record of predictive failure, you could well be inclined to expect the opposite of whatever he predicts

By Andrew Bolt

Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery really should stay out of the predictions business, unless he's just rehearsing a comedy act. Four years ago, there was his prediction for Perth:

Speaking last night at the State Government's Sydney Futures forum, Dr Flannery warned of a city grappling with up to 60 per cent less water. As temperatures around the world warmed by 2 to 7 per cent, Sydney could glimpse its future by looking at the devastating impact that global warming had already had on Perth. "I think there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis," Dr Flannery said.

Instead:

Perth's dams have reached their highest July level in eight years, despite WA's gas crisis causing the closure of the Kwinana desalination plant at the start of the month. Above-average rainfall in the major catchment areas since April has meant that the dams are about 34 per cent full. Weather Bureau spokesman Glenn Cook said that the high dam levels were due in part to good winter rain last year...

Three years ago there was his prediction for Sydney:

He also predicts that the ongoing drought could leave Sydney's dams dry in just two years.

Instead:

The available storage as at 3 p.m. Thursday, 7 August 2008 was 66.0 %.

Flannery's latest city-scare? It's for Adelaide, and given five months ago:

The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.

Instead? Let Tim Blair give you the soggy news and the healthy dam readings. We've seen Flannery's sort before, of course:

And so around the chorus ran
"It's keepin' dry, no doubt."
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."

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Climate balance from a major Australian TV show!

A turning point in the debate: 60 Minutes is suddenly not so sure man is heating the world to hell, after all. And it won't have been reassured by Kevin Rudd's shaky grasp of the evidence in spruiking his carbon tax:

PM KEVIN RUDD: But economic cost (sic) of not acting is massive, it's through the roof. Think about food production, the Murray, think about the impact on tourism in QLD, no more Barrier Reef, Kakadu, no more Kakadu. Think about the impact on jobs, it's huge.

Actually, even if Rudd really thinks warming will wipe out the Barrier Reef and Kakadu (neither of which show any sign of going anywhere), he is deceiving viewers by suggesting his carbon tax would make the slightest difference to the climate. Indeed, the only impact will be on jobs - as in costing them, and not, as he claims, saving them.

TARA BROWN: How certain are you that mankind is the cause behind global warming?

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There's a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them.

No, it's actually called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And no, there are not 4000 IPCC scientists. Try 2500, instead. Rudd is lucky that this exaggeration wasn't picked up by Brown. What's more, a number of those 2500 don't stand by the IPCC conclusion on man's effect on the climate. Many others were not even consulted over the report's bottom-line finding.

PM KEVIN RUDD: ... And what they (IPCC scientists) say to us is it's happening and it's caused by human activity.

Actually, even the IPCC report admits doubts, saying it's only 90 per cent sure humans are responsible for most of the warming in just the 25 years until 1998. But a token alarmist is then rolled on to preach doom:

DR TIM FLANNERY: Stop burning coal and other fossil fuels and stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because that is what is warming the atmosphere and that is what's driving the changes.

I wouldn't rely on anyone with Flannery's record of alarmist inaccuracies. And in this case thousands of scientists disagree, actually. 60 Minutes, to its credit, finally talks to some of the "thousands" it agrees are there:

PROF. RICHARD LINDZEN: We need CO-2. It's not a poison, it's not a pollutant. It's essential for life on earth. I mean how much are we going to depend on people's ignorance in order to produce panic?.

DAVID EVANS: (There's no evidence that carbon emissions cause any significant warming at all...

And reporter Tara Brown even dares mention the Medieval Warm Period:

TARA BROWN: Perhaps nowhere in the world is there more compelling evidence against the man-made carbon dioxide argument than Greenland. Long before the Industrial Age, the Vikings lived here and happily grew wheat and vegetables. It was known as the `Medieval Warm Period' and temperatures were even hotter than they are today.

But, wait, there's more:

TARA BROWN: So statistically, in the last seven years, the flattening and perhaps even slight cooling of temperatures - is that significant?

DAVID EVANS: Yes, yes it is significant. Once it gets up to five years or so it's really quite significant. Whatever was driving the temperatures up has taken a break for a while and meanwhile carbon emissions have continued and the level of carbon in the atmosphere has gone up about 5% since 2001, yet we see no more warming.

But back to Rudd, who can't have counted on being corrected mid-scare by Brown:

PM KEVIN RUDD: Here's a measurement which people should just sit back and pay a bit of attention to - the 12 hottest years in human history have occurred in the last 13 years. That's a fact.

TARA BROWN: It's not my position to correct you Prime Minister but Ive been told that in fact during the middle ages the global temperatures were two to three degrees warmer than now. Certainly we've had the hottest 12 years in recent history but the planet's been a lot hotter.

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I stand by what the International Panel of Climate Change Scientists have had to say. There will always be argy-bargy about elements of the detail.

Where the world has been hotter in human history is now just "elements of the detail" to Rudd? And is he not even familiar with this debate over dodgy IPCC claims, and what it says about the IPCC on which he relies so heavily? And still Brown hasn't finished sowing doubts:

TARA BROWN: But one thing climate scientists agree on - if global warming is caused by CO-2 emissions then the CO-2 will leave a distinct signature their computer models predict a big red hotspot above the equator. The problem is thousands of weather balloons equipped with some very sophisticated thermometers have measured the temperatures in the atmosphere to test the theory, and guess what, no hotspots.

DAVID EVANS: There's no hotspot, there's no hotspot at all. It's not even a little hotspot and it's missing. We couldn't find it.

Sadly, Brown then goes on to quote for no clear reason previous 60 Minutes stories which preached alarmism over drought and Chernobyl, and waffles on without quite finding the courage to admit they swallowed green scares whole. But there is this rally near the end:

PM KEVIN RUDD: The key thing is, how do you bring carbon pollution down in an economically responsible fashion? And having looked at all the detail this is the best way forward.

TARA BROWN: But if you believe the sceptics, and carbon dioxide isn't to blame for global warming then we face massive change for no good reason.

DAVID EVANS: Isn't it a bit dopey to wreck the economy for a purely theoretical reason when the alleged symptom, warming, stopped six years ago.

To conclude: 60 Minutes has dared to contradict the global warming "consensus", and its own record, to present fairly the growing evidence that supports the scepticism of thousands of scientists. That puts it ahead of the media curve - certainly ahead of the ABC. And having this done on the country's most-watched current affairs show marks a significant turning point in the debate. 60 Minutes, for one, will now have a vested interest in saying "we told you". Rudd, already at sea with the evidence, should be very, very nervous.

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

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19 August, 2008

LOL! It's Almost Like Something Unusual is Poised to Happen in Denver



Is Mother Earth trying to tell them something?

(Via Ace. For non-American readers, the Democrat convention is about to open in Denver, Colorado)

More: Record low maximum temperature set in Denver for August 16th... The high temperature at Denver International Airport today was 58 degrees. This 58 degree reading will replace the previous low maximum temperature record for August 16th which was 63 degrees set 118 years ago in 1890.




VA city has 'coolest August in years' -- Not a single 90 degree plus day

High temperatures usually mark the month of August, but those dog days of summer have been scarce in Hampton Roads this year. This month, not a single day's temperature has risen above 90 degrees. Forecasters are calling for Tuesday to hit 92 degress, which would be the hottest day of August. This month's highest temperature has been 90 degrees.

This summer, Hampton Roads has had the lowest average temperature in five years. In fact, this decade has been cooler than previous decades. Since 2000, Hampton Roads has seen 58 days when the official temperatur has climbed above 90. That represents the smallest total since the 1980s. Unseasonably cool temperatures are hitting other parts of the country as well. In Chicago, for example, temperatures this summer are the lowest since the 1930s.

Despite popular debates over global warming and global cooling, both processes are difficult to track. Climate change is so intermittent that even professionals in the scientific community have difficulty understanding its many complexities and causes.

Scientists have no data to prove whether or not the cooling is noteworthy. Josh Willis, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says, "There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant."

Source




Another cooling convert

The article is in Spanish here. Google Translated link from Spanish: here. Excerpt follows:

An expert from the National Autonomous University of Mexico predicted that in about ten years the Earth will enter a "little ice age" which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity. Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the UNAM, as argued earlier during a conference that teaches at the Centre for Applied Sciences and Technological Development...

Velasco Herrera described as erroneous predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pursuant to which the planet is experiencing a gradual increase in temperature, the so-called global warming. The models and forecasts of the IPCC "is incorrect because only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity," said the specialist also in image processing and signs and prevention of natural disasters. The phenomenon of climate change, he added, should include other kinds of factors, both internal, such as volcanoes and the very human activity, and external, such as solar activity....

"In this century glaciers are growing", as seen in the Andes, Perito Moreno, Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, and with Franz-Josef Glacier, New Zealand, said Velasco Herrera....

The prognosis on the emergence of a new Ice Age has little uncertainty as to their dates. The latest, according to Victor Manuel Velasco, could arrive in approximately two years. In another lecture he gave at the beginning of last December, the same expert had said that the cooling would arrive within 30 or 40 years. And in early July, Velasco Herrera said that satellite data indicate that this period of global cooling could even have already begun, since 2005.




A nasty one for the peak-oilers

You Can't Get Blood From A Stone. But Shell Oil appears to have found a way to get oil from a rock. The Denver Post describes a promising technology to extract oil - a lot of oil - from oil shale in the American West. There are many unanswered questions and many details that need to be worked out, but this is pretty promising. Shell's test site yielded about a 65% recovery rate for the oil. Versus about a 25% recovery rate for traditional methods. The resultant extracted oil is of an extremely high quality.

The ramshackle collection of wellheads and electric cables hidden in a pine-covered draw west of Rifle doesn't look like much now, but until three years ago it was the home of the oil industry's equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Over five years here, Shell Oil conducted a series of secretive experiments that have the potential to blow open the status quo of North American oil production, unlocking the vast reserves of oil shale that underlie Colorado's Western Slope.

Early attempts failed miserably. But beginning in 2002, Shell drilled a honeycombed series of wells, then lowered in giant heating elements, raising the temperature of the shale to 650 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 months. Out flowed an abundance of high-quality shale oil. "It was our 'eureka' moment," said Tracy Boyd, a spokesman for Shell, smiling as he showed off the historic spot. "Now we know we have a technology that works."

Now that and similar technologies have become fodder in the increasingly contentious energy debate, holding out the possibility that, in an era of $4-a-gallon gasoline, America might just be sitting on oil reserves equal to a 100-year supply of the country's imports.

The fight over oil shale has become a major issue in Colorado's U.S. Senate race as well as a regular talking point for Republicans nationwide. At the White House in June, President Bush blasted Democrats for "standing in the way" of oil-shale development and hurting ordinary Americans. The latest to enter the fray is Orrin Hatch, the powerful Republican senator from Utah, who accused Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall of siding with "an elite, anti-oil crowd" by helping impose a moratorium on commercial leasing regulations for the shale deposits. (Utah is one of three Western states with oil-shale reserves.)

The technology still needs to be proven at an industrial scale and there are serious issues about the environmental impact, especially on water resources. Read the whole thing. The early battle lines are already forming both in the short term of this election and in the long term, decades away. But this appears to be promising. Certainly more promising than this incident over in Zimbabwe.

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RUSSIA CRUSHES EUROPE'S ENERGY STRATEGY

Russia's adventure in Georgia has been described as a "warlet," a contained firing spree that wound up and down within a week. But to Europe's energy markets, it was the equivalent of wide-scale carpet bombing. With the North Sea oil and natural gas fields running out of puff, Europe, in particular the European Union, is more dependent than ever on imported energy. The biggest single supplier is Russia, whose pipelines snake across Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova before poking into central and western Europe.

Russia's energy supplies are cherished. Germany, France and Italy have almost no oil and gas of their own. Russia's Gazprom, the world's biggest gas company, supplies 40 per cent or more of Europe's gas imports. The company, controlled by the Russian state and led by Dmitry Medvedev before he became Russia's President, is the equivalent of a one-country gas OPEC. By 2020, Gazprom's exports to the EU are expected to rise by more than 50 per cent. The company is unafraid to wield its mighty power. For four days in 2006, it stopped supplying gas to the Ukrainian market because of a contract dispute.

Since keeping the lights on is the minimum requirement to stay elected, Europe's governments were doing two things. They were buying every molecule of Russian energy available and were working hard to ensure that Russia alone did not control the entire show.

Enter Georgia. The pro-Western country became a convenient bit of non-Russian real estate on which to plunk pipelines to funnel non-Russian (and non-OPEC) oil and gas to the outside world. No fewer than three pipelines originating in Azerbaijan cross Georgian territory.

One of the trio, called BTE, was due for a massively enlarged role in the future. The BTE pipeline currently takes gas from Azerbaijan through Georgia and into central Turkey. An extension, known as the Nabucco project, would take the gas from there on to Austria, making it a hefty counterweight to Russian gas exports. Nabucco is backed by the EU and the United States and counts German power utility RWE among it biggest shareholders.

Thanks to Russia's invasion of Georgia on Aug. 8, Georgia's role as a secure energy transit point to Europe has been shattered. Russia has made clear it can make Georgia a puppet state if it wishes, and will almost certainly recognize the independence of the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Suddenly the risk premiums on oil and gas pipelines that pass through Georgian soil went through the roof. Some analysts are already predicting the death of the Nabucco project, whose construction was to begin in 2010.

So much for Europe's energy diversification plans. New, independent pipelines from Central Asia seem like a lost cause. With Georgia reined in, Moscow's grip on energy supplies to Europe must be close to complete. You have to wonder whether a Kremlin filing cabinet contains a plan that had laid out this very scenario a decade ago.

What is Europe to do? Time for Diversification Plan B. A big part of the plan would have to see Europe turning the Mediterranean into mare nostrum - our sea - as the Romans called it in the empire years. The North African countries of Libya and Algeria, and Syria in the Eastern Med to a lesser extent, have vast, undeveloped oil and gas fields.

Energy companies with an appetite for political risk have been pouring billions into these countries. One of them is Petro-Canada, which is already hauling 50,000 barrels of oil a day out of Libya and has targeted the country for significant growth. Algeria's gas reserves are mammoth. Last year, Italy and Algeria agreed to construct a 900-kilometre pipeline to take Algerian gas to Sardinia, then on to the Italian mainland. Other pipelines will have to be built. Speed is of the essence, because Gazprom's ambitions are boundless. Last month it offered to buy all of Libya's gas exports.

Mediterranean gas cannot be the entire solution. Europe will have to rethink its nuclear strategy. Germany and Spain have committed to phase out nuclear power. Surely, that strategy will have to be reversed. Italy has no nuclear power plants. That will have to change, too. A few nuclear plants are under construction in Europe after a moratorium that began with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The number will have to soar if Europe is to take energy diversification seriously.

Coal might make a big comeback, too, in spite of the horrendous amounts of soot and carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired electricity plants. Fortunes will have to be plowed into "clean coal" technology, which so far is more myth than reality.

Before the Georgian crisis, Europe seemed to be doing all the right things, with little Georgia at the centre of a sensible energy diversification plan. A column of Russian tanks wrecked that strategy in an instant. Europe is learning quickly that the only way to curtail Russia's energy control is to compete with it. A new energy war is about to begin.

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THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE TORY CLIMATE CRUSADE

Britain's Conservative Party tried to exploit global warming alarmism. It backfired enormously. Lesson learned?

Britain's Conservative Party has surged to an historic 22-point opinion-poll lead over the incumbent Labour Party. This turnabout has followed an energetic campaign by the Tory leader, David Cameron, to wrench the party out of its ideological comfort zone and overhaul its public image. Cameron has indeed handled many issues deftly. However, his initial attempt to spark a bidding war over climate alarmism backfired enormously, and it should serve as a warning to other Western political parties that are trying to burnish their green credentials.

From the moment he was elected Conservative leader in 2005, Cameron was eager to woo the upper-class voters who had shunned the party in the post-Thatcher era. He chose to make environmental policy the focus of his stylistic revolution, and he commissioned Zac Goldsmith (a fellow Eton graduate and director of The Ecologist magazine) to chair a "Quality of Life" policy group. Goldsmith, an heir to a billion-dollar fortune and well-known green activist, claimed "an invitation to be radical."

Goldsmith's policy group soon unleashed a fury of impractical ideas. It proposed placing prohibitive taxes on landfill and big cars, halting investment in air and road infrastructure, taxing parking at out-of-town malls, and even mandating that car advertisements include emissions statistics. The Conservative MP Tim Yeo, who chairs the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, declared that domestic plane flights should be taxed out of existence. (Yeo boasted that he now travels to Scotland by train "as a matter of conscience.")

Without doing much to appeal to suburbanites interested in clean rivers and parks, the new Tory agenda threatened the low-cost flights that had only recently made European travel affordable for millions. It also confirmed the suspicion of many working-class voters that the Conservatives were rich elitists who cared little about job loss.

While many of the Tories' environmental proposals were harmlessly ridiculous and had no real prospect of enactment, the empty rhetoric proved very costly. The Labour government, refusing to let the Conservative Party claim the mantle of environmental champion, swung left on the issue. The failure of environmental taxes to change behavior was taken as a sign that those taxes should be raised even further. Big increases in annual road taxes were rolled out; drivers of Honda Accords will owe over $500 per year by 2010-11. Taxes on gasoline went up, forcing motorists to pay nearly $9 a gallon. Meanwhile, taxes on plane flights were doubled, despite evidence that such a change may actually increase emissions.

British leaders have long struggled to convince the public that significant resources should be allocated to fight climate change. Yet the burgeoning global warming industry-a motley assortment of activists and NGOs-has relentlessly driven its agenda through bureaucratic and legal channels that are cut off from democratic accountability. Further insulated from political attack by Cameron's green posturing, the climate change alarmists were able to set the terms of the debate.

While most peer-reviewed cost-benefit analyses of climate change tend to find that the costs of global warming do not merit a radical and immediate shift away from carbon-based fuels, moderate anti-carbon policies have failed to satisfy the demands of climate activists. In response to the inconvenient economics, the Labour government decided to base all its policymaking on a Treasury study by Nicholas Stern. The Stern report used an extremely low discount rate to grossly magnify the future environmental costs of climate change.

Yet, far from rebuking this folly, the Conservative Party's Quality of Life policy group criticised the Stern report for tolerating too much planetary warming. As the Labour government advocated a 60 percent reduction in British carbon emissions by the year 2050, the Tories shot back with a demand that the nation roll back 80 percent of its emissions by that time. This merely upped the ante. The third-party Liberal Democrats responded with a call for complete decarbonization-a 100 percent reduction in emissions. No matter how hard the Tories tried, they could never "out-green" their rivals on the left.

The popular press were less indulgent of such nonsense, and many media outlets lampooned the proposed climate initiatives. Voters did not like having wealthy politicians lecture them on the demerits of prosperity, and every green policy that the Tories promoted was greeted with derision or worse. When the Tory Quality of Life group's disastrous report was eventually released in September 2007, the Conservatives were in disarray. They were so far behind in the opinion polls that Prime Minister Gordon Brown even considered calling an early election.

Cameron had no choice but to change tack. The recovery that saw the Tories rise to their present poll lead began with a call to significantly reduce the inheritance tax. This was followed by proposals for comprehensive school choice and welfare reform. The Conservatives also suggested some tough new anti-crime initiatives. The idea that proved most useful in de-stigmatizing the Tory brand was a plan to rebuild poverty-stricken communities in disadvantaged areas.

To be sure, the Conservatives have also benefited from a complete collapse of popular support for the Labour government. Indeed, this has been perhaps the biggest factor in the Tories' resurgence. The British economy has faltered, and voters have become less tolerant of fiscal extravagance. They are especially angry about an increase in the annual car tax, which was sold as a green measure. In a recent YouGov poll commissioned by the TaxPayers' Alliance, 63 percent agreed with this statement: "politicians are not serious about the environment and are using the issue as an excuse to raise more revenue from green taxes." When a recent Mori poll asked voters to name important issues facing Great Britain, only 7 percent cited the environment, while 42 percent named immigration and 35 percent said crime.

None of this is to say that conservatives should neglect the environment. Over the past few months, Cameron has been trumpeting a more holistic environmentalism, arguing that being green is "not just about the stratosphere, it's about the street corner." He stresses the need to eliminate graffiti and cut crime in local parks. While there is little public appetite for raising energy taxes or overhauling the British economy to deal with climate change, there is widespread support for boosting investment in green-friendly technologies, and the Tories are well-placed to advance this.

The recent success of the Conservative Party has owed little to quixotic environmentalism, and almost every Tory attempt to play the green card has been a disaster. The party seems to have learned its lesson, and is now embracing a results-driven conservation policy that defends green spaces and promotes the development of efficient clean-energy technologies. While the climate debate is often dominated by clamorous activists, ordinary voters tend to favor a more pragmatic approach. If the Tories want to maintain their huge lead over Labour, that is the type of approach they should endorse.

Source




Prominent Australian conservative says Oz must go nuclear

AUSTRALIA must embrace nuclear power to cut greenhouse gases, argues a Liberal [Party] frontbencher who warns coal-fired power generation is deadlier. In the strongest pro-nuclear remarks since former prime minister John Howard left politics, Coalition trade spokesman Ian Macfarlane says Australia "must get real" on nuclear energy to tackle climate change. "If we are serious about reducing global greenhouse emissions, the nuclear option is one we cannot ignore," the Queensland Liberal MP will say in a speech tonight.

Mr Macfarlane's comments will be seized on by the Rudd Government, which believes the Coalition harbours a secret plan to resurrect Mr Howard's nuclear framework. They will not be welcomed by sections of the Liberal Party - including senior frontbenchers - who also believe nuclear is political poison.

In a mining speech in Brisbane tonight, Mr Macfarlane will argue the Government "must include" nuclear in any future base-load energy mix. He will argue that nuclear must be "among the first options worthy of consideration" as Australia decides the best way to tackle climate change. "The biggest gains in cutting greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in the shortest possible time and at the lowest cost and least economic risk will come from nuclear power," Mr Macfarlane will say. "It's a black and white answer. Or should I say black and yellow answer. Clean coal and yellowcake - we must include nuclear in our future base-load clean energy mix."

The Coalition's position on nuclear power has been confused since the election, when Labor ran an effective scare campaign on the prospect of 25 nuclear reactors. Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson appeared to shift position on the volatile issue in December - but some other frontbenchers believe nuclear should remain on the table. Other Liberal MPs, such as Opposition defence spokesman Nick Minchin, are very cool towards nuclear power, believing it is politically unpopular.

Mr Macfarlane says deaths from nuclear power generation "are less than half a percent of the total" of deaths attributed to the coal-fired power sector.

Source

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

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18 August, 2008

Prominent climate alarmist concedes (ungraciously) defeat to climate realist in rare debate

A debate between the Right Honourable The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Richard Littlemore of alarmist blog DeSmogBlog.com. Being intellectually outgunned by a senior member (A Viscount ranks above a Baron and below an Earl) of the hereditary British aristocracy must REALLY hurt. Note: DeSmogBlog's Littlemore is just the latest alarmist to get demolished like a tomato in a real debate. See U.S. Senate Report: Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming Believers in Heated NYC Debate --March 16, 2007

See this website to listen to the August 17, 2008 full audio of debate of Monckton vs. Littlemore and read the comments confirming yet another stunning victory for those skeptical of a man-made claims catastrophe: Excerpt:

"I'd have to say that Monckton 'won' the debate. He came across as more prepared and had answers at his fingertips, whereas Richard appeared to verbally stumble on occasion."

In addition, this website sympathetic to Littlemore was brutal in it's view of the smackdown that Littlemore got from Monckton. Excerpt:

"I got the impression that Littlemore was engaging in the debate totally unprepared."

No wonder Al Gore has refused all challenges to debate global warming!

Excerpt from Littlemore's concession speech:

"In hindsight, I played perfectly into the hands of Monckton and his happy radio host, Roy Green, who share the same goal - not to win an argument about global warming science, but merely to show that there still IS an argument. Of course there's not. But while we danced angels around the head of a pin, I can imagine Green's listeners thinking, "Oh my. This is very confusing. No wonder the government says it's too early to take action." Score one for Monckton....

It was also a tactical error to start pointing people to helpful websites with clear graphs and reliable science that could support my position. It left open the possibility for Monckton to say, "I could produce 35 graphs" to the contrary - which fiction then drifted to the listeners as if it were, well, accurate in the real world.

Thanks (and my apologies) to those of you who volunteered some much-preferable debating strategies. Maybe next time.

Source




Coral Calcification and Photosynthesis in a CO2-Enriched World of the Future

Many are the people who have predicted that rates of coral calcification, as well as the photosynthetic rates of their symbiotic algae, will dramatically decline in response to what they typically refer to as an acidification of the world's oceans, as the atmosphere's CO2 concentration continues to rise in the years, decades and centuries to come (see Calcification (Corals) in our Subject Index). As ever more pertinent evidence accumulates, however, the true story appears to be just the opposite of what these climate alarmists continue to tell us.

A case in point is the recent study of Herfort et al. (2008), who note that an increase in atmospheric CO2 will cause an increase in the abundance of HCO3- (bicarbonate) ions and dissolved CO2, and who report that several studies on marine plants have observed "increased photosynthesis with higher than ambient DIC [dissolved inorganic carbon] concentrations," citing the works of Gao et al. (1993), Weis (1993), Beer and Rehnberg (1997), Marubini and Thake (1998), Mercado et al. (2001, 2003), Herfort et al. (2002) and Zou et al. (2003).

To further explore this subject, and to see what it might imply for coral calcification, the three researchers employed a wide range of bicarbonate concentrations "to monitor the kinetics of bicarbonate use in both photosynthesis and calcification in two reef-building corals, Porites porites and Acropora sp." This work revealed that additions of HCO3- to synthetic seawater continued to increase the calcification rate of Porites porites until the bicarbonate concentration exceeded three times that of seawater, while photosynthetic rates of the coral's symbiotic algae were stimulated by HCO3- addition until they became saturated at twice the normal HCO3- concentration of seawater.

Similar experiments conducted on Indo-Pacific Acropora sp. showed that calcification and photosynthetic rates in these corals were enhanced to an even greater extent, with calcification continuing to increase above a quadrupling of the HCO3- concentration and photosynthesis saturating at triple the concentration of seawater. In addition, they monitored calcification rates of the Acropora sp. in the dark, and, in their words, "although these were lower than in the light for a given HCO3- concentration, they still increased dramatically with HCO3- addition, showing that calcification in this coral is light stimulated but not light dependent."

In discussing the significance of their findings, Herfort et al. suggest, as we have long contended (Idso et al., 2000), that "hermatypic corals incubated in the light achieve high rates of calcification by the synergistic action of photosynthesis [our italics]," which, as they have shown, is enhanced by elevated concentrations of HCO3- ions that come courtesy of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.

As for the real-world implications of their work, the three researchers note that over the next century the predicted increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration "will result in about a 15% increase in oceanic HCO3-," and they say that this development "could stimulate photosynthesis and calcification in a wide variety of hermatypic corals." This well-supported conclusion stands in stark contrast to the outworn contention of the world's climate alarmists that continued increases in the air's CO2 content will, as restated by Herfort et al., "cause a reduction in coral growth and planktonic calcification." This claim, as they and many others have now demonstrated, is about as far from the truth as it could possibly be.

Source

Note: My favourite Pilsener, Lubos Motl, also has a good demolition of the "ocean acidification" scare.




Prince Charles wrong on GM, says British government minister

A senior minister has accused Prince Charles of "ignoring" the needs of starving people in the developing world by attacking genetically modified crops. Phil Woolas, the environment minister, said it was "easy for those with plentiful food" to ignore Third World hunger. He told The Sunday Telegraph that the Government would press ahead with GM crop trials and look at moving to a more "liberal" regime in Britain, unless scientific evidence showed that the crops had done harm.

The defiant stance came days after the Prince called GM a "gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong". The Prince told The Daily Telegraph last week that future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land.

Ministers were privately furious about the attack, which they believe risks becoming a constitutional crisis. One Labour source said the Prince had "overstepped the mark". Mr Woolas said: "I'm grateful to Prince Charles for raising the issue. He raises some very important doubts that are held by many people. But government ministers have a responsibility to base policy on science and I do strongly believe that we have a moral responsibility to the developing world to ask the question: can GM crops help? "It's easy for those of us with plentiful food supplies to ignore the issue, but we have a responsibility to use science to help the less well off where we can. I'm asking to see the evidence. If it has been a disaster, then please provide the evidence."

Mr Woolas disputed the Prince's claim that the crops had caused climate change, adding: "I don't understand the reasoning behind the assertion that this is dangerous for climate change."

While Mr Woolas chose his words carefully, privately ministers are furious. Gordon Brown is said to be determined that anti-GM campaigners will not dictate his policy. The destruction of a GM trial in North Yorkshire two months ago is said to have hardened his stance. A Labour source said: "Usually we welcome Prince Charles's contributions to various debates, but on this issue he seems to have overstepped the mark."

Mr Woolas said the Government will base its future strategy on a number of tests, the crucial one being: "Should the UK change our policy on GM to one that is more liberal?" He added: "The Government has not got a predetermined decision."

Sources close to the Prince stressed that he had not been trying to cause a political row. "This was in no way an attempt to lay down a challenge to Government policy. The Prince's considerable interests in the environment are non-political: he simply cares for the future."

Prof John Wibberley, of the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, has offered support to the Prince. "The Prince of Wales is a very welcome champion of farmers not only nationally but internationally. As a farmer himself, he is all too aware of the brilliance that most possess in cherishing the countryside and their farms," he said.

Source




Student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags

Even a kid was able to falsify the frequent Greenie claim that plastic bags are not biodegradable. Will it influence the plastic bag hysteria? Probably not. Fantasies of heroism trump reality any day

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true. After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them. Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life. "Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags." The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic -- not an easy task because they don't exist in high numbers in nature. First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture. Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

That wasn't good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation. Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce. Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas.

A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.

Next, Burd tested his strains' effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow. At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks. The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn't tried that yet.

To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too. Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. "All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags." The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide -- each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd. "This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We're using nature to solve a man-made problem."

Source




Free trade would deliver the benefits that Warmism cannot

If just a fraction of the energies devoted to promoting Warmism were diverted into promoting free trade, there would be real and very large benefits -- but the world mostly chases after the illusion rather than the reality. As T.S. Eliot said in "Four Quartets", "humankind cannot stand very much reality"

By Bjorn Lomborg

Last month, the Doha negotiations, broke down, ostensibly over a technicality. In reality, the talks collapsed because nobody was willing to take the political short-term hit by offending inefficient farmers and coddled domestic industries in order to create greater long-term benefits for virtually everyone.

And they broke down because we really don't care. After a few exasperated editorials, the world has pretty much dropped the subject and gone back to its usual concerns. This is foolish. Establishing significantly freer trade would help the world combat almost all of its biggest problems. For an astonishingly low cost, we could improve education and health conditions, make the poorest people richer, and help everybody become better able to tackle the future.

We have known for centuries that free trade almost always benefits both parties. The economist David Ricardo pointed out in 1817 that both Britain and Portugal would benefit if they exploited their comparative advantages. Portugal could produce wine cheaply, whereas Britain could produce cloth much more cheaply than wine. By selling cloth and buying wine, Great Britain obtains more of both, as does Portugal. The same holds true today, when countries, doing what they do best, produce more and exchange it for more of all other goods.

Yet today, with international trade talks stalled and protectionist rhetoric rising, we are instead moving towards building bigger trade barriers. These barriers are supported by deep-pocketed corporations and lobby groups, and defended by politicians who are scared that the redistribution of jobs, income and wealth resulting from freer trade will reduce their chances of remaining in power.

When the Doha trade round was launched shortly after September 11, 2001, there was plenty of international goodwill. But a recent poll in the US and Europe found people nearly three times more likely to say that globalisation is negative rather than positive. Recently, the Copenhagen Consensus project gathered some of the world's leading economists to decide how to do the most good for the planet in a world of finite resources. The panel - including five Nobel laureates - found that one of the single best actions the planet could take would be completing the Doha negotiations. They based their conclusions on new research for the Copenhagen Consensus project by Australian economist Kym Anderson. Anderson showed that if developing countries cut their tariffs by the same proportion as high-income countries, and services and investment were also liberalised, the annual global gains could climb to $US120 billion ($137 billion), with $US17 billion going to the world's poorest countries by 2015.

This is a respectable sum, and certainly a benefit that the international community should try to achieve. But what we often fail to realise is that the story only starts here. As economies open up, as countries do what they do best, competition and innovation drive up rates of growth.

More competition means that previously sheltered companies must shape up and become more productive, innovating simply to survive. Having more open economies allows more trade in innovation, so that new companies can almost instantly use smart ideas from around the globe. Instead of every closed market having to reinvent the wheel, once is enough to get everyone's economy going. This means that over time, the advantage of moving towards freer trade grows dramatically bigger: the $US120 billion benefit in 2015 grows to many trillions of dollars of annual benefits by the end of the century. And the benefits would increasingly accrue to the developing world, which would achieve the biggest boosts to growth rates.

We have seen three very visible cases of such growth boosts in three different decades. South Korea liberalised trade in 1965, Chile in 1974, and India in 1991; all saw annual growth rates increase by several percentage points thereafter.

If we recast these benefits as annual instalments, a realistic Doha outcome could increase global income by more than $US3 trillion every year throughout this century. And about $US2.5 trillion annually would go to today's developing countries every year, or $US500 a year on average for each individual in the Third World, almost half of whom now survive on less than $US2 a day. There would, of course, be costs. Freer trade would force some industries to downsize or close, although more industries would expand, and for some people and communities, the transition would be difficult. Yet the overall benefits of a successful Doha Round would likely be hundreds of times greater than these costs.

It is interesting to contrast global scepticism about free trade with support for expensive, inefficient methods to combat global warming. Many argue that we should act, even if such action will have no benefit for the next decades, because it will help lessen the impact of global warming by the century's end. But free trade also promises few benefits now and huge benefits in the future. Moreover, if we could stop global warming (which we can't), the benefit for future generations would be one-tenth or less of the benefit of freer trade (which we certainly can achieve). Still, there are few celebrity campaigners calling on politicians to sort out the Doha Round. Fear about free trade leaves the planet at risk of missing out on the benefits that it offers.

Free trade is good not only for big corporations, or for job growth. It is simply good.

Source




Australia: 'Carbon tax bad governance,' says agricultural scientist

The Rudd government's carbon pollution tax is based on non-scientific and theoretical computer modeling and does not make good governance at a time of rising inflation, global food shortages and increasing export uncompetitiveness due to rising cost and freight pressures. That's the view of agricultural scientist John Williams - a researcher, author and educator who is studying for a PhD at the University of Melbourne.

Mr Williams said there are `strong and powerful counter-arguments' to the theories on global warming and carbon trading that are not being fully considered. Drawing on a chorus of disbelief from a growing number of scientists, Mr Williams said "there is no proof that carbon dioxide is causing or precedes global warming". "All indications are that the minor warming cycle finished in 2001 and that Arctic ice melting is related to cyclical orbit-tilt-axis changes in earth's angle to the sun."

Yet in the government's pursuit of a carbon trading scheme, Mr Williams said there was likely to be economic distortion, higher costs, investment disincentives and taxpayer-funded subsidies. He says any carbon trading scheme is likely to have a heavy impact on agriculture by:

Causing economic distortions, such as favouring imports over export industries (despite huge government subsidies to exporters which will attract World Trade Organisation [WTO] attention).

Penalising resource industries (and Australia's comparative advantage).

Compensating road transport, thereby discriminating against less-polluting rail transport.

Replacing highly productive cropping farmland in high-rainfall zones with tree plantations, reducing cropping agriculture and confining it to the less fertile lower-rainfall areas at a time of global food shortages and rising food prices.

Discriminating against animal industries which comprise one of the most successful Australian export industries.

Discriminating between farmers based on soil type.

Discriminating against consumers, who will bear the brunt of the costs through higher energy and food costs.

Mr Williams says the likely outcome of these economic distortions will be:

Increasing export uncompetitiveness at a time of record global shipping freight rates.

A worsening trade deficit which will necessitate persistent high interest rates to attract balancing foreign capital inflows.

Reduced investment in energy and rail industries.

Coal demand decreasing, which will lower prices and provide signals to buyers that the resource boom may be over;

Depressing rural communities even further, as long-term tree investment cannot replace short-term crop revenue cash-flows; and

Increasing cost pressures boosting prices and inflation for consumers already encountering economic difficulties.

He says shifting animals from pasture to higher protein feeds will exacerbate food shortages and higher prices. "As more than 80pc of Australian exports are price-taking commodities, any carbon emissions cost is going to be borne by the domestic producer and exporter, and require large compensation under any carbon trading scheme," Mr Williams said. "This compensation will be seen as a producer subsidy under WTO guidelines at a time when Australia is supposed to be leading by good example in freer trade for the rest of the world."

He said governments worldwide had spent $50 billion on global warming research since 1990, with no evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming. "All this cost is borne by taxpayers yet where exactly are the benefits beyond normal pollution control regulations?"

He also questioned what incentive there was for farmers to increase organic carbon in the soil, only to sell it off as carbon credits and become managers of it for someone else. And he asked what would happen if soil carbon levels dropped due to drought, fire, flood or crop rotations. "Farmers could be forced into bankruptcy by having to refund money they do not have."

He said increased rural land values caused by demand from industries seeking carbon credits through forestation programs was only going to distract farmers from producing food, cause uncertainty in investment decisions and entice them to seek short-term property sale benefits.

Rural towns would also struggle from a lack of money (from reduced production revenues) and decreased investment at a time when farms are being replaced by long-term forests. "To introduce a new high-cost system based on fear and feeding off superstition does not make good fiscal governance when there are serious economic distortions, measurement difficulties, investment disincentives, potential carbon market liquidity problems and a low probability of achieving any benefits in energy reduction or environment improvement," Mr Williams said. "Without a similar cost scheme for Australia's major export competitors, the outcome could be economic suicide for exporters in terms of loss of international competitiveness."

Source

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

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17 August, 2008

Desperation time: Forget Global Warming -- The Oxygen Crisis Threatens human survival

A brand new scare. The lack of warming and the collapse of the agw fear machine is leading to new causes. We may soon see the creation of a new UN IPOC - Intergovernmental Panel on Oxygen Crisis. The author of the screed below, Peter Tatchell, is best known as a homosexual activist. He appears to base his latest cry for attention on the contents of an as-yet unwritten book

The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. [This is risible. Gaseous diffusion is very rapid. A huge difference like this in Oxygen concentration between city and country is impossible] This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis.

I am not a scientist, but this seems a reasonable concern. It is a possibility that we should examine and assess. So, what's the evidence? Around 10,000 years ago, the planet's forest cover was at least twice what it is today, which means that forests are now emitting only half the amount of oxygen. Desertification and deforestation are rapidly accelerating this long-term loss of oxygen sources. The story at sea is much the same. Nasa reports that in the north Pacific ocean oxygen-producing phytoplankton concentrations are 30% lower today, compared to the 1980s. This is a huge drop in just three decades.

Moreover, the UN environment programme confirmed in 2004 that there were nearly 150 "dead zones" in the world's oceans where discharged sewage and industrial waste, farm fertiliser run-off and other pollutants have reduced oxygen levels to such an extent that most or all sea creatures can no longer live there. This oxygen starvation is reducing regional fish stocks and diminishing the food supplies of populations that are dependent on fishing. It also causes genetic mutations and hormonal changes that can affect the reproductive capacity of sea life, which could further diminish global fish supplies.

Professor Robert Berner of Yale University has researched oxygen levels in prehistoric times by chemically analysing air bubbles trapped in fossilised tree amber. He suggests that humans breathed a much more oxygen-rich air 10,000 years ago.

Further back, the oxygen levels were even greater. Robert Sloan has listed the percentage of oxygen in samples of dinosaur-era amber as: 28% (130m years ago), 29% (115m years ago), 35% (95m years ago), 33% (88m years ago), 35% (75m years ago), 35% (70m years ago), 35% (68m years ago), 31% (65.2m years ago), and 29% (65m years ago).

Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University and Professor Jon Harrison of the University of Arizona concur. Like most other scientists they accept that oxygen levels in the atmosphere in prehistoric times averaged around 30% to 35%, compared to only 21% today - and that the levels are even less in densely populated, polluted city centres and industrial complexes, perhaps only 15 % or lower.

Much of this recent, accelerated change is down to human activity, notably the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels. The Professor of Geological Sciences at Notre Dame University in Indiana, J Keith Rigby, was quoted in 1993-1994 as saying:

In the 20th century, humanity has pumped increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning the carbon stored in coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the process, we've also been consuming oxygen and destroying plant life - cutting down forests at an alarming rate and thereby short-circuiting the cycle's natural rebound. We're artificially slowing down one process and speeding up another, forcing a change in the atmosphere.

Very interesting. But does this decline in oxygen matter? Are there any practical consequences that we ought to be concerned about? What is the effect of lower oxygen levels on the human body? Does it disrupt and impair our immune systems and therefore make us more prone to cancer and degenerative diseases?

Surprisingly, no significant research has been done, perhaps on the following presumption: the decline in oxygen levels has taken place over millions of years of our planet's existence. The changes during the shorter period of human life have also been slow and incremental - until the last two centuries of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. Surely, this mostly gradual decline has allowed the human body to evolve and adapt to lower concentrations of oxygen? Maybe, maybe not.

The pace of oxygen loss is likely to have speeded up massively in the last three decades, with the industrialisation of China, India, South Korea and other countries, and as a consequence of the massive worldwide increase in the burning of fossil fuels.

In the view of Professor Ervin Laszlo, the drop in atmospheric oxygen has potentially serious consequences. A UN advisor who has been a professor of philosophy and systems sciences, Laszlo writes:

Evidence from prehistoric times indicates that the oxygen content of pristine nature was above the 21% of total volume that it is today. It has decreased in recent times due mainly to the burning of coal in the middle of the last century. Currently the oxygen content of the Earth's atmosphere dips to 19% over impacted areas, and it is down to 12 to 17% over the major cities. At these levels it is difficult for people to get sufficient oxygen to maintain bodily health: it takes a proper intake of oxygen to keep body cells and organs, and the entire immune system, functioning at full efficiency. At the levels we have reached today cancers and other degenerative diseases are likely to develop. And at 6 to 7% life can no longer be sustained.

Scaremongering? I don't think so. A reason for doomsaying? Not yet. What is needed is an authoritative evidence-based investigation to ascertain current oxygen levels and what consequences, if any, there are for the long-term wellbeing of our species - and, indeed, of all species.

Source

UPDATE: An emailed comment from Prof. Roy Spencer of UAH below.

"It doesn't get much more stupid than this. The O2 concentration of the atmosphere has been measured off and on for about 100 years now, and the concentration (20.95%) has not varied within the accuracy of the measurements. Only in recent years have more precise measurement techniques been developed, and the tiny decrease in O2 with increasing CO2 has been actually measured....but I believe the O2 concentration is still 20.95%....maybe it's down to 20.94% by now...I'm not sure.

There is SO much O2 in the atmosphere, it is believed to not be substantially affected by vegetation, but it is the result of geochemistry in deep-ocean sediments...no one really knows for sure.

Since too much O2 is not good for humans, the human body keeps O2 concentrations down around 5% in our major organs. Extra O2 can give you a burst of energy, but it will harm you (or kill you) if the exposure is too long.

It has been estimated that global wildfire risk would increase greatly if O2 concentrations were much more than they are now.

To say there is an impending "oxygen crisis" is the epitome of fear mongering."

Update 2: I think Lubos Motl has the final word on the matter




August 'one of the coldest on record' for Australia

August 2008 continues to be one of the coldest on record for most of Australia with temperatures averaging as much as six degrees below normal.

The cold weather has even spread to northern Queensland with Burketown dropping to five degrees on Saturday morning for the first time in 24 years. On the Queensland coast Coolangatta has now dropped to five or less on 10 consecutive mornings, easily beating the old record of six.

Daytime has brought little relief with Orange shivering through 10 consecutive days below eight degrees for the first time in 17 years.

The prolonged cold spell is due to a strong high pressure system anchored south of WA. The high is directing southerly winds over the country, carrying cold air from the Southern Ocean well north into the tropics.

The high will finally move east early next week but a second high will maintain chilly weather until at least Sunday.

Source




Canada endures 'briefest summer' in decades

Summer, we hardly knew ye. Even the sunniest optimist can't deny the signs. It's all but over. Area fall fairs start today. The CNE is under way. (Both, no doubt, doomed to storms that are both unforecast and torrential.) What, you say summer doesn't officially end until 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 22? Only if you're an astronomer. Back-to-school ads are out, retailers licking their chops in anticipation that Christmas is virtually around the corner. Soon sweaty Olympians will be replaced on TV by sweatier Jerry Lewis, the Ticats thump the Argos on Labour Day weekend, and the wet, brief, Summer of Woe-Eight is history. Has any summer felt shorter? And why does it matter? What is it about summer that so often breaks our hearts?

If you measure the season by blue sky and sunshine, this has been the briefest summer since perhaps the oppressive gloom and cold of the summer of 1992. It's not so much the total rainfall this season -- although Hamilton has indeed had at least 10 centimetres more rain than average, and three times more than last summer. No, it's more about timing. Summer is about the weekend. Last year, to this point in the summer, Hamilton had measurable rainfall on a total of four Saturdays or Sundays. This summer? Sixteen -- rain on 16 Saturdays or Sundays. Put another way, last summer there were seven totally dry weekends, this summer, just one (July 4-5).

Worst of all, the weather has been maddeningly schizophrenic, storm clouds on the periphery seemingly every day, and forecasts as scientific as a Ouija board. "If it's bright all day, or rains all day, it's easy to plan, but we've seen the weather changing on a dime, by the hour," said Dave Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, who is quick to assert that forecasters "never promise anything."

As if to compound frustration over the summer that wasn't, there is nothing convenient on which to blame the weather, not global warming, El Nino or El Nina. The cave-like summer of 1992 -- perhaps the worst ever for cloud and cold -- was attributed to atmospheric fallout of dust from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines the year prior. And this summer? There's no identifiable cause for our season of discontent, other than we have for some reason been trapped beneath what is called an "upper low," an oxymoronic disturbance parked over the James Bay-Central Quebec area that moves around a bit but never really exits, refusing to spin north or east, which would allow for the arrival of dry warm air from the southern United States.....

Expectations for a bright and warm 2008 season were no doubt influenced by last summer, which was abnormally dry and hot. It skewed our perception of what summer should be. But then, summer has always been less about reality than it is about magic.

Source




Global Warming: Solving an Environmental Problem or Creating a Social Crisis?

By William Kininmonth of Melbourne, Australia. William Kininmonth is a former head of Australia's National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organization. Kininmonth points out that it is only unrealistic figures fed into climate models that produce worrying projections

Prevention of dangerous climate change, particularly through implementation of a national carbon pollution reduction scheme, has emerged as a primary policy objective of the Rudd government. The rationale for the policy is the scientific assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its computer-based projections of global warming. We are told by the IPCC `consensus of scientists' that continued burning of fossil fuels, and a range of other industry activities that increase the concentration of `greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere, will lead to dangerous climate change, possibly passing a `tipping point' causing `runaway global warming'. What does this all mean, really?

The IPCC's most recent assessment attempts to be helpful to the casual enquirer by having a series of explanations for `frequently asked questions', or FAQs. The first FAQ is `What factors determine earth's climate'? We are informed that, on average, the earth emits 240 w m-2 of radiation to space and that this equates to an emission temperature of -19oC. The earth's temperature, however, is about 14oC and the -19oC temperature is found at a height of about 5 km above the surface. To quote the IPCC: "The reason the earth's surface is this warm is the presence of greenhouse gases, which act as a partial blanket for the longwave radiation coming from the earth's surface. This blanketing is known as the natural greenhouse effect".

This explanation by the IPCC is clearly misleading, if not wrong. The inference that the greenhouse gases are acting like a blanket suggests that they are increasing the insulating properties of the atmosphere. However, the main gases of the atmosphere are oxygen and nitrogen, non-greenhouse gases, and they are also excellent insulators against the conduction of heat (like a blanket); adding additional trace amounts of carbon dioxide will have no appreciable impact on the insulating properties of the atmosphere.

In its third FAQ, `What is the greenhouse effect?' the IPCC comes to the nub of the issue but provides a different and equally misleading explanation. "Much of the thermal radiation emitted by the land and the ocean is absorbed by the atmosphere, including clouds, and reradiated back to earth. This is called the greenhouse effect". According to the IPCC's global energy budget, the surface emits 390 W m-2 of radiation and the energy radiated back to the surface is 324 W m-2. It is difficult to see how an ongoing net loss of longwave radiation energy from the surface of 66 W m-2 can lead to warming! Indeed, we are all aware that between dusk and dawn the earth's surface cools.

The IPCC has not explained in a scientifically sound and coherent way, how the `greenhouse effect' is maintained. The greenhouse gases do not increase the insulating properties of the atmosphere and the back radiation does not warm the surface. The IPCC explanation of the greenhouse effect is obfuscation and, even to the mildly scientific literate, reflects ignorance of basic processes of the climate system.

How then do we explain to people who are going to be affected by reactionary government policies what are the greenhouse effect and its enhancement by additional carbon dioxide?

A credible explanation has no need for smoke and mirrors. The energy flow through the climate system is predominantly by way of four stages: 1) absorption of solar radiation at the surface; 2) conduction of heat and evaporation of latent energy from the surface to the atmospheric boundary layer; 3) convective overturning that distributes heat and latent energy through the troposphere; and 4) radiation of energy from the atmosphere to space. We will see that it is the characteristics of convective overturning that keep the surface warmer than it would otherwise be.

The Kiehl and Trenberth (1997) global average energy budget of the earth is used by the IPCC and is a useful starting point for explanation of the establishment and maintenance of the greenhouse effect. Of the 340 units of solar radiation entering the earth's atmosphere, 67 are absorbed by the atmosphere and 168 are absorbed at the surface. There is thus an ongoing source of solar energy available to the atmosphere and the surface. At the surface there is a net accumulation of radiation energy because the incoming solar radiation (168 units) exceeds the net loss of longwave radiation (66 units).

In the atmospheric layer there is absorption of 417 units (390 of emission from the surface, less 40 that go directly to space, plus absorption of 67 of solar radiation) and an emission of 519 units (324 back to the surface and 195 direct emission to space). The net effect of the interaction between the greenhouse gases and radiation is a tendency to cool the atmosphere because it is continually losing energy.

Overall there is a dichotomy, with radiation processes firstly tending to warm the earth's surface and secondly tending to cool the atmosphere. Air is an excellent insulator against conduction of heat and will not transfer heat through the atmosphere, as is necessary for energy balance. Also, the thermodynamic properties of air (potential temperature increases with height) ensure that turbulent motions of the atmosphere will mix energy downward, not upward as required.

The process for transferring energy from the surface to the atmosphere, necessary to achieve overall energy balance of the climate system, was explained by Herbert Riehl and Joanne Malkus (the latter better known as Joanne Simpson) in a 1958 paper, On the heat balance of the equatorial trough zone (Geophysica). Riehl and Malkus noted that boundary layer air, rising buoyantly in the protected updraughts of deep tropical convection clouds, converts heat and latent energy to potential energy. Away from the convection, compensating subsidence converts potential energy to heat.

What is implied in the Riehl and Malkus model is that deep tropical convection, and the transfer of energy from the surface to the atmosphere, will not take place without buoyant updraughts within deep convection clouds. That is, there is a need for the temperature of the atmosphere to decrease with altitude and that the rate of decrease of temperature must be sufficient to allow buoyancy of the air ascending in the updraughts. From well-known thermodynamic laws, the rate of decrease of temperature must be at least 6.5oC/km to allow the buoyancy forces of convection to overcome the natural stratification of the atmosphere.

The climate system will come into energy equilibrium when temperatures are such that the net solar radiation absorbed is balanced by the longwave radiation to space. At equilibrium, the greenhouse effect (ie, that the average surface temperature of 14oC is greater than the -19oC blackbody emission temperature of earth) is an outcome from the need for convective overturning of the atmosphere.

Additional warming of the surface will come about when the greenhouse effect is enhanced. The fundamental question is how much warming will additional greenhouse gas concentrations cause and will it be dangerous?

An increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration reduces the emission of longwave radiation to space and increases the back radiation at the surface. An increase in back radiation adds energy to the surface, which will further warm the surface. However there is a constraint on the surface temperature rise because of the commensurate increase in rate of energy loss from the surface: both the rate of infrared emission and the rate of evaporation of latent heat increase with temperature.

The increase in radiation emission from the surface can be calculated from the well-known Boltzmann equation and is 5.4 units/oC at 15oC. The earth's surface is mainly ocean or freely transpiring vegetation and evaporation will increase near exponentially with temperature according to the Claussius-Clapeyron relationship and is 6.0 units/oC at 15oC. According to the IPCC, the radiative forcing from doubling of carbon dioxide concentration is 3.7 units. The actual surface temperature increase is derived from the ratio of the radiation forcing (3.7) to the natural rate of increase in surface energy loss with temperature (5.4 + 6.0). The direct surface temperature rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide is therefore 3.7/(5.4 + 6.0) = 0.3oC.

A 0.3oC global temperature increase towards the end of the 21st century from a doubling of current carbon dioxide concentration is not obviously dangerous. However, what also needs to be taken into account is the positive feedback. A warming of the surface temperature will cause a warming of the overlying atmosphere, an increase in the water vapour concentration (another naturally occurring greenhouse gas), a further increase in back radiation, and an incremental increase in surface temperature. Each successive incremental surface temperature increase will cause another incremental temperature increase through the positive feedback amplification.

The amplification follows standard mathematical treatment and, as long as the ratio r is less than unity, the gain is given by [1 / (1 - r)]. Here r is the ratio of natural increase in back radiation with temperature (4.8 units/oC - estimated from a standard radiation transfer model) to the natural increase of surface energy loss with temperature (as previously, 11.4 units/oC). The natural gain is 1.7 and increases the surface temperature rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration from 0.3oC to 0.5oC.

A 0.5oC increase in global temperature over the coming century is within recent short-term temperature variability and is less than the apparent global temperature rise of the past century. Moreover, both the direct forcing of surface temperature and the amplification gain are tightly constrained by the magnitude of the natural increase of surface energy loss with temperature increase. It is not immediately apparent how `runaway global warming' could come about with such a constraint.

A fundamental question arises as to why the IPCC global temperature projections for doubling carbon dioxide concentration, based on computer models of the climate system, lead to estimates of about 3oC, or about six times the above estimate.

A clue to the conundrum can be found in published descriptions of the performance of the computer models used in the IPCC fourth assessment. Isaac Held and Brian Soden, writing in the Journal of Climate (2006) note that the rate of increase of evaporation in the computer models, on average, only increases at about one-third of the rate expected from the Claussius Clapeyron relationship. Additionally, Frank Wentz and colleagues, writing in the journal Science (2007), have confirmed the under-specification of evaporation increase with temperature and, from satellite based observations, have determined that global evaporation does indeed comply with the Claussius Clapeyron relationship.

It is clear from the above formulation of the surface temperature rise and the associated amplification gain that each is sensitive to the specification of evaporation increase with temperature. Substitution of the average evaporation specification of computer models into the formulation will boost the projected temperature rise from the above expected value of 0.5oC to 1.5oC, the lower end of IPCC projections. When the specification of evaporation increase with temperature is very low, as in the more extreme models, then the feedback amplification gain increases to a value of about ten; the temperature sensitivity of the computer model becomes highly exaggerated and model would likely simulate the behaviour of runaway global warming. The behaviour, of course, is false and arises only because of the significant under-specification of evaporation.

Despite the many claims that the IPCC projections of human-caused global warming are sound, the consensus of climate scientists and that the science is settled, there are disturbing shortcomings to both the essential explanations and to the computer modelling. The shortcomings are disturbing because the projections and their associated predictions of diabolical impacts on environmental systems are the only rational justification given for wholesale government restructuring of our industrial base and lifestyles.

This is the first time in human history that there has been a conscious move at the national level to discard the tools that have underpinned security, wellbeing and comfort. We are deliberately abrogating energy usage from proven and widely available sources on the basis of a perceived environmental threat which is poorly articulated and substantiated only by recourse to obviously deficient computer modelling. Why am I reminded of Charles MacKay's 1841 tome, "Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds'?

More here




Lomborg replies to the ticklish one

Says that Alarmist predictions of climate change like Oliver Tickell's are bad science. Tickell's plug for his new book was mentioned briefly on this blog on 11th

Much of the global warming debate is perhaps best described as a constant outbidding by frantic campaigners, producing a barrage of ever-more scary scenarios in an attempt to get the public to accept their civilisation-changing proposals. Unfortunately, the general public - while concerned about the environment - is distinctly unwilling to support questionable solutions with costs running into tens of trillions of pounds. Predictably, this makes the campaigners reach for even more outlandish scares.

These alarmist predictions are becoming quite bizarre, and could be dismissed as sociological oddities, if it weren't for the fact that they get such big play in the media. Oliver Tickell, for instance, writes that a global warming causing a 4C temperature increase by the end of the century would be a "catastrophe" and the beginning of the "extinction" of the human race. This is simply silly.

His evidence? That 4C would mean that all the ice on the planet would melt, bringing the long-term sea level rise to 70-80m, flooding everything we hold dear, seeing billions of people die. Clearly, Tickell has maxed out the campaigners' scare potential (because there is no more ice to melt, this is the scariest he could ever conjure). But he is wrong. Let us just remember that the UN climate panel, the IPCC, expects a temperature rise by the end of the century between 1.8 and 6.0C. Within this range, the IPCC predicts that, by the end of the century, sea levels will rise 18-59 centimetres - Tickell is simply exaggerating by a factor of up to 400.

Tickell will undoubtedly claim that he was talking about what could happen many, many millennia from now. But this is disingenuous. First, the 4C temperature rise is predicted on a century scale - this is what we talk about and can plan for. Second, although sea-level rise will continue for many centuries to come, the models unanimously show that Greenland's ice shelf will be reduced, but Antarctic ice will increase even more (because of increased precipitation in Antarctica) for the next three centuries. What will happen beyond that clearly depends much more on emissions in future centuries. Given that CO2 stays in the atmosphere about a century, what happens with the temperature, say, six centuries from now mainly depends on emissions five centuries from now (where it seems unlikely non-carbon emitting technology such as solar panels will not have become economically competitive).

Third, Tickell tells us how the 80m sea-level rise would wipe out all the world's coastal infrastructure and much of the world's farmland - "undoubtedly" causing billions to die. But to cause billions to die, it would require the surge to occur within a single human lifespan. This sort of scare tactic is insidiously wrong and misleading, mimicking a firebrand preacher who claims the earth is coming to an end and we need to repent. While it is probably true that the sun will burn up the earth in 4-5bn years' time, it does give a slightly different perspective on the need for immediate repenting.

Tickell's claim that 4C will be the beginning of our extinction is again many times beyond wrong and misleading, and, of course, made with no data to back it up. Let us just take a look at the realistic impact of such a 4C temperature rise. For the Copenhagen Consensus, one of the lead economists of the IPCC, Professor Gary Yohe, did a survey of all the problems and all the benefits accruing from a temperature rise over this century of about approximately 4C. And yes, there will, of course, also be benefits: as temperatures rise, more people will die from heat, but fewer from cold; agricultural yields will decline in the tropics, but increase in the temperate zones, etc.

The model evaluates the impacts on agriculture, forestry, energy, water, unmanaged ecosystems, coastal zones, heat and cold deaths and disease. The bottom line is that benefits from global warming right now outweigh the costs (the benefit is about 0.25% of global GDP). Global warming will continue to be a net benefit until about 2070, when the damages will begin to outweigh the benefits, reaching a total damage cost equivalent to about 3.5% of GDP by 2300. This is simply not the end of humanity. If anything, global warming is a net benefit now; and even in three centuries, it will not be a challenge to our civilisation. Further, the IPCC expects the average person on earth to be 1,700% richer by the end of this century.

Tickell's hellfire and damnation sermon also misinforms us of the solutions to global warming: panicking is rarely the right state of mind for finding smart solutions. In essence, Tickell says that because the outlook is so frightening, we need to cut much, much more than the Kyoto protocol called for. Now, all peer-reviewed, published economic models demonstrate that such an effort is a colossal waste of money - one of the leading models shows that, for every pound spent, Tickell's solution would do about 13p-worth of good.

Tickell finds that current climate efforts like Kyoto have been "miserable failures", which is true, but makes it seem rather odd that he thinks much-more-of-the-same will suddenly be great policy. He claims that the reason these policies are not realised is because our governments are "craven to special interests". While this is convenient to believe, it is, of course, incorrect; the real reason is that no one in the electorate wants to pay œ2, œ3 or even œ4 for a litre of petrol.

If we are to find a workable and economically smart solution, we would do well to look at the best climate solution from the top economists from the Copenhagen Consensus. They found that, unlike even moderate CO2 cuts, which cost more than they do good, we should focus on investing in finding cheaper low-carbon energy. This requires us to invest massively in energy research and development (R&D). Right now, we don't - because the climate panic makes us focus exclusively on cutting CO2.

R&D has been dropping worldwide since the early 1980s. If we increased this investment ten-fold, it would still be ten times cheaper than Kyoto, and probably hundreds to thousands of times cheaper than Tickell's proposal. The literature indicates that for every pound invested, we would do œ11-worth of good. The reason: because when we all talk about cutting CO2, we might get some well-meaning westerners to put up a few inefficient solar panels on their roof-tops. While it costs a lot, it will do little and have no impact on Chinese and Indian emissions. But if we focus on investing in making cheaper solar panels, they will become competitive sooner, making everyone, including the Chinese and Indians, switch.

Such a proposal is efficient, politically feasible and will actually fix climate change in the medium term. Being panicked by incorrect data and suggesting outlandish policies might create a splash, but it will stall our prospects of achieving real change. Let's not be silly - let's choose the best solution.

Source




Wind Woes: Living close to wind turbines can cause 'sleep disorders, difficulty with equilibrium, headaches, childhood night terrors'

Regrettably, carbon dioxide seems to induce the same disorders in some people

Dr. Nina Pierpont of Malone, N.Y., coined the phrase "wind turbine syndrome" for what she says happens to some people living near wind energy farms. She has made the phrase part of the title of a book she's written called "Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on the Natural Experiment." It is scheduled for publication next month by K-Selected Press, of Santa Fe, N.M.

In contrast to those who consider wind turbines clean, green and an ideal source of renewable energy, Pierpont says living or working too close to them has a downside. Her research says wind turbines should never be built closer than two miles from homes. Pierpont, 53, is a 1991 graduate of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has a doctorate in population biology from Princeton University. Her interest was piqued by a wind farm being built near her upstate New York home, and she studied 10 families living near wind turbines built since 2004 in Canada, England, Ireland, Italy and the United States.

Pierpont's findings suggest that low-frequency noise and vibration generated by wind machines can have an effect on the inner ear, triggering headaches; difficulty sleeping; tinnitus, or ringing in the ears; learning and mood disorders; panic attacks; irritability; disruption of equilibrium, concentration and memory; and childhood behavior problems.

Concerns also are coming out of Europe about low-frequency noise from newly built wind turbines. For example, British physician Amanda Harry, in a February 2007 article titled "Wind Turbines, Noise and Health," wrote of 39 people, including residents of New Zealand and Australia, who suffered from the sounds emitted by wind turbines. According to Pierpont, eight of the 10 families in her study moved out of their homes."All these problems were resolved as soon as these people got away from the turbines, got in the car and drove away from the house," she said.

Mike Logsdon, director of development for Invenergy, developer of the 48 wind turbines under construction in the Willow Creek Wind Project, said he's heard of Pierpont's findings, but his 5-year-old company doesn't find them credible."We've had a number of other wind farms over the country and residents living by them and never had any problems," Logsdon said. Invenergy has built and operates wind farms in Canada and Poland and in 12 states in the United States, Logsdon said. The company has 1,200 megawatts in production and is building 600 megawatts this year. The 72-megawatt Willow Creek Wind Project near the Eatons' home is scheduled to start producing electricity Jan. 1.

If Pierpont's theories gain acceptance, decisions on where future wind energy farms are built could be affected. Last year, more than one-third of all new power capacity in the United States, roughly 5,000 megawatts, was generated by wind turbines, said Joseph Beamon, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington.Meanwhile, a U.S. Department of Energy report said demand for electricity is likely to grow 40 percent in the next 22 years in the United States alone, with 20 percent of the nation's power generated by wind turbines, he said.

The Eatons and their neighbors have more to worry about than the Willow Creek Project. Approval was given July 25 by the Oregon Facilities Siting Council for construction of as many as 400 more wind turbines in the nearby Shepherds Flat Wind Project spanning parts of Gilliam and Morrow counties. The planned 909-megawatt project by Caithness Energy of Chicago is expected to be the largest wind farm on Earth, generating enough peak energy to power 225,000 homes.

"Man, this whole country is going to be windmills," said a dismayed Denny Wade, 59, a railroad worker and neighbor of the Eatons. He and his wife, Lorrie, a 53-year-old schoolteacher, live three-quarters of a mile from one of Willow Creek's turbines. The Wades had planned to sell the home where they've lived for four years and build a retirement home on a knoll 200 yards away with a view of Mount Hood. "Now, the view that it had is all windmills," Wade said. "I didn't move out there to view windmills."

But Denny Wade's larger concern is his vulnerability to migraine headaches. Although not everyone living near wind turbines experienced headaches, Pierpont's research suggests "everyone with pre-existing migraines" developed headaches by living near the wind generators. The Wades scrapped plans to build a new home and hope to sell their 42 acres and move, they said.

Morrow County planner Carla McLane said potential health issues never were raised during the planning process in her county, and the opportunity to appeal has passed. The potential effects of turbines on the scenic values of Oregon 74 never were brought up in hearings he attended, said Terry Tallman, Morrow County Commission chairman. Generally, wind energy farms have been welcomed in this sparsely settled corner of the state, Tallman said. Tax revenues from the wind farms will be distributed to the counties, public schools, park and recreation districts and fire departments, he said."Everybody that I've talked to has been very happy," he said, adding that some on whose property the turbines are being built intend to retire on the income they receive. "I think it's a good thing," Ron Wyscaver, 40, a neighbor of the Eatons and Wades, said of the wind turbines.

Caithness first proposed a 105-megawatt Shepherds Flat Project in 2002, then applied to the state for the larger project two years ago, McLane said. The project was so large it went to the Energy Facilities Siting Council, where it received the go-ahead to start construction.

Potential medical problems aside, wind turbines will wreck the tranquillity that Mike and Sherry Eaton came to this remote place to find, Sherry Eaton said. She drives 90 miles a day to and from her job in Hermiston so they can live in the high-desert setting."When you come home from work, everything drains away from you because it's so quiet and peaceful," she said, adding that's about to end."Now we are going to have to listen to those windmills: Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!" she said

Source

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16 August, 2008

Unashamed Fascism from Australian Warmists

A wet dream about police action to enforce Warmism below. The authors are Anthony Bergin, director of research programs at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and Ross Allen, an "independent researcher". We read: "ASPI is an independent, non-partisan policy institute. It has been set up by the government to provide fresh ideas on Australia's defence and strategic policy choices". The "fresh" ideas below go back to Mussolini in the 1920s. Musso was a Greenie too

AFTER the release of the Rudd Government's green discussion paper on climate change last month, eyes are focused on how business and the community will be affected by the mitigation costs of climate change. But there has been little attention given to climate change and its implications for Australian policing. As the principal domestic security actor in Australia, with 44,000 officers, the eight police forces that serve this country need to think harder about how climate change may affect their core business.

Most Australian senior police officers haven't considered climate change to have much relevance for their work. The notable exception is Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty, who suggested last September that climate change could eclipse terrorism as the security issue of the century.

Climate change could have wide-ranging implications and challenges for Australia's police. New legal regimes are required to manage carbon markets and these will require compliance and enforcement. Compliance under the carbon pollution reduction scheme will involve liable entities monitoring and reporting emissions at least annually.

The Government proposes establishing an emissions trading regulator as an incorporated body with a high degree of operational independence. The regulator will have its own investigation and enforcement mechanisms, and trading activities could be covered by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Detailed compliance and enforcement arrangements are to be developed, but the regulator and ASIC may wish to invite police involvement to investigate criminal breaches of the scheme once legislation has been defined. This will require police to develop knowledge and competencies on the use of emissions trading for money laundering and fraud.

But we may have expectations of law enforcement agencies that they're not in a position or resourced to deliver: large-scale fraud has proven to be resource intensive, particularly when the territory is uncharted. The possibility of a "green shoe" brigade emerging as the scheme begins can't be discounted. The financial scale of emissions trading and the proposed future linkages to existing international carbon trading schemes suggests the AFP will need to explore what opportunities exist for criminal activity, particularly where emission trading intersects with world financial markets.

While we may be confident in the capabilities of Australian policing and our regulatory institutions, there's cause to be concerned that Pacific Island states will be vulnerable to criminal activity associated with carbon markets. They don't have the capacity to handle large and complex investigations.

We may see changes in the type, rate and frequency of crimes as our climate alters. Anecdotal evidence suggests that weather does encourage particular types of criminal behaviour, such as changes in domestic violence patterns, a rise in drunkenness and associated anti-social behaviour, especially in the aftermath of disasters.

A key risk is that climate change could push already vulnerable pockets of communities further into hardship. The drought, for example, is changing the demographic make-up in areas affected by water availability. Lower socio-economic groups are relocating into drought-affected towns because the cost of living is cheaper. This could create a vicious cycle of poor economic prospects and associated social ills, including increases in personal and property crime rates. If drought conditions continue we may see increases in a range of water thefts. Crimes of opportunity will increase with more climate-affected natural disasters: if custodial sentences are given to looters this will have obvious implications for our prison system.

Climate change may have implications for police budgets; responding to a higher frequency of weather-induced disasters will divert already scarce resources from core police business. Climate change may contribute to regional events that require police to act in complex emergencies. Australian police could provide, for example, a security presence at refugee camps or at key transit areas in regional countries to help manage any potential mass movement of people. More climate refugees or climate migrants could pose problems for community policing, possibly leading to changes in the rates and types of crime that police forces will have to confront.

In vulnerable areas, police will need to play an active role enhancing community preparedness by educating the public in disaster-response protocols. The co-operation between state police and the military will need to improve to aid the Australian civil community in times of traumatic environmental stress.

In the face of increasing numbers of state police involved in responding to disasters, police agencies will need to consider the physical and psychological effects of climate change on their personnel. The emotional trauma of dealing with affected communities in natural disaster areas could have a psychological effect on some officers when they return to normal duties.

Australian police forces will also need to take on board the lessons from recent natural disasters and start a process to climate-proof their infrastructure and address redundancies in systems to adapt to climate change. Our police officers may have to face more environmental protest groups challenging governments to go further in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Law enforcement bodies would want to avoid aggressive and heavy-handed approaches in responding to this potential problem.

Police will need to adopt a "low carb" approach to daily business; like other large organisations in Australia, police agencies will have to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There has been little planning to make existing police infrastructure more energy efficient. Police fleets still largely consist of petrol-guzzling vehicles that are out of touch with efficiency trends and spiralling fuel costs.

Australia's police should bring together in a national information hub present knowledge and future thinking on climate change and its implications for law enforcement. Understanding the criminal implications of drought conditions would be an obvious starting point. Australia's police forces should co-operate with research bodies to develop risk assessments of locations likeliest to be affected by climate change as part of a multi-agency strategic approach to climate change adaptation.

While it's unlikely we will see climate-change squads in our police forces in the near future, the release of the Government's green paper provides the opportunity for Australian police officers to start considering how they will need to adapt to the challenges posed by the severity and effect of climate change.

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Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered

Despite the best that the crooks at the National Snow and Ice Data Center could do

Just a few weeks ago, predictions of Arctic ice collapse were buzzing all over the internet. Some scientists were predicting that the "North Pole may be ice-free for first time this summer". Others predicted that the entire "polar ice cap would disappear this summer".

The Arctic melt season is nearly done for this year. The sun is now very low above the horizon and will set for the winter at the North Pole in five weeks. And none of these dire predictions have come to pass. Yet there is, however, something odd going on with the ice data.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado released an alarming graph on August 11, showing that Arctic ice was rapidly disappearing, back towards last year's record minimum. Their data shows Arctic sea ice extent only 10 per cent greater than this date in 2007, and the second lowest on record.

The problem is that this graph does not appear to be correct. Other data sources show Arctic ice having made a nice recovery this summer. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center data shows 2008 ice nearly identical to 2002, 2005 and 2006. Maps of Arctic ice extent are readily available from several sources, including the University of Illinois, which keeps a daily archive for the last 30 years. A comparison of these maps (derived from NSIDC data) below shows that Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater on August 11, 2008 than it was on the August 12, 2007. (2008 is a leap year, so the dates are offset by one.)

The video below highlights the differences between those two dates. As you can see, ice has grown in nearly every direction since last summer - with a large increase in the area north of Siberia. Also note that the area around the Northwest Passage (west of Greenland) has seen a significant increase in ice. Some of the islands in the Canadian Archipelago are surrounded by more ice than they were during the summer of 1980.



The 30 per cent increase was calculated by counting pixels which contain colors representing ice. This is a conservative calculation, because of the map projection used. As the ice expands away from the pole, each new pixel represents a larger area - so the net effect is that the calculated 30 per cent increase is actually on the low side.

So how did NSIDC calculate a 10 per cent increase over 2007? Their graph appears to disagree with the maps by a factor of three (10 per cent vs. 30 per cent) - hardly a trivial discrepancy. What melts the Arctic?

The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn't even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss.

We know that Arctic summer ice extent is largely determined by variable oceanic and atmospheric currents such as the Arctic Oscillation. NASA claimed last summer that "not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming". The media tendency to knee-jerkingly blame everything on "global warming" makes for an easy story - but it is not based on solid science.

And what of the Antarctic? Down south, ice extent is well ahead of the recent average. Why isn't NSIDC making similarly high-profile press releases about the increase in Antarctic ice over the last 30 years?

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Al Gore's Doomsday Clock



Al Gore gave a speech last week "challenging" America to run "on 100% zero-carbon electricity in 10 years" -- though that's just the first step on his road to "ending our reliance on carbon-based fuels." Serious people understand this is absurd. Maybe other people will start drawing the same conclusion about the man proposing it.

The former vice president has also recently disavowed any intention of returning to politics. This is wise. As America's leading peddler of both doom and salvation, Mr. Gore has moved beyond the constraints and obligations of reality. His job is to serve as a Prophet of Truth. In Mr. Gore's prophesy, a transition to carbon-free electricity generation in a decade is "achievable, affordable and transformative." He believes that the goal can be achieved almost entirely through the use of "renewables" alone, meaning solar, geothermal, wind power and biofuels.

And he doesn't think we really have any other good options: "The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," he says, with his usual gift for understatement. "And even more -- if more should be required -- the future of human civilization is at stake."

What manner the catastrophe might take isn't yet clear, but the scenarios are grim: The climate crisis is getting worse faster than anticipated; global warming will cause refugee crises and destabilize entire nations; an "energy tsunami" is headed our way. And so on.

Here, however, is an inconvenient fact. In 1995, the U.S. got about 2.2% of its net electricity generation from "renewable" sources, according to the Energy Information Administration. By 2000, the last full year of the Clinton administration, that percentage had dropped to 2.1%. By contrast, the combined share of coal, petroleum and natural gas rose to 70% from 68% during the same time frame.

Now the share of renewables is up slightly, to about 2.3% as of 2006 (the latest year for which the EIA provides figures). The EIA thinks the use of renewables (minus hydropower) could rise to 201 billion kilowatt hours per year in 2018 from the current 65 billion. But the EIA also projects total net generation in 2018 to be 4.4 trillion kilowatt hours per year. That would put the total share of renewables at just over four percent of our electricity needs.

Mr. Gore's argument would be helped if he were also willing to propose huge investments in nuclear power, which emits no carbon dioxide and currently supplies about one-fifth of U.S. electricity needs, and about three-quarters of France's. Britain has just approved eight new nuclear plants, and the German government of Angela Merkel is working to do away with a plan by the previous government to go nuclear-free.

But Mr. Gore makes no mention of nuclear power in his speech, nor of the equally carbon-free hydroelectric power. These are proven technologies -- and useful reminders of what happens when environmentalists get what they wished for.

Mr. Gore's case would also be helped if our experience of renewable sources were a positive one. It isn't. In his useful book "Gusher of Lies," Robert Bryce notes that "in July 2006, wind turbines in California produced power at only about 10% of their capacity; in Texas, one of the most promising states for wind energy, the windmills produced electricity at about 17% of their rated capacity." Like wind power, solar power also suffers from the problem of intermittency, which means that it has to be backed up by conventional sources in order to avoid disruptions. This is especially true of hot summers when the wind doesn't blow and cold winters when the sun doesn't shine.

And then there are biofuels, whose recent vogue, the World Bank believes, may have been responsible for up to 75% of the recent rise in world food prices. Save the planet; starve the poor.

None of this seems to trouble Mr. Gore. He thinks that simply by declaring an emergency he can help achieve Stakhanovite results. He might recall what the Stakhanovite myth (about the man who mined 14 times his quota of coal in six hours) actually did to the Soviet economy.

A more interesting question is why Mr. Gore remains believable. Perhaps people think that facts ought not to count against a man whose task is to raise our sights, or play Cassandra to unbelieving mortals.

Or maybe he is believed simply because people want something in which to believe. "The readiness for self-sacrifice," wrote Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer," "is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life. . . . All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. . . . To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible."

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How NOT to Have Electricity

Every week there’s some new proposal to cover the nation with wind farms and solar panels.

Electricity is so commonplace that no one gives any thought to not having access to it. Few give any consideration to how it is generated, but we are now being inundated with the most virulent nonsense about how wind or solar power is “clean” and practically “free.” Every week there’s some new proposal to cover the nation with wind farms and solar panels.

The problem for everyone who wants to get rich with these energy sources or those who think they are the answer to our energy needs is that neither wind, nor solar can ever power anything more than relatively small projects like a farm or a local stadium. A nation of more than three hundred million people, however, needs a lot of generation capacity.

All the razzle-dazzle of television advertising and public relations propaganda cannot justify the building of massive wind or solar farms. They are simply inadequate to the production of the electricity the nation requires now and in the future. The weird thing about T. Boone Pickens' pitch is that he talks about oil dependency to justify wind power, but vehicles are not powered by wind. Nor are they likely to be powered by liquified natural gas as Pickens suggests.

By contrast, the July edition of Energy Tribune devoted some of its pages to the comeback of nuclear power in America. What jumped out at me was co-editor Robert Bryce’s citation of the fact that, “The U.S. government has spent some $7 billion building a repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada” and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has declared that it “is never going to open” and is “not the answer to nuclear waste storage.”

Senator Reid recently said that, “Coal is making us sick. Oil is making us sick,” and then went on to blather insanely about global warming.

According to Bryce, “On June 3, the Department of Energy submitted an 8,600-page application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeking approval of the Yucca Mountain site for waste storage. Just one day later, Nevada urged the agency to reject the application.” This is a glaring example of how to make sure America lacks the electrical energy it needs.

Throughout the debate over energy use, the Big Lie has been that industrial and other activities generate carbon dioxide emissions that, in turn, are causing global warming. Ergo, we have to radically alter every aspect of modern life to avoid the Earth’s destruction.

The problem with that is a decade-old cooling period that the Earth entered in 1998 and which is getting colder, not warmer. The other problem is the fact that the Earth has passed through periods in which the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere were much higher than they are today.

Since it is getting colder, we are going to need more electricity and other sources of energy to keep us warm in our homes, offices, schools, et cetera. We are going to have to burn coal, currently the major source of power, to generate electricity as well as the cheapest and most abundant. We will continue to use natural gas as well. All the hydroelectric sources have been identified and are in use at present.

That leaves nuclear. An Energy Tribune article by William E. Burchill serves up lots of information about the nuclear production of electrical energy. Worldwide, 441 nuclear reactors are providing electricity to one billion people. Presently nuclear power provides twenty percent of America’s electricity needs, thanks to the 104 nuclear plants operating in the U.S.

Here’s something to keep in mind. “No U.S. plant worker or member of the public has ever been injured or killed by an accident caused by nuclear power.” Moreover, amidst the frenzy over CO2, nuclear is “an emissions-free source of electricity.”

There is a literal renaissance of nuclear energy in America and this is a good thing. The U.S. Department of Energy forecasts that, by 2030, U.S. demand will increase by 30 percent. This increase reflects a worldwide trend. Currently, China, India, Russia, South Korea, Pakistan, and Japan are in the process of building a total of thirty-five nuclear plants and other nations have announced plans.

The worldwide demand for more electricity is growing right along with population growth and the spurt of industrialization occurring in nations that have looked at the Western model and are now beginning to compete in the process called globalization. By mid-century, the demand for electricity will double or triple.

The elected leaders of America have been largely deaf and blind to our national needs, opposing electrical generation no matter what source is used. Resistance to nuclear energy was part of the environmental agenda, but these days their cries and lies are mostly about what they now call “dirty fuels,” oil and coal.

What can Americans do when we have loonies like Senator Harry Reid or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spouting nonsense and blocking efforts to meet current and future energy needs? One answer is almost too obvious. They and others can and should be voted out of office. They can be replaced!

Or maybe you want to wait while wind power, currently 0.77 percent of the sources of electricity energy, or solar power, about 0.01 percent, replaces coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power. Bundle up! You’re going to be very cold.

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U.S. on verge of grand-scale blackout

Five years after the worst blackout in North American history, the country's largest utilities say the U.S. power system faces the prospect of even bigger and more damaging outages. The specific flaws that led to 50 million people losing power in 2003 have largely been addressed, they say, but even bigger problems loom. Excess generating capacity in the system is shrinking, for example, and power-plant construction has slowed as costs to build and operate plants have soared.

At the same time, it is estimated that electricity use will increase 29 percent between 2006 to 2030 - much of it driven by residential growth, according to a government report issued in June. "I'm really not a `Chicken Little' player, but I worry that no one seems to be focusing in on this," said Michael Morris, chairman, president and chief executive of American Electric Power, which runs the nation's largest electricity transmission system. Morris said massive outages this year in South Africa, which forced gold, diamond and platinum mines to stop production for five days, should serve as a warning to the United States.

Industry experts back Morris and say there is even more resistance to building new plants because of the debate over climate change and opposition to new transmission lines. The blocking of two coal-fired plants in Kansas is one example of the resistance. "The level of excess capacity has shrunk ... to a level barely within the planning toleration of the industry," said Marc Chupka, with the Brattle Group, an energy consultant.

The blackout five years ago today shut off power to vast swaths of the Northeast and Midwest for as much as four days. Rolling blackouts continued in Ontario for a week. The outages caused as much as $10 billion in damages to the U.S. economy. FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio, which got the blame for the spread of the outages, has worked to shore up its transmission system. But the larger issues of the country's total generating ability and the overall health and capacity of the transmission grid remain a problem, the experts say.

Rick Sergel, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the agency that oversees the nation's power grid, said, "We're to the point where we need every possible resource: renewables, demand response and energy efficiency, nuclear, clean coal - you name it, we need it. And we especially need the transmission lines that will bring the power generated by these new resources to consumers."

Construction of coal-fired generating plants has almost stopped, and new nuclear plants are years away, if they are approved at all, said Arshad Mansoor, vice president of power delivery and use for the Electric Power Research Institute. Better efficiency will go only so far, he said.

Morris, of American Electric Power, sees a potentially dire situation ahead, including the sort of power rationing that occurred in South Africa. "It would ruin the economy," Morris said.

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Climate-Change Skeptics Revisited

The article below by comrade John P. Holdren is an extension of an earlier article by him mentioned on this blog on 5th. He claims that the lack of scientific detail in his original piece was because the editor left that stuff out. Amusingly, however, this time too he simply makes sweeping assertions rather than discussing anything in detail. That evil editor again, I guess. Following it are replies to the original Holdren piece by Prof. Fred Singer and by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

I did not expect that my op-ed in Monday's Boston Globe, to which the editors gave the title "Convincing the Climate-Change Skeptics", would actually convince many skeptics. It was aimed more at reinforcing the resolve of the majority in the public and the policy-making community who, betting on the scientific consensus, are ready to move forward with a serious approach to dealing with the problem but are being slowed down by the ill-founded skepticism of a minority. That is why my own title for the piece was "Climate-Change Skeptics Are Dangerously Wrong".

I am being castigated by many respondents for resorting to reference to authority rather then providing substantive responses to the specific arguments of climate-change deniers. I suggest that this criticism is in part based on a misunderstanding of what is possible within the length constraint of an op-ed piece. The "top ten" arguments employed by the relatively few deniers with credentials in any aspect of climate-change science (which arguments include "the sun is doing it", "Earth's climate was changing before there were people here", "climate is changing on Mars but there are no SUVs there", "the Earth hasn't been warming since 1998", "thermometer records showing heating are contaminated by the urban-heat-island effect", "satellite measurements show cooling rather than warming") have all been shown in the serious scientific literature to be wrong or irrelevant, but explaining their defects requires at least a paragraph or two for each one.

This cannot be done in the 700 words of an op-ed piece. But there are plenty of other forums where it can be.and has been. Persuasive reefutations are readily available not only at a high scientific level in (among others) the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc.ch), the UN Scientific Expert Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development ( unfoundation.org/SEG/), the US National Academy of Sciences ( dels.nas.edu/globalchange), the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (ucar.edu ), and the UK Meteorological Office ( met-office.gov.uk) - as well as on a myyriad of websites run by serious climatologists (e.g., columbia.edu/~jeh1/, stephenschneider.stanford.edu, realclimate.org ) - but also in a form boiled down for the intelligent layperson by organizations skilled in scientific communication, such as the BBC ( news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7074601.stm ) , the New Scientist magazine ( http://environment.newscientist.com/climatemyths ), and the promising new Climate Central organization ( climatecentral.org) featuring The Weather Channel's climatologist, Heidi Cullen. Any skeptic who actually wants to know what's wrong with the standard deniers' arguments can easily find out.

I provided all the above-mentioned references and more in a longer essay on climate-change skepticism that I wrote in June in response to requests for an explanation of the apparent continuing influence of deniers in the U.S. policy process, and from which I abstracted the op-ed I submitted to The Globe. The references wouldn't fit within the op-ed word limit without losing too much else that I thought needed to be said.

Even more regrettably, I agreed to a further shortening of what I submitted by the editors at The Globe. I regret agreeing to it because it's clear (from the responses I'm receiving) that the resulting omission of a sentence about the value of skepticism in science left the impression that I am unaware of the positive role that healthy skepticism has played in the scientific enterprise over the centuries. The omitted sentence was in the middle of a passage that in the original read as follows (omission italicized):

"All three factions are wrong, but the first is the worst. We should really call them "deniers" rather than "skeptics", because they are giving the venerable tradition of skepticism a bad name. Their arguments, such as they are, suffer from two huge deficiencies".

As my original reference to "the venerable tradition of skepticism" indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated and soundly based, tend to promote healthy re-examination of premises, additional ways to test hypotheses and theories, and refinement of explanations and arguments. And it does happen from time to time - although less often than most casuual observers suppose - that views initially held only by skeptics end up overtuurning and replacing what had been the "mainstream" view.

Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing what much of has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to "mass hysteria" or deliberate propagation of a "hoax".

The purveying of propositions like these by a few scientists who do or should know better -and their parroting by amateur skeptics who laack the scientific background or the motivation to figure out what's wrong with them - are what I was inveighing against in the op-ed and will continue to inveigh against. The activities of these folks, whether witting in the case of the scientists or unwitting in the case of their gullible adherents, have nothing to do with respectable scientific skepticism.

It also needs to be understood by publics and policy makers alike that, while it can never be guaranteed that a mainstream scientific position will not be overturned by new data or insight, the likelihood of this occurring gets smaller as the size and coherence of the body of data and analysis supporting the mainstream position get larger. The lines of evidence and analysis supporting the mainstream position on climate change are diverse and robust - embracing a huge body of direct measurements by a varietyy of methods in a wealth of locations on the Earth's surface and from space, solid understanding of the basic physics governing how energy flow in the atmosphere interacts with greenhouse gases, insights derived from the reconstruction of causes and consequences of millions of years of natural climatic variations, and the results of computer models that are increasingly capable of reproducing the main features of Earth's climate with and without human influences.

The public and the policy makers who are supposed to act on the public's behalf are constantly having to make choices in the absence of complete certainty about threats and outcomes. If they are smart, they make those choices on the basis of judgments about probability: Which position is more likely to be right? On climate change, the probability is high that the scientific mainstream is right about its main conclusions, even if all the details are not yet pinned down. Those main conclusions are that climate is changing in ways unusual against the backdrop of natural variability; that human activities are responsible for most of this unusual change; that significant harm to human well-being is already occurring as a result; and that far larger -- perhaps catastrophic - damages will ensensue if serious remedial action is not started soon.

The rationale for calling the attention of the public and policy makers -- the audiences for an op-ed - to the number, diversity, and distincction of scientists and scientific organizations embracing these conclusions is to inform them of the extent to which this is the view of the most qualified people and groups that have studied the matter. Given the unavoidable fact that most people do not have the training (or the time) to reach an independent conclusion on a scientific matter of this kind, knowing where most of the people who do have the training and who have taken the time come down on the matter is the best guide available on where the public and its policy makers should place their bets.

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Comment from Fred Singer:

John Holdren, of the Kennedy School, Harvard University, and Woods Hole Research Center (not to be confused with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) presents a polemic that distorts relevant science. As he himself points out, many scientists agree that current climate changes are not unusual and that human-released greenhouse gases play only a negligible role - contrary to his own view. He does not provide any references, but readers may scrutinize the report "Nature, not human activity, rules the climate," of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a group of more that two dozen climate experts from 16 nations. It is available on the Internet here. (Unlike the UN-sponsored IPCC, the NIPCC, while an international team, does not include experts ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe.)

Holdren cleverly tries to shift the burden of proof away from himself, Al Gore, and the IPCC, which claims to be 90 to 99 % sure that warming is anthropogenic. They have no evidence to support this claim. None. Yet they all call for Draconian steps to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by effectively imposing a huge tax on the already high price of energy. (New Englanders will bear the full brunt of these misguided policies in their household heating bills this coming winter.). Well, perhaps Dr. Holdren can explain to us why it is that the climate has refused to warm during the past decade -- in spite of rising CO2 levels.

Comment by The Right Honourable The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley;

Professor John Holdren wrote recently here that no one should heed the few climate change skeptics with any sort of scientific credentials. Yet, in 676 words, he did not offer even one scientific argument in favor of climate alarm. In this reply, I offer nothing but scientific arguments.

First, global warming began 300 years back. Humankind was not to blame. Warming stopped ten years ago. For the last seven of those years, all five major global surface temperature datasets show cooling. The cooling between January 2007 and January 2008 was the sharpest since records began in 1880. Not one of the 22 costly computer models relied upon by the UN's climate panel predicted the present long cooling. Now scientists expect no more warming till 2015.

Today's temperature is 10 F below its peak during each of the past four interglacial periods; and up to 5 F below where it was in the Bronze Age, Roman, and mediaeval warm periods. For most of the past 10,000 years, temperatures were above today's.

The Sun was more active in the past 70 years than at almost any time in the previous 11,400 years. Even if it had not caused the warming that stopped a decade ago, the UN's climate panel has not convicted humankind. CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750. In the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, there was 18 times as much CO2 in the air as there is today. Life throve: otherwise we should not be here. The climate panel, in its 2001 report, admitted that the observed changes may be natural.

The UN's models predict a human fingerprint - warming in the tropical mid-troposphere at thrice the surface rate. This fingerprint is absent from 50 years of radiosonde data and 30 years of satellite data. Whatever caused the warming in the 300 years ending in 1998, it was not us.

Why are the climate models so wrong? Because in 1963 it was proven impossible to predict the long-run future of the complex, chaotic climate unless we first know its initial state to a precision that is not attainable in the real world.

There is only one question that matters in the climate debate: By how much will temperature rise if we double the pre-industrial concentration of CO2 in the air? The answer to this question is an input to the computers, not an output from them. Models cannot predict future rates of warming, because they are told the answer in advance.

Even if minuscule increases in the concentration of a trace gas could impact temperature significantly, the peer-reviewed literature is near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe. A High Court judge in London, finding against Al Gore's sci-fi comedy horror movie, said bluntly: "The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view."

Scientifically-baseless precautions are already starving millions as biofuels, which the UN at first recommended and now calls a "crime against humanity", have pre-empted agricultural land, doubling staple cereal prices in a year.

The UN's proposed "precautions" would work no better than the "precautionary" ban on DDT, which killed 40 million worldwide - mostly children - before the World Health Organization ended the ban in 2006.

The strategic harm to humanity caused by killing the worlds poor and destroying the economic prosperity of the West would far outweigh any conceivable climate benefit from Warner-Lieberman. Adaptation as or, rather, if necessary would be far more cost-effective and less harmful. Futile schemes by bureaucrats to mitigate imagined global warming will have no more effect on the climate than King Canute's command to the tide not to come in and wet the Royal feet.

We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. There is no manmade climate crisis. It is a non-problem. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

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

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15 August, 2008

New book: "Green Gone Wild -- Elevating Nature Above Human Rights"

For those considering the green revolution and wondering about its future, it may be too late. One prominent authority believes green has gone, gone wild. M. David Stirling, vice president of the highly regarded Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento has just published a book titled "Green Gone Wild -- Elevating Nature Above Human Rights." In it he catalogs the unrestrained steps by hardcore environmentalists from Rachel Carson to present day power and property grabbers who operate through the implementation and enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.

He chronicles the half-century worldwide influence of Carson's rage against the use of the mosquito-killing DDT as costing tens of millions of lives. Uncontrolled mosquito populations, especially in developing countries, have spread killer malarial plagues year after year since DDT was banned in 1972.In what Stirling calls a display of classic hypocrisy, Carson's erroneous fear-mongering that DDT was causing human sickness and deaths led her radical followers to find ways to eliminate or curtail humans' activities they viewed as endangering an ever-expanding number of lesser species.

He believes that today's greenies are on a rampage to confiscate millions of acres of private property they declare as habitat for an assortment of rats, snakes, crickets, birds, salamanders and other wildlife and plants. Like many of the other 1,350 species that have been tucked under the ESA's protective canopy, polar bear numbers are increasing as the animal thrives. Stirling foresees that tying the polar bear's listing to global warming can lead to highly restrictive regulation of any human activity viewed as contributing to that alleged phenomenon.

Stirling's book recalls the poorly researched science and knee-jerk reaction of authorities to declare a significant portion of the Northwest's old-growth forests as protected habitat for the northern spotted owl. Timber operations throughout the area closed down, causing immeasurable economic and personal distress to logging families and communities, making the forests more vulnerable to wildfires.

Stirling's conclusion is that nature-loving green zealots hiding behind the ESA are exclusionists at heart. That means they are anti-human. They believe the earth is overpopulated, and restrictions on human enterprise such as the pursuit of happiness should be curtailed, whatever it takes. They have found a way to discourage and limit human enterprise with the ESA's onerous and expensive regulations.

He offers 15 ways to modify the ESA to allow it to actually protect plants and animals that may be in danger without eliminating human activity and commerce. For farmers and others with property at stake these suggestions alone make the book worth the price

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Gang Green

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: "S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash." The story began: "Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents' trash to make sure pizza crusts aren't mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom."



Isn't that what homeless people do -- rooting around in other people's garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000. "We don't want to fine people," the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. "We want to change behavior." Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion -- with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: "Give a hoot, don't pollute." Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. The most glaring example of course is the multitrillion-dollar cap-and-trade anti-global warming scheme that would mandate an entire restructuring of our industrial economy. This plan, endorsed by both presidential candidates, would empower climate-change cops to regulate the energy usage and carbon emissions of every industry in America. If we do this, the best estimates are that we could reduce global temperatures by 0.1 degrees by 2050 and save on average about one polar bear a year from early death. But no burden is too great when it comes to helping the planet -- even if the progress to be made is infinitesimal. To weigh costs and benefits is regarded as sacrilege -- the refuge of global warming "deniers."

There are also new federal and state proposals to snoop on citizens in our own homes. California is considering a plan to police the temperature settings on residents' thermostats. The feds are checking on the flush capacity of our toilets and the kinds of light bulbs we use. A new game called Climate Crime Cards urges kids to spy on and keep an online record of their family's environmental faux pas -- noting when their parents fail to turn off the TV, plug in too many appliances or use the clothes dryer on a sunny day.

Sen. John Warner, a Republican from Virginia, wants to bring back the reviled 55-mile-per-hour federal speed limit law so that America can reduce gasoline consumption. Barack Obama believes that properly inflating the tires on our cars is the solution to our energy woes. Is the government going to start giving tickets for failure to inflate?

The latest rage among the more radical environmental groups is to encourage the government to monitor and ration every individual's carbon footprint -- how much you eat, drive, fly, heat, air condition, throw away and so on. Why? Because the average American emits twice as much carbon as the average European (which is another way of saying we are more productive than they are).

This is all promoted as a form of shared sacrifice. But under this system some people are more equal than others. People with enough money like Al Gore can purchase carbon offset credits to justify chartering a plane rather than having to fly commercial. Seems like this is the very kind of elitist policy -- reminiscent of the practice during the Civil War of allowing the rich and privileged to buy their way out of the draft -- that liberals used to be against.

Do-gooders also once wanted to "celebrate diversity," but total conformity seems to be the aim of those in Seattle these days, where the city has started putting green tags on garbage cans of homeowners who don't recycle. Enthusiasts boast that there is a very positive "Scarlet Letter" effect to subjecting noncompliers to public scorn. So you can almost hear the kitchen conversations: "Jimmy, I don't want you playing with the Williams boys anymore; their family doesn't recycle."

But wait, aren't these the same ACLU members who oppose public registries of multiple sex offenders? Many studies have shown that the environmental benefits from household recycling are minimal or at least highly exaggerated (because it uses a lot of energy and those recycling trucks emit a lot of greenhouse gases). America is not in danger of ever running out of landfill to store our garbage. For example, a study by Daniel Benjamin, an economist at Clemson, finds that we could store all of America's garbage for the next century within the property of Ted Turner's ranch in Montana, with 50,000 acres undisturbed for the horse and bison.

In reality, household recycling is mostly about absolving the guilt of Lexus liberals who just hate themselves for enjoying an affluent 21st-century lifestyle. The aim seems to be less saving nature than building self-esteem. And it has worked. Too well. I can barely tolerate the proud recyclers, hybrid-car owners and "save the polar bear" button-wearers who smother us with their self-righteousness. A few weeks ago I was at the house of some friends, and I accidentally tossed a plastic Gatorade bottle into the glass recycling bin. You would have thought that I had made a pass at their daughter.

Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes with rich irony that "we now live in a society where Sunday church attendance is down, but people wouldn't dream of missing their weekly trek to the altar of the recycling center." These facilities, by the way, are increasingly called "redemption centers." Which is fine except that now the greens want to make redemption mandatory. Oh, for a return to the days when someone stood up for the separation of church and state.

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REAL climate change -- and not an SUV in sight

A US-led team of archaeologists said today they had discovered by chance what is believed to be the largest find of Stone Age-era remains ever uncovered in the Sahara Desert. Named Gobero, the site includes remarkably intact human remains as well as the skeletons of fish and crocodiles dating back some 10,000 years to a time when what is now the world's largest desert was a swampy wetland.

The discovery, reported in the September issue of National Geographic Magazine, was stumbled upon by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno as he and his team searched for dinosaur fossils in Niger. The archaeological site is a part of the desert called Tenere, or "deserts of deserts" in the Tuareg nomads' language, and dates back to when the region was at its wettest period between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.

Gobero holds evidence of two different human populations that lived in the area more than 1,000 years apart. Exposed by the hot winds of the Sahara, human bones were found strewn about a wide area, the researchers said. "At first glance, it's hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the same place," said team member Chris Stojanowski. The Arizona State University bioarchaeologist added: "The biggest mystery is how they seemed to have done this without disturbing a single grave."

One of the finds stopped the team in its tracks -- a 5,000-year old skeleton of a small woman facing the remains of two young children, her arms outstretched in a gesture of embrace. Samples taken from underneath the bones revealed pollen clusters, evidence the team says, that those who perished had been buried on a bed of flowers. Other finds at the site include a human jaw with a nearly complete set of teeth and the bones of a small hand jutting out of the sand with all its digits intact. Alongside the human remains, the archaeologists also found harpoon points, stone implements and small, pierced decorations for making collars.

Because of the pristine condition in which the remains were found, the archaeologists say they are certain the burial ground was undiscovered until now. "Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in the desert, Sereno said. "I realised we were in the green Sahara." The site yielded fossils of huge crocodiles and dinosaurs including the complete skeleton of Sarcosuchus imperator, one of the biggest crocodiles that ever roamed the earth some 110 million years ago. Sereno also unearthed the Nigersaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur with a huge jaw studded with 500 teeth that lived in the same geologic period, the Cretaceous, some 110 million years ago.

Carbon-dating tests carried out on the bones and teeth by Stojanowski, from the University of Arizona, revealed more than 80 radiocarbon dates, showing two distinct populations lived on the banks of the lake, but 1,000 years apart.

Source




Austin, Texas, wants to produce power (at 6 times the normal cost) by burning wood waste

Burning wood will reduce pollution?? When other people are paying, no cost is too great and no acrivity is too bizarre in the pursuit of righteousness

Austin Energy (the city-owned electric utility in the Texas capital) and Nacogdoches Power, LLC, are hosting a town hall meeting in Austin tonight about their proposed biomass-power partnership. They propose a $2.3 billion, 20-year contract for power from wood waste. Austin Energy would be the sole buyer of power from the plant for the duration of the 20-year contract.

So Austin, always eager to lead the way in costly "green" ventures, is about to spend $2.3 billion on a 100-megawatt power plant that produces power from a fuel source that accounted for 0.95 percent of the total electricity generation in the U.S. in 2006. Not a surprising move, as the Austin Climate Protection Plan seeks to have 30 percent of the city's power from renewable-energy sources by 2020.

But even local environmental groups are urging caution:

"The City Council's decision to delay a decision on the plant for a couple weeks is a good one because I think there are a lot of questions," said Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, who said he supports getting power from a biomass plant but would like to see more data. "It'd be really helpful for that information to come out and be reviewed."

Tom "Smitty" Smith, executive director of Public Citizen, a government watchdog and environmental group, said he likes the basic concept behind the project but still has concerns about the cost and environmental impact, specifically pollution and the amount of wood waste that might be available to fuel the plant.

Mike Sloan, president of local renewable energy consulting firm Virtus Energy, said Austin shouldn't make such an expensive decision before Austin Energy's planned effort this fall to gather input about future sources of energy. "There are so many changes going on in the energy industry right now; it would be a good idea for Austin to get its priorities based on input from the people," Sloan said.

Austin Mayor Will Wynn is raring to go, though: "Wynn said partnering with Nacogdoches Power is a valuable opportunity. If Austin doesn't jump on this offer, someone else will, he said. `I definitely want to act when we can control our destiny,' Wynn said. `This is a remarkable hedge against the volatility of fossil fuels (pricing) and whichever carbon regime is going to happen sooner rather than later.'"

Missing from Mayor Wynn's comments are the effects of the project on Austin Energy ratepayers. Austin is preparing to commit $2.3 billion for 100 megawatts of generating capacity. The FutureGen project promised 275 megawatts of generating capacity for about $1.5 billion. The two proposed additional units at the South Texas Nuclear Project will generate 2,700 megawatts for about $6 billion. On a cost-per-megawatt basis, the city would be better off pursuing these zero-emissions alternatives rather than air-polluting burning of wood waste.

The kicker: Austin Energy owns 16 percent of the existing two STNP units but declined to participate in the two new units over cost concerns. Maybe Austin's ambitious Climate Protection Plan had something to do with it. The article reports, "If the biomass plant and a planned solar power project for a city-owned Webberville tract go forward, 18 percent of Austin Energy's fuel would be coming from renewable sources in 2012."

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NEW SCIENTIFIC DATA JUSTIFIES REPEALING NJ GLOBAL WARMING RESPONSE ACT

Responding to various new scientific reports questioning the concept of global warming, Assemblyman Michael Doherty today called on Governor Corzine to hold off on proposing any new regulations associated with the state's Global Warming Response Act and urged the Legislature to repeal that act when it returns to legislative business after Labor Day.

"There are many credible members of the scientific community who have questioned the theory of global warming, and now we have some scientists actually suggesting the earth's temperatures may be entering a period of dramatic cooling," said Doherty, R-Warren and Hunterdon. "With this growing level of scientific uncertainty, it makes no sense to enact a new set of economically damaging regulations prompted by the global warming hysteria of recent years."

The Global Warming Response Act was signed last year by Corzine, which requires the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The law required the state Department of Environmental Protection to release a report detailing how the state would meet the goals, with recommendations now expected to be issued this fall.

According to recent news reports, a top observatory that has been measuring sun spot activity predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next 20 years as solar activity slows and the planet drastically cools down. They suggest this could potentially herald the onset of a new ice age. Following the end of the sun's most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now decreasing.

Earlier this year, John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, stated that manmade global warming is "the greatest scam in history," adding, "I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam." Coleman said the theory of global warming is based on fraudulent science.

"New Jersey's tax and regulatory climate is already chasing jobs from this state left and right and these new regulations will make matters worse," Doherty said. "Rather than conforming our policies to questionable scientific theories, we should be looking at the concrete economic indicators that show our state's economy is in trouble. And we should be taking steps to help people who are losing jobs and being forced out of their homes by this state's anti-economic growth agenda - not making matters worse."

Source




CCSP-USP Report misunderstands ice-core data

Comment by ice-core expert, Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski. See also a previous critique of this allegedly "expert" Warmist report here

Abstract:

The foundations of the CCSP-USP Report, its "fingerprints" and "human influences", are based on ice core studies of CO2. However, ice cores are a wrong matrix for reconstruction of chemical composition of the ancient atmosphere. No effort dedicated to improving analytical techniques can change the imperative pattern of polar ice as a non-closed system matrix. Because of this pattern of ice the CO2 ice core data will always be artifacts caused by processes in the ice sheets and in the ice cores, with CO2 concentration values about 30% to 50% lower than in the original atmosphere.

The low CO2 ice-core concentrations during the past interglacials, when the global temperature was warmer than now, suggest that either atmospheric CO2 levels have no discernible influence on climate, or that proxy ice core reconstructions of the chemical composition of the ancient atmosphere are false - both propositions are probably true.

The scenarios in the CCSP-USP draft Report are based on unreliable ice core data and on incorrect presentation of the past climatic changes. They should not be used for global economic planning. Under Information Quality Act's terms this document is not permissibly disseminated so long as it continues to reproduce these false scenarios with the apparent imprimatur of the federal government. The requested change is: (1) to drop all the references to "human influences" and "fingerprints" as they cannot be credibly validated and are in fact empty notions; (2) to present the veritable fluctuation of climatic cold and warm phases over the past millennium; (3) to review the recent cosmo-climatologic studies, and to reflect them in the conclusions and recommendations of the Report. Without such corrections, the statements in this document fail to meet the authors' claim of representing "the best available information" (p. 14), and "the best available evidence" (p. 15), and otherwise violate applicable objectivity requirements.

Heavily referenced full article available online here

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

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14 August, 2008

Greenies beginning to see that abuse alone is not enough

Writing below, Andrew Dessler even acknowledges that there is a climate "debate". Wow! And he even argues his case instead of just saying that the skeptics are in the pay of "Big Oil". His arguments are nonsense but we must be thankful for small mercies, I guess. For instance, Einstein's theory didn't "extend" anything; Einstein REMOVED assumptions that Newton (and others, implicitly) had used to derive a theory of universal gravitation.

And there is NO need to go back a century to find scientific consensus being overturned. Instances crop up all the time on my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. For instance, the recognition of the role of helicobacter pylori happened only in the 1990s and that overturned a centuries-old consensus that bacteria could not survive in the acid environment of the stomach. Where stomach ulcers were once universally treated with antacids and surgery, they are now treated with antibiotics. Similar revolutions already under way this century in the treatment of burns, snakebite, the use of blood transfusions and the use of N2O in anesthesia etc., etc.

And as for 100% certainty that global temperature is increasing, that's true only if you believe the "cooked" figures of Jim Hansen. Other sources show no increase over the last 10 years

One of the biggest problems in the climate change debate is the fact that many people out there fail to understand the finer points of "scientific consensus." For an example of this misunderstanding, see Ron Rosenbaum's recent article in Slate. His article trots out one of the staples of the denial industry: Science has been wrong in the past, so how do we know that a scientific consensus on climate change is right? Because of this, reporters should report all sides of the argument.So if you're writing an article about climate change, you can interview one of the thousands of climate scientists out there who basically agree with the scientific assessment described by the IPCC reports, and then you can balance them out by quoting one of the the dozen or so credible scientific skeptics out there. After all, you don't want to be biased.

To support this well-worn canard, he trots out the usual examples of scientific consensus being overturned, such as Ignaz Semmelweis, who recognized that proper hygiene could greatly reduce disease, and Einstein, whose theory of general relativity superseded Newton's. Of course, the fact that the author had to go back more than a century to find these examples should give the reader pause. And never mind that Einstein's theory didn't overturn Newton's, but extended it.

Why is this such a ridiculous argument? As all scientists know, the confidence in any "consensus" can range from low to very high. For some, such as the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, or the observation that the Earth's temperature is increasing, there is virtual 100 percent certainty that the scientific consensus is correct.

For the statement that humans are responsible for most of the recent warming, the consensus is slightly weaker. The IPCC estimates that there is about a one-in-ten chance that this statement is wrong. For statements about changes in precipitation patterns under climate change, the consensus is weak. We think we know generally how precipitation will change, but no one would be surprised if it turns out to be substantially wrong.

Dissenting voices exist on just about every scientific question that touches the political sphere. For example, there are dissenters out there arguing that HIV does not cause AIDS, such as Kary Mullis, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Because they are always out there, the existence of dissenting voices actually tells you nothing about the actual scientific strength of a position. I doubt that even Rosenbaum would argue that journalists writing an article about HIV should balance their work by providing the dissenting view that perhaps HIV does not cause AIDS.Rather, journalists need to evaluate the strength of the consensus that they are reporting on.

For confidently held scientific views, such as the connection between increasing greenhouse gases and climate change or the connection between cigarettes and cancer, it is highly unlikely that the scientific community is wrong. What Rosenbaum fails to understand is that promoting uncertainty is a technique to forestall action. In other words, those opposed to action want the debate to focus on the science. As long as people are debating whether climate change is happening or not, and whether humans are responsible or not, then the debate will not be about what to do, and the status quo is maintained.In these cases, providing balance is, in reality, bias.

Source




It does not add up!

There's been no net global warming in the 21st century. Although seldom reported by the mainstream media, it's quite a story, because no climate model predicted it.



This graph, courtesy of atmospheric scientist John Christy, shows how climate models and reality diverge. The red, purple, and orange lines are model forecasts of global temperatures under different emission scenarios. The yellow line shows how much warming we are supposedly "committed to" even if CO2 concentrations don't change. The blue and green lines are actual temperatures as measured by ground-based (HadCrut) and satellite (UAH LT) monitoring systems.

What's really rather remarkable, is that since 2000, the rates at which CO2 emissions and concentrations are increasing have accelerated. According to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, fossil fuel and cement emissions increased by 3.3 percent per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.3 percent per year in the 1990s. Similarly, atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by 1.93 parts per million per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.58 ppm in the 1990s.

And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there's been no net warming in the 21st century. It don't add up! Skeptics have long said climate models aren't accurate enough to base policy decisions on. That may be truer now than ever

Source




Are the ice caps melting? Climate science's bipolar disorder

The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer "for the first time in human history," wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so let's look at the facts about polar sea ice. As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports.

Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique. In the August 29, 2000 edition of the New York Times, the same NSIDC expert, Mark Serreze, said: "There's nothing to be necessarily alarmed about. There's been open water at the pole before. We have no clear evidence at this point that this is related to global climate change." During the summer of 2000 there was "a large body of ice-free water about 10 miles long and 3 miles wide near the pole". Also in 2000, Dr Claire Parkinson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was quoted as saying: "The fact of having no ice at the pole is not so stunning." Submarines regularly surface at the North Pole

Satellite records have been kept for polar sea ice over the last thirty years by the University Of Illinois. In 2007 2008, two very different records were set. The Arctic broke the previous record for the least sea ice area ever recorded, while the Antarctic broke the record for the most sea ice area ever recorded. Summed up over the entire earth, polar ice has remained constant. As seen below, there has been no net gain or loss of polar sea ice since records began.

Last week, Dr James Hansen from NASA spoke about how CO2 is affecting the polar ice caps. "We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes... The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would," he said.

Well, not exactly. Hansen is only telling half the story. In the 1980s the same Dr Hansen wrote a paper titled Climate Sensitivity to Increasing Greenhouse Gases [pdf], in which he explained how CO2 causes "polar amplification." He predicted nearly symmetrical warming at both poles. As shown in Figure 2-2 from the article, Hansen calculated that both the Arctic and Antarctic would warm by 5-6 degrees Centigrade. His predictions were largely incorrect, as most of Antarctica has cooled and sea ice has rapidly expanded. The evidence does not support the theory.

In 2004, Dr Hansen returned to the subject. This time, he explained (pdf) that most of Arctic warming and melting is due to dirty snow from soot, not CO2. "Soot snow/ice albedo climate forcing is not included in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change evaluations. This forcing is unusually effective, causing twice as much global warming as a CO2 forcing of the same magnitude," he wrote. Once the snow dirties, it absorbs sunlight, warms, and quickly melts. Then the land and air above warms, causing higher temperature readings. This affects the Arctic more than the Antarctic simply because there aren't many people living near the Antarctic. The Arctic is polluted by European cities and oil fields in Siberia - where gas flaring generates huge amounts of soot. In fact, scientists at the University of California have estimated that up to 94 per cent of Arctic melt is due to dirty snow.

In other words, then, Antarctic temperatures and ice are going the opposite direction of what Dr. Hansen predicted, and most of the Arctic warming is due to soot, not CO2. His own research directly contradicts his recent high-profile statements about the Arctic and CO2.

Dr Hansen also talks frequently about the unprecedented temperature rise in the Arctic, yet his own temperature records show that much of the Arctic (including Greenland) was warmer from 1920-1940 than now. The NASA graph below from Nuuk, Greenland is typical of long term records of the region. Nuuk, Greenland is a key location because it is located in the southwest portion of the island and is not far from the mouth of the Jakobshavn Glacier - the most rapidly moving glacier in the world and a poster child for global warming campaigners. It is also the largest city and capital of Greenland, located just south of the Arctic Circle. NASA literature from the last few years focuses heavily on anomalous melt in southwest Greenland as a concern for sea level rise.

During the ice age scare in the 1970s the Arctic cooled dramatically, and is only now returning to temperatures comparable to sixty years ago. Most of the other Arctic locations with long-term records show similar trends. Long-term NASA temperature records in the Arctic are very sparse, but most show a pattern similar to Nuuk. Most of the other Arctic locations with long-term records show similar trends. Ostrov, Hatanga, Gmo, Bodo Vi, and Reykjavik are good examples.

Another pollution problem reported by NASA is known as the Arctic Haze. This is a human-generated brown cloud which hovers over the Arctic and traps heat. Additionally, we know that the summer of 2007 had unusually low cloud cover in the Arctic, which contributed to the unusual melt. But probably the most important factor in the anomalous "melt" was a spate of strong winds which blew all summer up the Bering Strait, across the pole and out into the warm waters of the North Atlantic. This compressed the sea ice towards Greenland and revealed a large area of open water north of Siberia and Alaska.

But in 2008 we are not seeing that. The winds and temperatures in the Arctic are quite different, and as of today there is more ice than normal around Siberia. The Arctic melt season ends in about seven weeks because the sun will get too low. As of June 26, there is no indication that the North Pole is in danger of melting.

The BBC's Richard Black wrote an article last week claiming that Arctic Ice is melting "even faster than last year." Looking at the Cryosphere Today map, it is abundantly clear that ice is melting more slowly than last year. By the end of June, 2007 the Hudson Bay was essentially ice-free. This year it is close to normal, with cold temperatures predicted for most of the rest of the short melt season. Someone is apparently having trouble reading maps at either the BBC and/or NSIDC.

Last summer, the headlines read "First ever traversal of the Northwest Passage". This sounds very dramatic, except that it is entirely incorrect. As the BBC reported: "In 1905, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first person to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage, in a wooden sailboat." The Northwest Passage has been navigated at least one hundred times over the last century. According to official US Weather Bureau records (pdf) from 1922, there was open sailing very close to the North Pole that year. Anthony Watts unearthed this quote from the Weather Bureau: "In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81 degrees in ice-free water.

Source




Is there a cold future just lying in wait for us?

Comment from Ulster

Our own observatory at Armagh is one of the oldest in the world and has been observing solar cycles for more than 200 years. What this work has shown is that, over all of this time, short and intense cycles coincide with global warmth and long and weak cycles coincide with cooling. Most recently, this pattern continued in the 1980s and 1990s when cycles 21 and 22 were short (less than 10 years) and intense and it was notably hot. But all this now looks set to change.

Cycle 23, which hasn't finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak. Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C - that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years. Of course, nothing in science is certain. Perhaps (though I doubt it) Armagh's old measurements are wrong or perhaps there are now other factors, such as CO2 emissions, which may change things somewhat.

However, temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern. Northern Ireland is not noted for extreme warmth at the best of times and has much more to fear from cold weather than it does from hot. We really need to be sure what is going to happen before spending too much money on combating global warming. We may need all the money we can save just to help us keep warm.

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Decade has had fewest 90-degree days since 1930

Comment from Chicago

August is the wettest and often the muggiest month of the year. Yet, summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century's opening decade. There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That's by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.

This summer's highest reading to date has been just 91 degrees. That's unusual. Since 1928, only one year-2000-has failed to record a higher warm-season temperature by Aug. 13.

Source




More global cooling: Abnormally cold winter in Southern Queensland, Australia

It's not your imagination. This is shaping up to be Brisbane's coldest winter in years with minimum temperatures about four degrees below average. So far this August Brisbane has averaged 7.4 degrees in the morning compared with 11.4 degrees at the same time last year. Bureau of Meteorology senior forecast Vikash Prasad said the long term average for August was about 10 degrees. "We're certainly seeing some cooler temperatures associated with the dry south-westerly airstream," Mr Prasad said.

This morning was no different with the mercury sinking to 6.5 degrees in the City and just 2.8 at the Airport. But farther west it was much colder with Amberley reaching a freezing -2.1 degrees, Oakey -3.6, Warwick -4.5 and Applethorpe a bone rattling -5 degrees.

Mr Prasad said the clearing of yesterday's cloud cover contributed to the colder morning. "There's still a bit of high cloud about but with the cloud clearing forward we'll probably see similar temperatures tomorrow as well," he said. Although the cold snap was expected to continue across inland parts, coastal areas should see slightly warmer minimums from next Monday or Tuesday as the winds changed from south-westerly to south-easterly. "That means there's more onshore flow and it should increase the moisture in the air a little bit," said Mr Prasad.

Source

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

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13 August, 2008

Anything might happen

Just a bit of fun: An unfalsifiable New Zealand weather forecast that uses a lot of words to predict everything and thus says nothing at all. If only the Warmists were equally prepared to admit that no-one can predict climate events. The waffle below is at least harmless

Otago's weather is expected to return to normal over the next two months, with an occasional cold blast providing variation, the MetService's seasonal forecast says.

The northwest winds of spring are expected to be delayed this year while fronts are likely to mainly bring southwest wind changes, with occasionally showery conditions, especially along the coast. "Some fronts may be followed by chilling southerly winds with hail and or sleet," the seasonal forecast team said. In Central Otago and the southern lakes, the weather was also expected to return to normal, with long periods of dry weather expected. Fronts and troughs rolling in from the Tasman Sea were expected to bring a return to normal rainfall.

In August, these fronts might add to the accumulation of mountain snow, the forecast said. Computer models suggested there was a 75% probability of neutral conditions dominating the incoming spring, and just a 15% probability of a significant El Nino appearing. A close year with similar weather patterns was 2001, which remained neutral through spring and into summer. "Since there was no significant broad-scale influence on our weather patterns during the next few months, it opened the possibility for more variability and variety," the team said. "We do not expect any one particular pattern to dominate for any more than a week or two."

The northern Tasman Sea was slightly warmer than normal and was likely to continue to be a breeding ground for low-pressure areas that would move on to various parts of New Zealand, especially during August. Each of the systems was expected to bring periods of rain and some wind. There would also be interludes of sunny weather and light winds, with some passing anticyclones or ridges of high pressure, but these were not expected to last long. "Occasional polar blasts that bring chilling winds from the Southern Ocean are also on the menu."

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Claim: Drought is the silent and insidious killer associated with global warming

This poor old anthropologist obviously has not a clue about elementary physics. Warming oceans evaporate off more and thus produce MORE rain, not less -- though rainfall patterns may of course shift. But the overall effect will be LESS drought. And in a globalized world, shifting patterns of production will be quickly adapted to

Global warming is currently one the world's most pressing issues, but the phenomenon of climate change is not specific to the 21st century. A new book by anthropologist Brian Fagan takes a look at the global effects of climate change that occurred during the Medieval Warm Period and examines how subtle shifts in the environment had far-reaching effects on human existence.

In "The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations" (Bloomsbury Press, 2008), Fagan, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focuses on the period from the 10th to 15th centuries when the earth experienced a rise in average temperature that changed the climate worldwide.

Some civilizations, including those in Western Europe and the Norse and Inuit of the North Atlantic, flourished as long summers brought bountiful crops, population growth, and a burgeoning cultural scene, Fagan notes. However, other long-established societies, such as the Maya and Indians of the American southwest, collapsed from prolonged periods of drought.

He describes the ways in which different civilizations adapted to the centuries of irregular warming. Mayans, for example, created huge water storage facilities while the Chimu lords of coastal Peru designed sophisticated irrigation systems. However, despite their efforts, they could not withstand the repeated multiyear droughts, which, according to Fagan, constitute the most dangerous element of global warming.

"When I began writing the book, I expected to focus on Europe," Fagan said. "But as I looked further afield I realized that for a lot of the world the Medieval Warm Period meant savage issues related to drought. With so much of the world currently suffering from the effects of drought, this struck me as a neglected problem."

While climate experts tend to focus on melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina and the severe flooding it caused, Fagan believes drought is the greater threat.

Citing conditions in eastern and sub-Saharan Africa among other areas, he writes in his book, ".if you look at the warm centuries with a global perspective, the wide incidence of drought is truly striking and offers a sobering message about tomorrow's world. Prolonged aridity was widespread in medieval times and killed enormous numbers of people. Evidence is mounting that drought is the silent and insidious killer associated with global warming."

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The Greatest Hoax ever Perpetrated

Google "RECORD HEAT" and you will get 3,180,000 hits. Google "record cold" and you will get 5,110,000. Yes, that's right; and it's just the tip of the proverbial (not melting) iceberg. You see, the convenient truth about the theory of global warming is that you can blame anything on it. Record snows and snow cover in North America, record cold in Asia, snow falling in Baghdad. That's right. Snow in the desert. Clearly more signs of catastrophic global warming.

Not so fast. Pull up a chair, put your feet up, expel some evil CO2, and let's talk about how "settled" the issue of global warming really is. I know full well that writing this piece will cause me to be labeled a "global warming denier" and be lumped in with those that Al Gore said in March are, along with Dick Cheney, "in such a tiny minority view now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat."

Seriously? I can't question the people who are incapable of telling me what the weather is going to be for my tee-time this Saturday, but claim to know exactly how much warmer the entire globe will be, how much the sea will rise, how much the snow cover will recede, and how much the ice caps will melt in 100 years?

You're really going to implicitly equate me with a holocaust denier because I don't believe that your faulty computer models (designed by James Hanson, et al., a liberal NASA scientist with an agenda) prove that the globe is warming, or if it is, that it's our fault? You swear by the models, why don't you swear by the corrections that NASA very quietly released last summer that show the warmest year on record was not 1998, but in fact is 1934, and that five of the top 10 hottest years on record were all before World War II?

The Pope once had a problem with a "denier." His name was Galileo, and he thought that the earth was round and that it was not the center of the universe; that it actually revolved around the sun, not the other way around. The Pope did the same thing that Al Gore is doing now. With faulty data and conjecture, the Pope declared that the debate was over and that anybody who disagreed would be burned at the stake.

While we don't burn people at the stake these days, Gore claims we will all die in a ball of fire if we don't rally around this theory and devote all of our time, energy (both fossil and kinetic), and money to it.

OK, I am a skeptic. When every lunatic liberal leftist on the face of the planet says we need to close down the carbon emissions of industry (carbon caps) and spend trillions of dollars trying to fix something that (1.) we don't know if we caused it (the factual evidence says we didn't), and (2.) if we did cause global warming, is it really in our power to fix (reverse) it, red flags go up.

Many leading scientists firmly believe that more CO2 in the atmosphere is actually good for the planet. David Archibald, PhD, at the Biology Department of San Diego State University, is one of those leading scientists. In a lecture given at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, Dr. Archibald said that more CO2 in the atmosphere will give us a lusher environment and actually increase plant growth rates in addition to increasing the sustainability of crops in arid regions.

If you believe that liberal bastion of policy wonks and diplomats (and a couple of decent, and many not-so-decent, scientists), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we cannot reverse it. The IPCC closed its Fourth Assessment Report's (AR4) Summary for Policymakers with this: "[B]oth past and future anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to global warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the time scales required for removal of this gas from the atmosphere."

For those of you who do not know, the IPCC is more than just Gore's co-conspirator in the global warming fraud, they are co-recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And what does climate change have to do with peace anyway? Back to our favorite global warming alarmist, Al Gore. He recently announced that his Alliance for Climate Protection will embark on a mission to better educate the public on the dangers of man-made global warming and the dire necessity to make drastic (and prohibitively costly) changes in order to stop it. Oh yeah, he's spending $300 million to do it.

Maybe Gore subscribes to Gallup. A recent Gallup poll revealed that about the same percentage of people believe in man-made global warming as did when they first took the poll in 1989. Ironically, the propaganda machine that is Nobel Laureate Gore bans the media from his lectures. An odd contradiction for a man that wants the world to adopt his doomsday outlook and invest in his "green" funds. Gore's lecture contract, handled by The Harry Walker Agency, Inc., in New York, in addition to requiring non-disclosure of the terms and conditions of the agreement, says in section 9(a) that "the press is not invited or permitted to cover the event unless express written permission is granted by the Harry Walker Agency, Inc." Section 9(c) reads, "Vice President Gore will accept no interview requests."

Maybe if he allowed the press into his lectures, or gave an interview or two, he wouldn't have to spend $300 million on public awareness. In case you are wondering, yes, I have a copy. Are you at least a little bit curious why the free press is not allowed to attend his lectures? Read on, my friend.

GLOBAL WARMING HAS BECOME QUITE THE INDUSTRY. The U.S. alone spends over $4 billion per year on climate change research. That seems like a lot of money to spend on something that is so well settled and agreed upon by all but a few "flat-earthers."

Gore has started giving a disclaimer during his lectures. Gore, and Global Investment Management, LLP (GIM), the London-based private equity firm of which Gore is the founder and Chairman, stand to benefit in untold riches if we invest in the companies he recommends in his lectures. His disclaimers are no different than those of a stock broker or insurance agent. Gore is basically saying, yes, I own stock in these companies, but you should too if you want to save the planet from certain doom.

Doom-and-gloom has served Gore well. Like the other two shysters from his administration, he is reported to be worth north of $100 million. If you missed the media's passing mention last month, Clinton finally released her income tax returns. Turns out she's worth about $109 million. Civil servants, huh? Servants never had it so good. All the past presidents and vice presidents combined probably don't have the wealth of the Gores and Clintons.

As a side note, Gore closed GIM's second "green" fund, Climate Solutions Fund, in April at $683 million. The first fund, Global Equity Strategy Fund, has invested $2.2 billion in large companies judged to have, from an environmental, social and economic viewpoint, a "sustainable" business. I wonder, can any of the companies that Gore is investing billions in help him and his Nashville mansion use less than 10 times the amount of energy the average American household uses? But don't worry, he's using compact fluorescents in his house, so it's ok to use 10 times as much energy as everyone else.

Speaking of Gore's waste and gluttony, I wonder how ginormous his carbon footprint was while he was jetting around the world promoting his lie/movie and trying to convince everyone to invest in his companies. It was reported in April that An Inconvenient Truth used computer-generated footage from the movie The Day After Tomorrow to show a crumbling ice shelf. Those are the kinds of deceptions necessary when trying to convince the world of a lie. Just as Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels said, "[T]ell a lie enough and it becomes accepted as truth."

As well as that has worked for Gore, support for his "planet in peril" mantra is eroding faster than he claims the ice caps are. In 2007 a British court held that, in order for his lie/movie to be shown to school children, "eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of the [students]." Among those inaccuracies, the court ruled, was that rises in CO2 lagged behind temperature rises by 800-2,000 years; that despite the movie's claim, it is a scientific impossibility for global warming to cause the Gulf Steam to stop flowing; and that, while the movie claims sea levels could rise 23 feet, the evidence showed sea levels are expected to rise 15 inches over the next 100 years.

If you believe Gore, we shouldn't even bother buying green bananas, the end is so close at hand. Gore should have won his Oscar for the best mockumentary, not documentary, of 2007.

The idea of exposing the lies behind global warming in courtrooms is catching on in the U.S. also. John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, published an article in ICECAP last year in which he called global warming the greatest scam in history. Coleman added, "[S]ome dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long-term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the `research' to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus."

Coleman didn't stop there. On March 3, while attending the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York he said the following: "I have a feeling this is the opening. If the lawyers will take the case - sue the people who sell carbon credits, that includes Al Gore - that lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming." Well, it worked in Britain.

Another famous Albert (Einstein), this one with a background in math and science, however, once noted that the consensus of a 100 scientists is undone by one fact. Steve McIntyre and a team of volunteers noticed some inconsistencies and an unusual discontinuity in the US temperature data used for climate modeling. When they asked NASA's Hanson for the algorithm, he refused. (All in the name of science and consensus, I'm sure.) McIntyre and his team reverse-engineered it. What they found was a jump in many locations, all occurring around January 2000. As previously noted, NASA has released corrected data.

Hanson can't even fix the Y2K glitch in his climate model, and we're supposed to radically change global lifestyles and economics based on his numbers? Joseph D'Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast, says that "carbon dioxide (CO2) is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume. . . Only 0.0275 of atmospheric CO2 is [man-made] in origin. . . We are responsible for 0.00001 of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere were a 100-story building, our [man-made] CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor."

Do we really want to spend a trillion dollars on linoleum? "We've been warming up about a degree per century since the Little Ice Age (LIA) in about 1600. We've been warming for 400 years, long before human-generated CO2 could have anything to do with the climate," says Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University.

Dr. Easterbrook is not alone in his opinion. Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, opines "[O]f course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out of the LIA, not because we are putting more carbon dioxide into the air."

On December 13, 2007, 100 scientists (often referred to as the Bali-100) wrote an open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, His Excellency Ban Li-Moon, in New York, NY. Among other things, the letter made three significant declarations: 1. "[R]ecent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability. 2. The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century fall within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years. 3. Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling."

The letter continued, "In stark contrast to the oft repeated assertion that the science of climate change is `settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But, because these IPCC working groups were generally instructed to consider work published only through May 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated."

In case you are wondering, these are not some lunatic-fringe, pseudo-scientists. Of the 100 signatories to that letter, 85 hold a PhD. They closed the letter by saying, "[A]ttemps to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems."

On March 4, at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, more than 500 scientists closed the conference with what is referred to as the Manhattan Declaration. In short, they declared that "global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life. . . There is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change. . . Now, therefore, we recommend that world leaders reject the view expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided, works such as An Inconvenient Truth."

How many of you heard or read about these declarations in the mainstream media? Is this the consensus that Saint Gore and his co-conspirators in the media speak of?

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Maine's tourism industry suffering due to 'unseasonably cool' weather

August is usually the busiest month of the year for Maine's tourism industry. With August off to a soggy start, there are a lot of long faces in Vacationland. Fleece and sweatshirts have replaced bikinis at Old Orchard Beach and no one's buying ice cream. Instead, it's rained 10 of the last 11 days and it's unseasonably cool.

Who's counting? Families on vacation, that's who. "A little depressing so far ha. It would have been nice to go to Aquaboggan today." Instead Dad had to break the bad news to Melanie, Alex and Nathan--the waterpark was closed due to weather. Staying closed on a lucrative 10-dollar Monday means 20 to 30 thousand dollars down the tubes..And in Aquaboggan's short nine week season, they can't make that money back.

While bad weather tends to scare off last minute travelers, vacationers who've booked ahead usually forge ahead. They string up the blue tarp at the campground and try to make the best of it.

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Global Warming Hoax: A Skeptical Beginner's Guide

When you landed on this site, you most likely made an effort to search for an alternate take on global warming - the one the mainstream media and Al Gore won't tell you. However, you may be new to the entire subject of the global warming hoax and need a primer without having to read the vast library of information contained on SkepticsGlobalWarming.com. There are several major subjects up for debate, unlike what Al Gore tells you, on the topic of climate change. This two-part article will attempt to provide guidance, from a skeptical point of view, of each subject trumpeted by the global warming activists.

Each of these talking points have been touted by the media and the global warming crowd as proof that the world is going to end and all civilization as we know it will be wiped from the face of the planet if we don't act soon. By "proof" they mean "possible observations at a specific point-in-time that may have changed to no longer support the global warming cause so we'll just keep repeating old data until you believe it." By "the world is going to end" they mean "sea levels are going to rise one foot over the next 100 years, but we'll say 20 feet just to scare them". "All civilization as we know it will be wiped from the face of the planet" really means "the poor that can't afford to move away from low-lying areas may have their homes flooded if there's a really, really high tide". And "act soon" really means "more taxes". Got it so far? Good. Let's move on to the talking points.

Global Warming Activist Point #1: Arctic ice is melting, which will force polar bears into extinction.

Global Warming Skeptic Rebuttal: If the Arctic ice is melting, a recent study found that it may be due to natural causes. However, the Winter of 2007-2008 showed that the Arctic ice refreezed at a record rate, but the records have only been kept for 25 years. Also, ice coverage between 2006 and 2007 went from 13 million square kilometers in the winter to 4 million square kilometers in the summer back to 13 million square kilometers the following winter. So no scientist can truly tell you that the Arctic ice, in an unprecedented move, is going to melt away and flood the world. There isn't enough data available to understand the median ice coverage. Oh, and polar bear thing? An global warming activist was caught passing off photos of polar bears clinging to shrinking winter icebergs when the photo was actually taken in the summer.

Global Warming Activist Point #2: Antarctic ice is melting, which will flood the planet.

Global Warming Skeptic Rebuttal: Antarctic ice is GROWING on three sides of the continent. They don't tell you that on the news. The best example of disputing this claim is the work of an early 1900's explorer that visited Antarctica. His claims state that parts of the continent that were water back in 1915 are now ice. With all of the carbon dioxide pumped into the air between 1915 and today, shouldn't the same area of Antarctica remain in liquid form?

Global Warming Activist Point #3: All of the warming has occurred since 1940, so it must be due to carbon dioxide output.

Global Warming Skeptic Rebuttal: Al Gore presented the now infamous "hockey stick" graph that depicted a relatively low temperature period before making a significant jump north during the era of industrialization. Unfortunately for Gore and the global warming activists, it's been warmer on this planet before as is evidenced in a graph on this website. The warming and cooling of the Earth appear cyclical and, over the long run, does not appear to have any direct correlation to CO2 levels.

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Australian property buyers not worried by global warming

The threat of rising sea levels caused by climate change is not putting off cashed-up Australians from spending big on blue-chip beachfront property. Real estate agents say that dire predictions about the hungry sea swallowing up coastal suburbs seem to be falling on deaf ears. Demand for high-end beach property is holding up despite overall market softness due to a slowing economy and tanking share market. Buyers are either ignoring the experts or don't believe them.

A record was set on the Central Coast when a deceased estate in Pacific Dr, facing Wamberal Beach, offered for the first time in 70 years, sold for $6.2 million. Another picture-perfect beachfront home at Narrabeen, earmarked by scientists as the Sydney suburb most vulnerable to rising sea levels, sold last month for $4.03 million -- 20 per cent up on the price it fetched three years ago.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report predicts sea levels will rise between 18cm and 59cm over the next 92 years, and another 10cm to 20cm if ice sheets melt faster. For every centimetre the sea rises, scientists say, the beach retreats 1m -- so, by the end of the century, the worst-case scenario is that properties within 80m of the beach will be under water.

But real estate agent Jack Elsegood, an expert in northern beaches property, said there was no sign buyers were worried. "They understand there is a threat but, while it exists, it's not going to be in their lifetime or maybe even in their children's,'' he said.

Oceanographer Dr John Hunter, from the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, said some people did not to want to face the problem. "People want to live by the sea and a lot of them will take these risks,'' he said. "They'll accept them, hoping a solution can be found. (They think) perhaps a sea wall can be built.'' Dr Hunter said it was wrong to think the problems posed by rising sea levels were years away. [Even though sea-levels have stopped rising recently?]

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

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12 August, 2008

APS, A thought-free zone

Below is the substance of a communication received from The Right Honourable The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

The American Physical Society ceased to be a scientific body and became a mere pressure-group when, in 2007, it adopted "National Policy 07.1" on climate change, reproduced in full below. The "policy" cites not a single scientific authority: it is a purely political manifesto whose tendentious conclusions are materially at odds with scientific theory and with observed reality.

"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

"The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

"Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth's climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases."

A scientifically accurate revision of the APS' "National Policy" on "Climate Change" is below

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities have increased the proportion of the atmosphere occupied by carbon dioxide by one-ten-thousandth part since 1750 (Keeling & Whorf, 2004, updated). This minuscule perturbation may cause a small, harmless, and beneficial warming (Monckton, 2008). Greenhouse gases also include water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas because of its volume, and methane, of which the atmospheric concentration ceased to increase in 2000 and is now declining (IPCC, 2007). Greenhouse gases are not pollutants, but occur naturally in quantities greater than those emitted from fossil fuel combustion and industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: global cooling is occurring (GISStemp, HadCRU, RSS, UAH, NCDC). Though a natural warming trend of ~0.5 øC per century began in 1700, long before humankind could possibly have had any significant effect on global temperature (Akasofu, 2008), there has been no new record year for global temperature since 1998 and, since late 2001, there has been a downtrend. The cooling between January 2007 and January 2008 was the sharpest since records began in 1880.

Therefore no action need be taken to mitigate "global warming", for there is no evidence in the instrumental record that humankind has caused any significant increase in the 300-year-long natural warming rate, and no theoretical reason why future greenhouse-gas emissions should prove harmful. In any event, mitigating actions would be orders of magnitude less cost-effective than adaptation as, and if, necessary (all economists except Stern, 2006). The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was ~18 times today's in the Cambrian era (IPCC, 2001). Humankind was not responsible - we were not there. The planet came to no harm. Significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are unlikely to occur.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate long-run prediction impossible (Lorenz, 1963), the APS urges caution in relying upon computer models when making long-term climate predictions. There is no basis for the oft-repeated contention that the effects of human activity on the Earth's climate are likely to be great enough to influence the future climate. The APS therefore urges governments and peoples to provide the technological options for meeting real short-term and long-term environmental challenges, of which "global warming" from greenhouse-gas enrichment is not one. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the current official misinformation and unscientific alarmism about emission of greenhouse gases.

Climate realists' weekend sports sampler

Beijing:

Here's a news flash: someone is actually shivering at the Olympics. Beijing was supposed to be hotter than Amanda Beard, but yesterday, the rain poured down on the women's cycling road race.

The odds of somebody quivering in the cold at the Beijing Olympics were about as long as Yao Ming's inseam, but the lips of Canadian cyclist Leigh Hobson were trembling in a finish-line interview after she placed an impressive 17th on her 38th birthday. What do you have to say now, David Suzuki?

Chicago:

With unseasonably cool temperatures dipping into the mid-60s Sunday night at Wrigley Field, Edmonds received three standing ovations in a 6-2 victory over St. Louis, including one in the second inning for flying out and advancing a runner...

On a crisp night that felt more like early October than the dog days of August, Edmonds almost managed to upstage Ryan Dempster...

Virginia:

An unseasonably cool August morning and a highly competive field that featured many of the area's best distance runners were the catalysts for record-setting performances at the third annual Dog Days 5K in Gypsy Hill Park on Saturday.

UK:

Gerald Mosse took the starring role on Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup day at Ascot when leading his European team to victory as well as collecting the Silver Saddle trophy for leading rider.

Despite damp conditions and unseasonably cold weather for the height of summer, over 33,000 turned out to enjoy the annual four-team jockeys' competition which drew riders from across the globe.

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New poll shows CO2 hysteria fading in the U.S.

Actual poll results are here. A few notes:

Only 25% (question 2) of those surveyed thought that global warming was the world's single biggest environmental problem (multiple responses accepted). This is down from 33% last year.

Only 30% (question 3) trust the things that scientists say about the environment "completely" or "a lot".

Only 33% (question 8) thought that a rise in the world's temperatures was caused by "things people do", down from 41% last year.

Only 33% (question 18) thought that "most scientists" agree with one another about the causes of global warming, and only 33% thought that "most scientists" agree with one another about how much of a threat global warming poses.

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Scientists debate whether we're changing the climate

The global warming debate isn't likely to cool off anytime soon, with experts disagreeing about its causes, and even its existence. What you hear about global warming can vary as much as, well, the weather. One day, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is quoted saying: "We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late. The science is clear. The global warming debate is over."

Another day, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum says this: "Americans are coming to understand that global temperatures have actually cooled over the last 10 years and are predicted to continue cooling over the next 10."

On another day, dozens of papers proclaim that the sun is at fault, since the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research demonstrated that the sun has burned brighter in the last 60 years than any time in the last 1,100 years, or 8,000 years, depending on the news source.

Most climatologists maintain that global warming is real and human activity is likely the major contributor. They believe that as we release more CO2 into the atmosphere, the planet will get hotter. The contradictory statements tend to cluster around a couple of sticking points: the heating trend over the last few years, the influence of the sun, and the lessons from the distant past.

Where there's good agreement is laid out by MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, a critic of Al Gore and others he considers alarmists. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal several years ago called "Climate of Fear," he wrote that he agrees that global temperature has risen about a degree (Celsius) since the late 19th century. He also agrees with most other climatologists that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 30 percent over the same period, and that CO2 should contribute to future warming, thanks to basic atmospheric physics.

Lindzen, however, said in a recent interview that the carbon dioxide buildup may not be causing the current warming trend, and it therefore may not play a significant role in the future climate. And the trend may already have turned around, he said. "If you look from 1995 you don't see any change that could be regarded as statistically significant . . . . For the last 13 or 14 years nothing has been happening."

Pennsylvania State University climatologist Richard Alley said the recent cooling claim is everywhere. If you search for the phrase "global warming stopped in 1998," you get thousands of hits, and he's most recently heard this argument from U.S. senators. He called it "cheating" to start in 1998 and then pick some subsequent cooler year to argue for cooling. It's a little like taking your first measurements in July and your last ones in January, he said. To understand the climate, you have to look at longer-scale trends, he said, smoothing out those little ripples known as weather. Over the long term, he said, it's getting hotter. "If you take the last 30 years, it's completely evident that it's going up," he said of the global temperature.

But could it be the work of the sun? Solar physicists say the sun has been temperamental in the past, and flare-ups and calm periods have rocked the climate. One clue to the sun's variability comes from the Little Ice Age, during the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe and North America were much colder and snowier than they are today. During that time, astronomers noted a nearly complete absence of sunspots, said atmospheric physicist Peter Pilewskie from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Called the Maunder Minimum, he said, the coincidence of this spotless period on the sun with the notable chill of the ice age suggests a sun-climate connection.

Could the sun be getting warmer? If that were so, Pilewskie said it would be unlikely to account for more than a fraction of the observed warming trend. With satellites, scientists have been able to record the total radiation emitted by the sun, and found it has changed very little in the last 30 years.

But those records only go back so far. Several years ago, a team from Germany's Max Planck institute published a paper showing that carbon isotopes trapped in tree rings reveal unprecedented solar activity during the 20th century. Carbon 14, a heavy form of carbon, is formed when cosmic rays from outer space impact carbon on the Earth. The greater the solar activity, the more the sun's magnetic field deflects the cosmic rays and the less carbon 14 should be stored in tree rings. According to the Max Planck team, we've been experiencing more solar activity in the last 100 years than we did for the last 8,000 years.

Judith Lean, a solar physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, calls that conclusion erroneous. She said the isotopes also vary much more with changes in the Earth's own magnetic field and processes on the Earth, thus complicating the analysis. She said the consensus among solar physicists now is that the sun is in a relatively warm phase, but nothing unprecedented and not hot enough to have raised the temperature a degree in the last century.

The other major point of contention surrounds the Earth's erratic climate history, with its many ice ages and long steamy periods. Lindzen argues that the climate is ultimately unstable, and so we should expect constant change regardless of human-generated carbon dioxide. Many factors can influence climate on time scales long and short. Slight fluctuations in the Earth's distance from the sun have periodically conspired with the angle of the planet's tilt to create ice ages over the course of the last five million years.

More ancient hot periods that lasted millions of years are raising bigger questions. About 95 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, for example, it was so warm that alligators lived in what's now Canada and tropical trees grew as far north as Greenland. Dinosaurs roamed where penguins and polar bears live today.

It looks as if it would take about eight times today's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to make things that hot, said Brian Huber, who studies past climate for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "This is a challenge for climate modelers - we don't fully understand it," he said. But it could be that CO2 has a greater warming power than previously realized, in which case we will be in for a more severe global warming than has been predicted, Huber said.

To Lindzen, the inability to fully account for past warm spells makes it hard to trust predictions of our near-term future. "If we knew the answer to things like this, one would have more confidence." Lindzen takes the view that the climate doesn't need human intervention to change over the course of decades or centuries. "The whole notion that something outside has to cause a change is absurd," he said. "The system is never in equilibrium; it's always wobbly."

But Penn State's Alley said CO2 from volcanoes looks to be the prime suspect for the warm spells of the distant past, and fossil-fuel burning is by far the most likely driver of current trends. "We've looked at the sun. Volcanoes are not doing anything weird. The oceans can dump heat into the atmosphere, but they're getting warmer too," he said.

Perhaps some of the disagreement boils down to a philosophical difference. Some fret over the pace of humanity's impact on the planet, and consider the cautious approach to be to hold off on further changing our atmosphere. Others are comfortable with the notion of human beings altering the global atmosphere, and argue the cautious approach would be to avoid changing our way of life until we know more.

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The Columbia Journalism Review's Division Over Dissent

When does dissent become Untruth and lose the rights and respect due to "legitimate dissent"? Who decides-and how-what dissent deserves to be heard and what doesn't? When do journalists have to "protect" readers from Untruth masking itself as dissent or skepticism?

I found myself thinking about this when I came across an unexpected disjunction in the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The issue leads off with a strong, sharply worded editorial called "The Dissent Deficit." (It's not online, but it should be.) In it, the magazine, a publication of the Columbia School of Journalism-and thus a semi-official upholder of standards in the semi-official profession of journalism-argues clearly and unequivocally that allowing dissent to be heard and understood is part of a journalist's mission.

The editorial contends that doing so sometimes requires looking beyond the majority consensus as defined by the media on the basis of a few sound bites and paying extra attention to dissenting views, because they often present important challenges to conventional wisdom on urgent issues that deserve a hearing.The editorial deplores the way that journalism has lately been failing in this mission: "Rather than engage speech that strays too far from the dangerously narrow borders of our public discourse, the gatekeepers of that discourse-our mass media-tend to effectively shout it down, marginalize it, or ignore it."

So true. The editorial offers the media's treatment of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a dissident whose views, particularly on American foreign policy's responsibility for 9/11, have gotten no more than sound-bite treatment, as an example. I found that the editorial gave the best short summary of Wright's view of "black liberation theology," especially the concept of "transformation," and made a strong case that Wright and his views deserve attention rather than derision. He shouldn't be erased from public discourse with the excuse that we've "moved on," that we're all "post-racial" now.

The CJR editorial encourages journalists not to marginalize dissenters, however unpopular or out of step. Implicit are the notions that today's dissenters can become tomorrow's majority, that our nation was founded on dissent, that the Bill of Rights (and especially the First Amendment) was written by dissenters, for dissenters. That the journalistic profession deserves what respect it retains not for being the stenographers of the Official Truth but for conveying dissent and debate.

It was troubling, then, to find, in an article in the very same issue of CJR, an argument that seems to me to unmistakably marginalize certain kinds of dissent. The contention appears in an article called, with deceptive blandness, "Climate Change: What's Next?" The article doesn't present itself as a marginalizer of dissent. It rather presents itself as a guide for "green journalists" on what aspects of climate change should be covered now that the Truth about "global warming"-whether it's real, and whether it's mainly caused by humans-is known.

About two-thirds of the story offers tips and warnings like "watch out for techno-optimism." Alas, the author doesn't inspire confidence that she takes her own warnings to heart. The very first paragraph of her story contains a classic of credulous "techno-optimism":

... a decade from now, Abu Dhabi hopes to have the first city in the world with zero carbon emissions. In a windswept stretch of desert, developers plan to build Masdar city, a livable environment for fifty thousand people that relies entirely on solar power and other renewable energy.

All that's missing from the breathless, real-estate-brochure prose is a plug for the 24-hour health club and the concierge service for condo owners.

But, the article tells us, the danger of "techno-optimism" pales before the perils of handling dissent. The first problem in the evaluation of what dissent should be heard is how certain we are about the truth. If we know the truth, why allow dissent from it into journalism? But who decides when we've reached that point of certainty? In any case, as the author's Abu Dhabi effusion suggests, there's no lack of certainty about what the Official Truth is in her mind:

"After several years of stumbling, mainstream science and environmental coverage has generally adopted the scientific consensus that increases in heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels and tropical deforestation are changing the planet's climate, causing adverse effects even more rapidly than had been predicted.

She's correct in saying that this is the consensus, that most journalists now accept what's known as the "anthropogenic theory" of global warming: that it is our carbon footprint that is the key cause of global warming, rather than-as a few scientists still argue-changes in solar activity, slight changes in the tilt of the earth's axis, the kinds of climate change that the earth constantly experienced long before man lit the first coal-burning plant.

But here lies danger, "a danger that the subtleties of the science, and its uncertainty, might be missed by reporters unfamiliar with the territory," especially when confronted with "studies that contradict one another." Faced with conflicting studies, she tells us, "scientists look for consistency among several reports before concluding something is true."

This is, frankly, a misunderstanding or misstating of the way science works. She seems to be confusing consensus among scientists and scientific truth. They are two different things. The history of science repeatedly shows a "consensus" being overturned by an unexpected truth that dissents from the consensus. Scientific truth has continued to evolve, often in unexpected ways, and scientific consensus always remains "falsifiable," to use Karl Popper's phrase, one any science reporter should be familiar with. All the more reason for reporting on scientific dissent, one would think.

Yet when I read her description of how science proceeds, it seems to me she is suggesting science proceeds by a vote: Whoever who has the greatest number of consistent papers-papers that agree with him or her-"wins." As in, has the Truth.

In fact, the history of science frequently demonstrates that science proceeds when contradictory-dissenting-studies provoke more studies, encourage rethinking rather than being marginalized by "the consensus" or the "consistency" of previous reports. Indeed, the century's foremost historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, believed, as even "green" reporters should know, that science often proceeds by major unexpected shifts: Just when an old consensus congealed, new dissenting, contradictory reports heralded a "paradigm shift" that often ended up tossing the old "consensus" into the junk bin.

If it hadn't been for the lone dissenting voice of that crazy guy in the Swiss patent office with his papers on "relativity," we still might believe the "consensus" that Newtonian mechanics explained a deterministic universe. And what about Ignaz Semmelweis and his lone crusade against the "consensus" that doctors need not wash their hands before going from an infected to an uninfected patient? Or the nutty counterintuitive dissenting idea of vaccination? The consensus was wrong. In fact, science proceeds by overturning consensus.

Sometimes the consensus proves to be long-lasting, but in science, any consensus, even the new consensus that formed around relativity, is subject to the challenges of Popper's "falsifiability." But even if-or because-not all truths in science are final, argument about what the truth is, and competition among competing ideas, often helps us to get closer to it.

But our CJR author appears to believe that the green consensus, the anthropogenic theory of global warming, has some special need to be protected from doubters and dissenters, and that reporters who don't do their job to insulate it are not being "helpful." When faced with dissent from the sacrosanct green consensus, the author, as we'll see, argues that the "helpful" reporter must always show the dissenters are wrong if they are to be given any attention at all.

This was the contention that stunned me-that reporters must protect us from dissent -especially in light of the CJR editorial deploring the "dangerously narrow borders of our public discourse."

The contention that reporters must be "helpful" in protecting us from dissent is best understood in the context of the "no last word" anecdote in which the author tells us of the way your loyal green reporter must manage conflicting reports. She tells the story of a report that indicated the rest of the century would bring fewer hurricanes. It was important to her that "experienced" green journalists were able to cite other reports that there would be "more and more powerful hurricanes." She praises a reporter who concludes his story "with a scientist's caveat": "We don't regard this [new, fewer-hurricane report] as the last word on this topic."

So, "no last word" is the way to go. Except when it isn't. We learn this as the CJR writer slaps the wrist of a local TV station for allowing "skeptics" to be heard without someone representing the consensus being given the last word. "Last year," she writes, "a meteorologist at CBS's Chicago station did a special report that featured local scientists discussing the hazards of global warming in one segment, well-known national skeptics in another, and ended with a cop-out: 'What is the truth about global warming? It depends on who you talk to.' " In other words, no last word. Bad CBS affiliate, bad! "Not helpful, and not good reporting" she tells us. "The he-said, she-said reporting just won't do."

Setting aside for a moment, if you can, the sanctimonious tone of the knuckle rapping ("just won't do"), there are two ways to interpret this no-no, both objectionable, both anti-dissent.

One implication is that these "nationally known skeptics" should never have been given air time in the first place because the debate is over, the Truth is known, their dissent has no claim on our attention; their dissent is, in fact, pernicious.

The second way of reading her "not helpful" condemnation is that if one allows dissenters on air to express their dissent, the approach shouldn't be "he-said, she-said." No, the viewers must be protected from this pernicious dissent. We should get "he-said, she-said, but he (or she) is wrong, and here is the correct way to think."

It may be that believers in anthropogenic global warming are right. I have no strong position on the matter, aside from agreeing with the CJR editorial that there's a danger in narrowing the permissible borders of dissent. But I take issue with the author's contention that the time for dissent has ended. "The era of 'equal time' for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over-except on talk radio, cable, and local television," she tells us.

And of course we all know that the Truth is to be found only on networks and major national print outlets. Their record has been nigh unto infallible.

But wait! I think I've found an insidious infiltration of forbidden dissent in the citadel of Truth that the CJR writer neglected to condemn. One of the environmental reporters the writer speaks of reverently, the New York Times' Andy Revkin, runs the Times' Dot Earth blog and features on his blogroll a hotbed of "just won't do" climate-change skeptics: the Climate Debate Daily blog (an offshoot of the highly respected Arts & Letters Daily). Revkin provides no protective warning to the reader that he will be entering the realm of verboten dissent from the Consensus.

I find Climate Debate Daily a particularly important site precisely because it does give "equal time" to different arguments about climate change. Take a look at it. It's just two lists of links, one of reports and studies that support the consensus view and one of studies that don't. No warnings on the site about what is True and what constitutes Dangerous Dissent. Exactly the sort of thing that our CJR reporter says is just not done.

And yet one cannot read the site without believing there are dissents from the consensus by scientists who deserve a hearing, if only so that their theses can be disproved. Check out, for instance, this work by an Australian scientist who was once charged with enforcing limits on greenhouse gases by the government but who now has changed his mind on the issue! It happens perhaps more often than "green journalists" let us know.

At a dinner recently, I listened as Nick Lemann, the dean of Columbia's J-school, talked about the difficulty the school had in helping the students get the hang of "structuring an inquiry." At the heart of structuring an inquiry, he said, was the need to "find the arguments." Not deny the arguments. Find them, explore them.

But which arguments? It's a fascinating subject that I've spent some time considering. My last two books, Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars, were, in part anyway, efforts to decide which of the myriad arguments about and dissenting visions of each of these figures was worth pursuing. For instance, with Hitler, after investigating, I wanted to refute the myth (often used in a heavy-handed way by anti-Semites) that Hitler was part Jewish. The risk is that in giving attention to the argument, one can spread it even while refuting it. But to ignore it was worse.

Perhaps this is what our green journalist with her tsk-tsking really fears, and it's a legitimate fear. But I'd argue that journalists should be on the side of vigorous argument, not deciding for readers what is truth and then not exposing them to certain arguments.

In my Shakespeare book, I mentioned-but didn't devote time to-what I regarded as the already well-refuted argument that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays in the canon. This doesn't mean I would stop others from arguing about it; it just is my belief that it wasn't worth the attention and that since life was short, one would be better off spending one's time rereading the plays than arguing over who wrote them. In any case, the fate of the earth was not at stake.

But the argument over the green consensus does matter: If the green alarmists are right, we will have to turn our civilization inside out virtually overnight to save ourselves. One would like to know this is based on good, well-tested science, not mere "consensus."

Skepticism is particularly important and particularly worth attention from journalists. Especially considering the abysmal record green journalists have on the ethanol fiasco.

Here we should give the CJR reporter credit where due: She does include perhaps the single most important question that such an article could ask, one I haven't heard asked by most mainstream enviro-cheerleader media: [W]here were the skeptical scientists, politicians and journalists earlier, when ethanol was first being promoted in Congress?

Indeed I don't remember reading a lot of "dissent" on the idea. Shouldn't it have occurred to someone green that taking acreage once capable of producing food on a planet with hundreds of millions of starving people and using it to lower the carbon footprint of your SUV might end up causing the deaths of those who lack food or the means to pay the soaring prices of ethanol-induced shortage? But it doesn't seem to occur to her that the delegitimizing of dissent she encourages with her "just won't do" sanctimony might have been responsible for making reporters fearful of being "greenlisted" for dissenting from The Consensus at the time.

I think it's time for "green reporters," the new self-promoting subprofession, to take responsibility for the ethanol fiasco. Go back into their files and show us the stories they wrote that carry a hint that there might be a downside to taking food out of the mouths of the hungry. Those who fail the test-who didn't speak out, even on "talk radio, cable TV or local news"-shouldn't be so skeptical about skeptics.

I'd suggest they all be assigned to read the CJR editorial about protecting dissent and the danger of "narrowing the borders" of what is permissible. The problem is, as Freeman Dyson, one of the great scientists of our age, put it in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, environmentalism can become a religion, and religions always seek to silence or marginalize heretics. CJR has been an invaluable voice in defending that aspect of the First Amendment dealing with the freedom of the press; it should be vigilant about the other aspect that forbids the establishment of a religion.

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Climate Change: Breaking the "Political Consensus"

The purpose of this report is to examine the science behind climate change so as to better understand the issue at hand, and thus, to be able to make an informed decision on how to handle the issue. The primary aim here is to examine climate change from a perspective not often heard in media or government channels; that of climate change being a natural phenomenon, not the result of man-made carbon emissions.

The "Science" of Consensus

When addressing the issue of climate change, it is important to understand that climatic change is an important field of study in science. However, it is not an exact science, like all sciences. Our understanding of the climatic sciences is always changing, just as our understanding of all sciences changes. If our understanding of science does not change, we would still think that the Earth was flat and the Sun revolved around our little planet. When these great achievements in science were first discovered, the scientists who discovered them were attacked, denounced, or even imprisoned.

There is an enormous political, social and economic interest in a scientific consensus, because it determines our understanding of our environment and all that is in it, including humanity, itself. A challenge to a perceived consensus is a challenge to all the powers in human society, as it can take a person's understanding of the world we live in, and flip it upside down.

This encourages people to think "outside the box," fosters creativity and to be critical thinkers. This can ultimately threaten any power structure, as people may come to understand the forces that seek to control our lives. A consensus is an amazing tool in the hands of elites to control and manipulate people. And challenging a consensus is an amazing tool for people to remain free and independent thinkers.

This does not mean that any perceived consensus is inaccurate or completely manipulated. But it is important to understand how such a consensus can be used. It is also vital to understand that without questioning and challenging a scientific consensus, science would never advance. The key to scientific discovery is being able to change your perspective as the science changes. This is why debate on climate change must not be simply reduced to a one-sided debate; those who "know there is a problem," and those who are "deniers." All sides must be heard, so that we can come to a better understanding of the issue.

We hear consistently the one side of the debate, that climate change is caused by increased Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, and that humans are the greatest contributor of this toxic greenhouse gas, and thus, the greatest contributor to climate change, and that there will be catastrophic consequences as a result. I hope to give voice to the other side of the debate.

A Brief Climate History

First of all, it is important to note that climate change is not new. There has always been climate change, and there will always be climate change. After all, there was a period known as the Ice Age, which was a long-term period of reduction in global temperatures. This expanded the continental ice sheets and glaciers. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were created in this period. The ice age left its imprint upon our environment, forming valleys, fjords, rock formations, and the like as glaciers advanced across the continents. As they receded when the ice age passed, it left the landscape altered and free for plant growth and life to flourish. The Great Lakes between Canada and the United States were carved out by ice. Following the Ice Age, the Holocene period began roughly 12,000 B.C. All human civilization has occurred within the Holocene period.

During the Holocene period, there was both global warming and cooling periods, which have lasted until today. During the period of 10,000 to 8500 BC, there was a slight cooling period known as the Younger-Dryas. However, that passed, and between 5000 and 3000 B.C., temperatures increased to a level higher than today. This period is referred to as the Climatic Optimum. It was during this warming period in history that Earth's first great human civilizations began to flourish, such as ancient African civilizations around the Nile.

Between 3000 and 2000 B.C., a cooling period occurred, resulting in a drop in sea levels, from which islands such as the Bahamas emerged. There was a subsequent warming period between 2000 and 1500 B.C., again followed by a cool period, which led to glacial growth. The Roman Empire (150 B.C. - 300 A.D.) occurred during a cooling period, which went until roughly 900 A.D. During the period of 900 A.D. until 1200 A.D., a warming period occurred known as the Medieval Warming Period, or Little Climatic Optimum, which was warmer than today, allowing settlements to flourish in Greenland and Iceland.

Then a cooling period followed and between 1550 and 1850, temperatures were colder than at any other time since the end of the previous Ice Age, leading to what has been called the Little Ice Age. Since 1850, there has been a general warming period.

CO2 and Temperature

This latest warming period has also coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which saw the greatest output of human induced CO2, leading many, like Al Gore, to compare the rise in CO2 levels with the rise in temperatures, drawing a conclusion that the rise in CO2 in the earth's atmosphere was the determining factor in the rise in temperatures. However, if one studies statistics and how to read and interpret stats and graphs, one of the primary lessons is that correlation does not imply causation. Simply put, two factors lining up on a graph, does not necessarily imply that there is a cause and effect relationship. One could take a graph of increases in temperatures and increases in the consumption of peanuts, and they may line up. However, common sense will tell us that eating peanuts does not increase global temperatures. Simply because there appears to be a correlation between the two, that does not imply that there is a cause and effect relationship.

When it comes to CO2, however, there is a much more important factor to analyze than simply statistical interpretation. Al Gore popularized the CO2/temperature connection in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he showed the correlation between the two on a graph. However, he interpreted the graph as evidence of a cause and effect relationship. His information came from an ice core sample related to CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. However, paleoclimatologist and earth sciences professor at USC, Lowell Stott, released findings of a study in September of 2007, which concluded that, "Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2" at the ending of the last ice age, which "suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming," not the cause of warming.[3]

As well as this, an ice core sample of air bubbles in 2003, "revealed a precise record of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations" and concluded that, "the CO increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 +/- 200 years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation." Simply put, the analysis of the ice core samples, published in Science Magazine, reported that CO2 increases lagged behind temperature increases by roughly 800 years.

In statistics, this is what is called a "lurking variable," meaning a hidden variable that can have an outcome on the results of a statistic without having been taken into consideration in the statistic's interpretation. For example, Al Gore's graph showed a correlation between CO2 increases and temperature increases. The interpretation he gave was that the correlation implied causation; that because they lined up, there was an established relationship, and that relationship was defined as CO2 increases driving temperature. However, the lurking variable was that he did not take into consideration whether CO2 followed temperature increases, as the ice core samples have shown, but he rather chose to conclude that because they line up on a graph, CO2 is therefore the driver. This is bad science and statistical analysis at best, or intentional political deception at worst.....

What Causes Climate Change?

If CO2 increases lag behind temperature increases, it does not make sense that CO2 can be the cause of temperature increases. It would be the equivalent of saying that growing older is caused by the graying of hair; there appears to be a cause and effect relationship, it is just of vital importance to understand which is the cause and which is the effect. So, from here we must examine what some major causes of climatic change can be.

The most important factor in climatic changes is what is called solar variations. This refers to radiation emitted from the Sun and its variations, in particular, the sunspot cycle. Sunspot cycles are the irregular rises and drops in the number of sunspots, which are regions on the Sun's surface, which have lower temperatures than its surrounding area and strong magnetic fields. The cycles tend to last 11 years.

An important thing to note is that Earth is not the only planet that experiences climate change, as in 2002, it was reported that Pluto was "undergoing global warming in its thin atmosphere," likely due to it's orbit, which, "significantly changes the planet's distance from the Sun during its long `year,' which lasts 248 Earth years."[14] In 2006, it was reported that a new storm on Jupiter could indicate that the planet is "in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit." As far back as 1998, it was reported that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, "has been undergoing a period of global warming," since 1989.[16] This could have much to do with the fact that, as reported in 1997, the "Sun is getting hotter," leading some scientists to say that Earth's global warming "is part of a natural cycle for the planet."

In 2004, the Telegraph reported that, "Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research." The study, conducted by Swiss and German scientists, "suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes." Interestingly, the Sun "is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years," coinciding with the warming trend experienced since the Industrial Revolution.

This is what can be referred to as a "lurking variable" in Al Gore's analysis of his graphs of carbon and temperature increases since the Industrial Revolution. It is a lurking variable because though the temperatures and carbon emissions match up on a graph, it doesn't take into account other factors that may influence the statistics, such as increasing radiation from the Sun, which also correlates with increasing temperatures.

National Geographic News quoted a scientist in 2007 that, "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural-and not a human-induced-cause." Mars' ice caps had been diminishing for three years in a row, and the scientist, "Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun." He further stated that, "changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets."

A NASA study in the same year also reported that Mars warmed since the 1970s, "similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period," which, they conclude, "suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena." A study in 2007 on climatic changes on Earth and Neptune suggested that, "some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment."

In 2006, a study was conducted regarding Venus being the "solar system's most inhospitable planet." A planetary scientist at Oxford University stated, "It's very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet that is so much like the Earth," and that, "It is telling us that we really don't understand the Earth. We have ended up with a lot of mysteries." Venus was "unbelievably hot, dense, and had virtually no oxygen." Venus has a very pronounced greenhouse effect, as its "thick atmosphere traps solar radiation and heats the world to boiling point."

Scientists say that Venus being closer to the Sun than Earth is a factor, yet, there may be other factors. One brought up was that Venus' atmosphere is almost entirely made up of CO2, which is effective at trapping heat. CO2 is roughly 95% of Venus' atmosphere, compared to Earth's atmosphere, which is 0.038% CO2, so it is extremely understandable that CO2 would have a greater effect upon Venus than Earth. The question as to why Venus has so much CO2 may be because it lost its water, whereas on Earth, "carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, where it forms carbonate minerals and over the millennia is deposited as rock. That process was arrested early on Venus when it lost its oceans."[22] Perhaps we should put more focus into preserving and protecting our oceans.

Get Your Parka, Here Comes Global. "Cooling"?

There is a little problem with the whole "global warming" consensus, in that recent scientific research has shown that, "A study of sea temperature changes predicts a lull as traditional climate cycles cancel out the heating effect of greenhouse gases from pollution," and that, "Global warming will be `put on hold' over the next decade because of natural climate variations."[23] In other words, the natural climate cycles that Earth goes through, and always has gone through, has changed once again, just as a political consensus was reached. This is very significant because if CO2 was the prime cause for recent warming, and CO2 consumption has not gone down, yet, the Earth's climate has engaged on a cooling trend, this appears to pose a problem for the CO2 hypothesis.

This cooling trend is supported by many recent events. In 2008, "Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966," and China went through its most brutal winter in a century. Also, when we are told that the Artic Sea ice is melting to its "lowest levels on record," it is important to note that the records date back to 1972, and "that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past."

As it turns out, the ice itself has not only recovered from melting, but has grown thicker in many places. With the previous melting of the Arctic, we have been told it was caused by human activity and will result in catastrophe. However, climate modelers, predicting the future climate with computer models based upon information they provide, such as CO2 consumption, are highly inaccurate, as, "Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt."

Many places have experienced unusual cold and snowfalls in the last year. Argentina got its first snowfall in Buenos Aires since 1918,[25] Johannesburg, South Africa, experienced snow for the first time in 26 years,[26] Baghdad experienced snow for the "first time in living memory,"[27] and Saudi Arabia went through sub-zero temperatures and snow storms, making it the coldest winter in over 20 years.

Even the BBC reported that temperatures will decrease, "as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific,"[29] which is a natural phenomenon, and has a large effect on increasing cyclonic activity in the Atlantic. It's interesting how La Nina and El Nino have disappeared from discussion on climate and hurricanes. Today, whenever there is a hurricane or natural disaster, it is instantly blamed on global warming and having been accelerated by human activity. Even Al Gore's movie poster pictured a smoke stack with a hurricane coming out the top. An MIT climate scientist, who previously wrote about the link between hurricane energy and warming, produced a study in 2008 where he changed his pervious claims, saying that its not a clearly defined connection, saying there is a "lot of uncertainty," and he was quoted as stating, "It's a really bad thing for a scientist to have an immovable, intractable position."

In March of 2008, NPR reported that after a survey of the ocean by 3,000 scientific robots, information was retrieved that showed that, "the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather." The article quotes a NASA scientist as saying that, "the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming."

In July of 2008, a major peer-reviewed journal of the American Physical Society, Physics and Society, concluded that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report "overstated" the effects of CO2 on temperature in their climate models by between 500 and 2000%. The paper concluded that there is no "climate crisis." The paper further reported that CO2 will add "little more than 1øF (O.6øC) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;" that the IPCC report took their predictive information from four published papers, not 2,500, as was claimed; that "global warming" stopped ten years ago; the IPCC overstated the "effect of ice-melt by 1000%"; that 50 years ago, it was proved that "predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible"; and that an important factor in explaining the previous warming was that, "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the last 11,400 years."

What About the Consensus?

We are often told, (especially by Al Gore), that on the issue of the effects of human activity on climate change, there is a "scientific consensus" on humans being the primary cause. If the above information does not provide some proof as to a lack of consensus on the subject, perhaps the fact that for the UN-organized 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which concluded that, "global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe," was countered with a petition of scientists decrying, "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action." The number of signatories to the petition eventually reached 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners. In 2000, to counter the Kyoto Protocol, a petition was made up of "1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor."

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

The former editor of New Scientist magazine, Nigel Calder, wrote that, "When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works." He explained how roughly 20 years ago, "climate research became politicized in favour of one particular hypothesis," and that the media, "often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported."

He also explained the results of a scientific study conducted in 2001 in Denmark, which found that, "cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier."[35] So not only is the Sun a determining factor, but so are cosmic rays.

Conclusion

I won't state exactly what is causing climate change on our planet, as the reality is that there are many answers to that question; the Sun, cosmic rays, ocean currents and other natural phenomena, etc. However, it is safe to say that the wealth of science points to a natural change in our climate, and the entire history of the world and of all humanity supports this hypothesis. Throughout history, as in the earliest African civilizations, it was the ability of different peoples to change and adapt to climate change, which determined their survival as a civilization.

Today, we are trying to fight it. This is a dangerous road to walk, and history will not look kindly upon our scientific ignorance and politically fear-driven society. How will we be viewed in the future? How have we viewed the people of the past who thought the Earth was flat, or the Sun revolved around Earth? Trying to fight and stop a natural phenomenon is possibly one of the most ignorant and dangerous things humanity has ever engaged in. How would history view a civilization that tried to reverse the spinning of the Earth, or the blowing of wind? It is a recipe for the fall of a civilization.

Much of the people in the world have been riled up with predictions of a catastrophic end to mankind and the world unless we don't do something about so-called "man-made" climate change. Ironically enough, our refusal to adapt to a changing world, and instead a determination to fight it with our efforts to "go green" and "carbon neutral" may, in fact, cause the catastrophic end of our civilization. And sadly, in this instance, it would undeniably be a man-made disaster.

Source

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

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11 August, 2008

"On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction"

Excerpt below from an article by Oliver Tickell. Tickell is a professional alarmist who is also "concerned" about trans fats in food etc. His alarmist books must be a nice little earner

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Gurdian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable [Fact check, O ticklish one: Antarctica contains 91% of the world's glacial ice and the temperature of all but the margins of Antarctica is WAY below zero Celsius, so a mere 4 degree rise would melt NOTHING of that] , bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

More here




Global Warming Task Force: all cost, no benefit

A squeak of protest from Wisconsin -- by Jim Ott, formerly a meteorologist with WTMJ-TV (Channel 4)

Predictably, the climate scientists on the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board endorsed the recommendations of Gov. Jim Doyle's Global Warming Task Force ("Making it happen," July 29) But the Editorial Board - and the task force - left out important facts you should know: The task force was charged by the governor at the outset to assume that human use of fossil fuels is a major contributor to global warming. The fact that a significant number of climate scientists do not share this view or have serious reservations was ignored.

The Editorial Board forgot to mention that there have been many dramatic natural climate variations in the past that are not fully understood, such as the "Little Ice Age" that affected Europe for several centuries. Has the Journal Sentinel determined that natural causes of climate change are no longer relevant? Where is the science to back this up?

The editorial mentioned the "recommendations" of the task force regarding nuclear energy. In fact, the task force states on page 49 that, "This recommendation is not a recommendation by the Task Force that a new nuclear power plant be built." The easiest way to reduce greenhouse gases - increased use of nuclear energy - is clearly not a priority of the task force.

And, like the task force, the Journal Sentinel fails to make any mention of the potential cost to you or to our state's economy if the "recommendations" are enacted into law. Isn't this important information? Would you be willing to pay $6 a gallon for gas to fight global warming? How does a 40% increase in the cost of electricity sound? The price of virtually everything would rise. Last year, Wisconsin's economy grew by a paltry 1%. What will raising prices, taxes and the cost of doing business do to Wisconsin's economy?

It's important to understand that if the task force's recommendations are adopted, we all will be forced to make dramatic changes in how we live. The state will interject itself into every facet of our lives, including but not limited to requiring an energy audit when we sell our homes, telling farmers what to feed their cows, adjusting the school funding mechanism, mandating what type of lighting landlords must install and maybe even regulating how many miles we can drive our cars - all in the name of "fighting global climate change."

Finally, any effort by an individual state to address global warming is pointless. Even if Wisconsin's greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced to zero, there would be no measurable impact on global atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and therefore no measurable effect on global temperatures. So a cost/benefit analysis of the task force's recommendations reveals major increases in prices and taxes for consumers, massive growth in state government rules and regulations and no impact or benefit to Earth's climate.

Regardless of how you feel about "global climate change," the task force's recommendations are a recipe for disaster.

Source




EMISSIONS TRADING BECOMES A GLOBAL LAUGHING STOCK

So this is the Kyoto Protocol in action: A marginally-economical chemical factory in an industrial superpower finally installs 1970s-era technology to clean up its act, and as a result makes 30 times more money by selling "carbon credits" to fight global warming than it makes by selling chemicals. This isn't a last-ditch effort to upgrade Outer Mongolia-this is a French factory in South Korea. From the WSJ today:

"The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn't make. The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It's Rhodia's single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated _189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution "credits." [.] The Rhodia factory in [South Korea] alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa."

Fears over the effectiveness of Kyoto at reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases have multiplied as the treaty nears its expiration date in 2012. And that matters, because Kyoto is still the main template for what comes next, to be decided by the end of 2009 at another global climate-change conference in Denmark. The apparent shortcomings of a Kyoto-style approach are two-fold.

Plenty of economists suspect a cap-and-trade system is just asking to be gamed, and that a straight tax on emissions of carbon dioxide would be more transparent. Rhodia, the French company with the Korean factory, says it's just following the rules that were laid down. Even so, the United Nations-which runs the Kyoto plan-is trying to crack down on bogus "emissions reductions" schemes which threaten to undermine confidence in the whole idea.

And climate-change plans that leave big chunks of the global economy-like South Korea's $1 trillion economy, or China and India-outside the picture are bound to cause distortions. South Korea is considered a "developing economy," so it wins points-and factories there earn millions-by doing things that other industrialized countries do out of habit nowadays. That seems to flunk Kyoto's own acid test that lucrative carbon credits have to come from projects that wouldn't otherwise make sense.

The Bush administration has caught a lot of flak for insisting that any global agreement on climate change must include developing countries, as well as the U.S., a Kyoto holdout. But when companies are making more money cleaning up their factories than running them, something does seem wrong with the current system. Is it time for a rethink?

Source




Cap and Trade: Economic Suicide

There have been many texts and many analyses written about big governments, specifically the tyranny of big governments. Those who have studied them notice big governments such as those of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar, and others, have commonalities among them. "The Road to Serfdom" by Nobel winner Friedrich Hayek, for example, is a short and excellent analysis.

There are invariably major losses of personal freedoms, personal liberty, speech codes, loss of freedom of the press, to assemble, of religion, expression, confiscation of personal property, confiscation of wealth, wages, and overall government sponsored destitution. Most have led in their final stages to tyranny involving huge terror and police states, rendering its citizens broken, deprived, and destitute.

Big Federal Government

Recently Congress attempted to impose its big government hand into CO2 mitigation. Called the Climate Security Act (sponsored by senators Warner and Lieberman) it proposed, according to the Heritage Foundation analysis of the bill, many economy-killing features. The Act relies upon 3 dubious assumptions: The climate is warming, man-made CO2 is the cause, and it is always harmful.

A look at the scientific literature shows that the earth has not been warming for 10 years and has been actually cooling for the last 7 years, man-made CO2 is not the cause of significant warming or cooling, and warming is not necessarily harmful. It shouldn't need saying but life is better at the lower latitudes. CO2 is a nutrient essential for all life. Nonetheless, the Senate bill proposed an "economy killer" by restricting CO2 emissions, throughout nearly all human activities in American life. No government should have this much power, let alone one that espouses freedom.

Most Americans would never accept or believe that our leaders would seriously propose legislation that could destroy the American economy, and that would take our liberties.

As serious as this proposed federal legislation is, many in Congress are also compounding the economic threat by restricting the oil supplies, opposing drilling, wishing to wean Americans off cars and gasoline. Washington's Senator Maria Cantwell was quite explicit in supporting this agenda (http://tinyurl.com/5gbold). The Senators seem to have forgotten that our constitution was written specifically to protect US citizens from heavy handed government. Leaders with such whimsical and shallow understanding of energy and how it is made, are frightening and dangerous.

Big State Governments

Now we find that it is being casually put forth at the state levels too, as if these were just routine legislation. The expansion of federal and state government bureaucracies in the Western United States is of major concern to many Americans in noticing the similar growing expansion of big US state governments into their lives, much of it menacing, unwelcome and unsolicited. What is going on in the Western states may be called "assisted suicide".

This history of big government intrusions continues in the western US such as the Washington State legislature passing House Bill 2815 and signed into law by Governor Christine Gregoire. The bill spells out the need and a multi-billion dollar climate change mitigation program.

More bureaucratic activities have been formed such as the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). The WCI released its recent planning document entitled "Draft Design of the Regional Cap-and-Trade Program." The document is available on the Washington State Dept. of Ecology's website http://www.ecy.wa.gov/climatechange/wci_stakeholders.htm.

Concurrently another bureaucracy was formed, the Washington State Climate Action Team (CAT). The big government fests continued when the big government CAT team was briefed on the status of WCI accomplishments to-date, and discussed these draft recommendations.

The driving force behind these massive well-funded government activities is the global warming scare in general, now renamed "climate change", and a huge, largely wasteful program for mitigation of Washington State CO2 emissions.

Based upon incomplete climate "evidence", the Washington State programs-and the thousands of proposed new hires needed to enforce them, will require billions of dollars to be spent in implementation, monitoring, testing, measuring, permitting, approving, auditing, recording, filing, and enforcement throughout, the program is grotesquely misguided, wasteful, and unnecessary.

The Origins of it all

Going back to the beginning of this giant scare story, the leader of the United Nation Environmental Program stated in 1992 "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" -- Maurice Strong, (Strong was head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and Executive Officer for Reform in the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations).

Strong's statement was quite clear in its intent, ominous in significance, and an integral part of UN policy. His statement is fundamental in helping us understand the essence of the global warming agenda at the state and federal levels as well. But it is not science, even though it may look and sound like it.

Secondly, the entire climate undertaking by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not to push research toward a greater understanding of the very complex climate systems. The stated purpose of the IPCC with regard to climate change was to show man-made effects only. The effects of the significantly larger natural forces were to be ignored---vastly different from the purpose of understanding the complex climate-changing forces.

For example, the United Nation's Framework on Climate Change states in its Article 1 defines "Climate Change" as "a change of climate which is attributed directly and indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to the natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods". (Green Delusions, by Vincent Gray, p. 11).

Once we understand the IPCC's original guidance to limit studies solely to human impacts on climate and ignoring the rest, the entire discussion changes. Given man's small impacts the entire global climate, this effort seems to be more political activity than science. (See the Maurice Strong quote above).

Many in the media, Hollywood, educators, state and federal governments, (including the funding agencies providing $5 billion in climate research per year), nevertheless have failed to notice such limiting distinctions.

The level of science intolerance continues far beyond the Washington State policy makers. Since the policy makers have forbidden any discussions of the underlying and changing science, they have forced science illiteracy upon themselves. This, of course, will result in extremely misguided, costly, and intrusive policy, that is based upon bad science. Even worse some of the operating assumptions appear to be questionable. Some of these include:

* Climate change is always unusual---its not

* Climate change is always harmful-its not.

* The change is always caused by humans (especially in the capitalist and free nations---See Maurice Strong's statement above)

Climate change, no matter its largely natural origins, no matter that it has been changing for millions of years, must now be stopped no matter how costly, how futile, and how harmful to Americans. Thus, when the CAT team, politicians, and others attempt to end the science discussion, they also cut themselves off from recent evidence.

One of these is that the global temperatures have not increased for 10 years. In fact in has declined since 2001. The CAT team is not alone in its self-imposed isolation, since many in the media have yet to learn this either, and are still repeating old mantras that the earth is warming and doom is imminent. Even though CO2 is increasing, the climate is not currently warming.....

There are many other serious yet unanswered climate questions about which we have little information. There is significant information that is directly contrary to what the dogmatic climate change "templates" require.

Americans would be better served if the policy makers paid closer attention to the continuing flood of new climate information. The fact that the climate is currently cooling, is unknown to the CAT team which now seems hell-bent on creating a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy, that is premised on warming which ended 10 years ago. We are not even permitted to ask why. Why the rush? Why the secrecy? How can we respect such heavy handed state policies, when the need for such policies and huge costs are not justified?

In the recent words of Christopher Monckton, science advisor to Margaret Thatcher, "We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. There is no manmade "climate crisis". It is a non-problem. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."

He continued to an Australian government official: "If you introduce an emissions-trading scheme, when it transpires that the scheme and its associated economic damage had never been necessary - and it will, and sooner than you think - you and your party will be flung from office, perhaps forever. It is, therefore, in the long-term vested interest of your party to think again." Amen, Lord Monckton.

Source




Carbon-Based Prohibition

If some environmentalists have their way, simple math suggests life as we know it will end

In 1916 a blanket ban on beer seemed like far-fetched idea. But prohibitionists cracked the door open by promising to keep whiskey available by prescription. Within three years, the country was dry. Nearly a century later, environmentalists are thinking the same way about carbon. Converting fossil fuels into controlled substances today could lead to outright carbon prohibition tomorrow.

In a magazine interview last year, Al Gore upped his call for a 90 percent cut in fossil fuel use, demanding Congress "eliminate the payroll tax and replace it dollar for dollar with a CO2 tax." A research paper published this year in Geophysical Research Letters went further. "Avoiding future human-induced climate warming," the authors said, "may require policies that seek not only to decrease CO2 emissions, but to eliminate them entirely." As the New York Times business section headlined it in March, "For Carbon Emissions, a Goal of Less Than Zero."

Those who view fossil fuel the way Carrie Nation did Demon Rum point out that were everyone on Earth to burn just a gas tank's worth of carbon each day, CO2 in the atmosphere would still double in a decade. Skeptics may discount climate models as metaphysical, but true believers consider the human costs of prohibition an acceptable price for environmental salvation. Gore's 2006 Nobel Prize speech elevated environmentalism from a pretext for social intervention to a categorical imperative by declaring: "We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer..They will not take us far enough without collective action."

It took two centuries for daily per capita carbon consumption in America to reach the roughly 100-pound level that currently lights homes, powers industry, and keeps the Internet humming. But like driving, all those welcome activities increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The average American currently generates 22 tons of CO2 a year, but to limit 21st century warming to 2.5 degrees Celsius, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests cutting the global rise in CO2 to one part per million by 2050. That's only a small multiple of the weight of the CO2 people exhale, and realizing this goal within 42 years could require America to burn less carbon in a month than we do now in a day.

This draconian downturn unfolds from a single statistic: the 5-quadrillion-ton weight of Earth's atmosphere. Your 792,000-ton share of the air may seem hefty, but one part per million of it is less than one ton. Goodbye, central heating; an average New England home furnace belts out six tons of CO2 a year. Ditto private cars; families living on a truly Earth-friendly carbon ration might spend breakfast debating whether to blow their half-pint gasoline coupon on a moped ride to town or use the daily kilowatt-hour allotment to turn the communal electric blanket up to 4. Holiday turkeys may end up as sashimi, since oven roasting could mean a heatless Thanksgiving night or Christmas Eve.

A personal CO2 limit of less than a ton per year does not even imply the right to buy that much fuel, because CO2 is only 27 percent carbon. Multiply your 1,745-pound annual CO2 ration by 27 percent, divide the result by 365 days, and.yikes! It's 21 ounces of carbon a day-and falling. If the global population reaches 9 billion by 2050, expect a daily fossil fuel ration of a latte cup of gasoline, three Pilates balls of natural gas, or a lump of coal the size of a turnip.

If you suspect life on a pound of coal a day might be solitary, brutish, nasty, and short, you're right. The countries with the smallest carbon footprints already feature the shortest life expectancies on Earth. Not that real prohibitionists should mind: When it comes to carbon, Sudan is bone dry.

Source




BRIGNELL: ON REFEREEING, OR THE END OF SCIENCE AS WE KNOW IT

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". --Voltaire (attributed)

That's what we used to call it - refereeing. The term "peer review" seemed to spring up and take over at about the same time as the rise of political correctness. It was a burden that most senior academics and some industrial engineers and scientists were expected to bear as part of their duty to their profession, and an onerous one it was too. It took up many hours of one's week, with no recognition and certainly no payment. Many of us would now have a more comfortable retirement if we had devoted the time to fee earning.

The duties of the referee were mainly concerned with preserving the integrity of the institution and its publications, to identify provable errors and infelicities of expression. It did not involve rewriting an author's paper, changing its slant or imposing an opinion.

The European tradition of refereeing was that it was to be done with a light touch, but that curious intensity that invades some American academic institutions often resulted in little short of a demolition job. There was something of a schism, one side thinking the other was idle, while in the other direction there were mutterings of "over the top". For what was understood was that the process was corruptible. Many referees in their early careers had experienced coteries that attempted to take over particular small areas of disciplines to enforce their own views and theories. It was, however, only in the new era of Green politics that the threat of a universal censorship emerged.

It was always a difficult course to negotiate. There will inevitably be submissions that are just silly or even insane, such as the old perennial that pi is exactly three. It is not uncommon for people to acquire a bit of jargon and go on to delude themselves that they are making a fundamental contribution to knowledge. Such delusions became institutionalised with the rise of fashionable nonsense under the name of post-modernism. This was just one of the enormous tectonic shifts that were taking place in society, the rise of the new left. At the same time political control was being established over science and research. In Britain it took the form of outright nationalisation of the universities, begun under Thatcher and completed under Blair. In America it was the founding of new public institutions, richly endowed with taxpayers' money, such as Nixon's EPA. They had the resources and therefore the patronage. A new self-sustaining political class had formed, insulated from the laws of science and economics, yet demanding sovereignty over both. Science was no longer a democracy of scholars seeking after truth; it was now an instrument of political power and control.

The creation of the UN IPCC was a cataclysmic event in the history of science. Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution. Through the power of patronage it rapidly attracted acolytes. Peer review soon rapidly evolved from the old style refereeing to a much more sinister imposition of The Censorship. As Wegman demonstrated, new circles of like-minded propagandists formed, acting as judge and jury for each other. Above all, they acted in concert to keep out alien and hostile opinion.

"Peer review" developed into a mantra that was picked up by political activists who clearly had no idea of the procedures of science or its learned societies. It became an imprimatur of political acceptability, whose absence was equivalent to placement on the proscribed list.

As global warming alarmism stumbles inevitably towards the later stages of Langmuir's Laws, its defenders have become increasingly shrill. The pressure on science, both from external politicians and internal quislings, has become intense.

The question of whether science can ever recover its innocence is moot. After life as a harlot on the mean streets of political imperative, a return to the sanctity of the cloister looks out of the question. If so, humanity has forever lost a bright jewel in its culture.

Source

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

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10 August, 2008

The latest statement of faith from a Warmism disciple

An excerpt from a Greenie site: Thickening ice is due to global warming!

As I type this, I am in the Students on Ice office in Gatineau, Quebec, helping to coordinate the media and logistics for the current expedition in Canada's Arctic. Every single day, the schedule has changed. Logistics consist of Plan B, Plan C, and even Plan J. There is a reason why the motto of the organization's founder and expedition leader, Geoff Green, is: "Flexibility is the key". But never before has an expedition been so altered by climate change impacts. Auyuittuq National Park was closed earlier this week due to mass flooding as glaciers melt at exponential speed. Itinerary change number one.

Major ice blockages up past Pangnirtung in the Cumberland Sound that the ice-class ship was unable to break through, as ice conditions are becoming more extreme (both forming and melting) with climate change.

More here

The silly little lady who wrote that could actually be right. Global warming would cause warmer seas and hence more evaporation and precipitation. And precipitation is the main determinant of glacial ice mass. So global warming COULD cause thicker ice. But I don't think she would like some of the corollaries of that: That global warming will cause polar ice to grow rather than shrink and that shrinking ice mass indicates global cooling!

The major thing overlooked in her dreaming, however, is that Arctic ice mass is not solely the product of global temperature but is affected by many local factors as well -- winds, currents, vulcanism etc




The Australian government's climate castle is built on sand

A large part of the justification that Prime Minister Rudd has offered for his climate adventures is a CSIRO report on how global warming (if it ever happens) would affect Australia. The CSIRO is a greatly respected scientific research body but its funding depends on political favour and has often been threatened. So political expediency is not of course beyond them. You can get all sorts of answers out of climate models (which is why the IPCC reports the results from many of them) so if the CSIRO people know what the government wants, why not choose a model that gives it to them? Below is one summary of the CSIRO report (from July 6):

The Federal Government has released a report into the link between drought and climate change, which it says will trigger major review of drought policy. The report is by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO and is the first of three commissioned by the Government.

The report warns that extreme conditions previously thought to occur once in every 20 to 25 years, could become as frequent as every one or two years. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has told ABC1's Insiders the report paints a very disturbing picture about the future of droughts in Australia. "When it comes to exceptional or extreme drought, exceptionally high temperatures, the historical assumption that this occurred once every 20 years has now been revised down to between every one and two years," he said. "Exceptional circumstances drought conditions ... will occur twice as often and with twice the area of droughted parts of Australia included. "Now this is a serious revision of the impact of climate change on drought."

Recently, however, an examination of the assumptions behind the CSIRO report has been done by Dr David Stockwell, a modelling expert. Excerpt:

"Therefore there is no credible basis for the claims of increasing frequency of Exceptional Circumstances declarations made in the report. These results are consistent with other studies finding lack of adequate validation in global warming effects modeling, and lack of skill of climate models at the regional scale..

Except in the few cases noted above, the model simulations have no resemblance to patterns of observed droughtedness in the last century. We conclude the models have failed internal validation and no further testing is warranted."

In other words, those wonderful "models" the CSIRO relied on don't give an accurate picture of what has actually happened in the past. And if they can't get the past right, how can we expect them to get the future right?

A recent article in the Hydrological Sciences Journal also found that climate models had no validity in portraying the climate of regional areas (such as Australia). The one thing we can test about such models is how accurate they are in "back-predicting" the past -- and they fail utterly. The journal Abstract:

On the credibility of climate predictions

By D. Koutsoyiannis et al.

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

Source (H/T Agmates)

Are deserts soaking up CO2?

When Li Yan began measuring carbon dioxide (CO2) in western China's Gubantonggut Desert in 2005, he thought his equipment had malfunctioned. Li, plant ecophysiologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences'Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, discovered that his plot was soaking up CO2 at night. His team ruled out the sparse vegetation as the CO2 sink. Li came to a surprising conclusion: The alkaline soil of Gubantonggut is socking away large quantities of CO2 in an inorganic form.

A CO2-gulping desert in a remote corner of China may not be an isolated phenomenon. Halfway around the world, researchers have found that Nevada's Mojave Desert, square meter for square meter, absorbs about the same amount of CO2 as some temperate forests. The two sets of findings suggest that deserts are unsung players in the global carbon cycle. "Deserts are a larger sink for carbon dioxide than had previously been assumed," says Lynn Fenstermaker, a remote sensing ecologist at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Las Vegas, Nevada, and a coauthor of a paper on the Mojave findings published online last April in Global Change Biology.

The effect could be huge: About 35% of Earth's land surface, or 5.2 billion hectares, is desert and semiarid ecosystems. If the Mojave readings represent an average CO2 uptake, then deserts and semiarid regions may be absorbing up to 5.2 billion tons of carbon a year--roughly half the amount emitted globally by burning fossil fuels, says John "Jay" Arnone, an ecologist in DRI's Reno lab and a co-author of the Mojave paper.

But others point out that CO2 fluxes are notoriously difficult to measure and that it is necessary to take readings in other arid and semiarid regions to determine whether the Mojave and Gubantonggut findings are representative or anomalous. For now, some experts doubt that the world's most barren ecosystems are the long-sought missing carbon sink. "I'd be hugely surprised if this were the missing sink. If deserts are taking up a lot of carbon, it ought to be obvious," says William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who in the 1980s was among the first to examine carbon flux in deserts. Nevertheless, he says, both sets of findings are intriguing and "must be followed up."

Scientists have long struggled to balance Earth's carbon books. While atmospheric CO2 levels are rising rapidly, our planet absorbs more CO2 than can be accounted for. Researchers have searched high and low for this missing sink. It doesn't appear to be the oceans or forests--although the capacity of boreal forests to absorb CO2 was long underestimated. Deserts might be the least likely candidate. "You would think that seemingly lifeless places must be carbon neutral, or carbon sources," says Mojave coauthor Georg Wohlfahrt, an ecologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria....

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"Fake But Accurate" Science?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science claims for its journal Science: 'the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million.' Be that as it may, Science is the Dan Rather of science journalism. "Fake Data, but Could the Idea Still Be Right?" in the July 14 issue actually makes the following statement:

European investigators last week confirmed that a pioneering oral cancer researcher in Norway had fabricated much of his work. The news left experts in his field with a pressing question: What should they believe now? Suppose his findings, which precisely identified people at high risk of the deadly disease, were accurate even though data were faked?

AAAS's fake-but-accurate standard of scientific rigor applies not merely to the science of such obscure and unimportant subjects as death, disease, and cancer, but extends even to the science of impending doom.

The Hockey Stick Graph

The so-called "hockey stick" graph appears in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations organization that dominates climate change discussion. The graph purported to show that world temperatures had remained stable for almost a thousand years, but took a sudden turn upward in the last century (the blade of the hockey stick). It was the product of research into "proxy" temperature records, such as tree rings, ice cores, and coral reefs, by Michael Mann, the Joe Wilson of climate change. It can be seen here. Charles Martin took a critical look at it last March for The American Thinker.

The problem is that the world was almost certainly warmer than it is today during the "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Climate Optimum" of the 9th through 14th Centuries, which was followed by the "Little Ice Age" of the 15th through 19th Centuries, whose end is the occasion for today's global warming hysteria.

But Science magazine stuck to its argument. "Politicians Attack, But Evidence for Global Warming Doesn't Wilt" in the July 28 issue of Science not only employs the typical deceitful rhetoric of the scientific establishment, here presenting an argument among scientists as an argument between scientists and politicians, but also uses the fake-but-accurate excuse for the corrupt activities of its favorite scientists.

Mann's statistical methodology was soon exposed as flawed, if not downright fraudulent, by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, and he responded by refusing to make public the details of his analysis. This in turn angered Joe Barton and other members of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who objected to this arrogant refusal to allow oversight of federally financed research-either by the responsible congressional committees or by the scientific community. Hence the recent hearings and the dishonest report of them in Science.

Since Mann's work-and the IPCC's inclusion of it in its report-are indefensible, Science resorted to the fake-but-accurate defense. Gerald North of Texas A&M, testifying on behalf of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, "concluded that the hockey stick was flawed but the sort of data on which it was based are still evidence of unprecedented warming."

The graph shows unprecedented warming; the graph is flawed in such a way as to produce a false appearance of unprecedented warming; nevertheless, there is unprecedented warming: "Finding flaws 'doesn't mean Mann et al.'s claims are wrong,' he told Barton."

I must admit that it is possible for science to be fake but accurate, just as it is possible for Israel to have committed war crimes despite the fact that the evidence for them is faked. It is indeed possible that, as the New York Times famously proclaimed, "Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says."

The question, however, is not whether it is possible that Israel committed war crimes or that George W. Bush did not complete his National Guard service, but whether we have any reason to believe the reporting of Reuters or CBS News. It is possible that the hockey stick is accurate, but why should we take the word of Michael Mann, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the United Nations for it?

Michael Mann faked his statistics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published his fakery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science suggested that the fakery is beside the point, and the United Nations, well, readers of The American Thinker are quite acquainted with the United Nations.

The article in Science would do Dan Rather proud. It says the North investigation found that the "only supportable conclusion from climate proxies" was that "the last few decades were likely the warmest of the millennium." However, here is what North actually testified.

"It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries."

Four centuries, not the millennium! North testified that recent decades were warmer than the Little Ice Age, not that they were warmer than the Global Warm Period! North also testified that he "finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium."

North first said that in recent decades the world was likely warmer than in any other time in the last four hundred years. Then he said that in recent decades the Northern Hemisphere was likely warmer than in any other time in the last millennium. Science has converted these statements into the claim that in recent decades the world was likely warmer than in any time in the last millennium. So much for the Scientific Method. But even the statement that the Northern Hemisphere was likely warmer than in any other time in the last millennium is subject to uncertainty according to North:

However, the substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that 'the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium' because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.

As to Mann's scandalous statistical manipulations, North says gently, "We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues." Ah, the "choices" euphemism.

A perfectly reasonable letter to Michael Mann from Representative Barton, who is derisively characterized by Science as a politician, makes clear that in the morally inverted universe of the liberal scientific establishment, it is the scientists who play politics, forcing the politicians to uphold the ideals of science.

As you know, sharing data and research results is a basic tenet of open scientific inquiry, providing a means to judge the reliability of scientific claims. The ability to replicate a study, as the National Research Council has noted, is typically the gold standard by which the reliability of claims is judged. Given the questions reported about data access surrounding these studies, we also seek to learn whether obligations concerning the sharing of information developed or disseminated with federal support have been appropriately met....According to The Wall Street Journal, you have declined to release the exact computer code you used to generate your results. (a) Is this correct? (b) What policy on sharing research and methods do you follow? (c) What is the source of that policy? (d) Provide this exact computer code used to generate your results.

The subcommittee commissioned a study of the hockey stick headed by Edward Wegman of George Mason University, Chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences, referred to dismissively as "Barton's choice" by the article in Science. The study reached the following conclusions:

In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 [papers by Mann] to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b [papers by McIntyre and McKitrick] to be valid and compelling.

In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus 'independent studies' may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent.

Overall, our committee believes that Mann's assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

The response of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science and its prestigious journal? It refers to the hockey stick as a "now-superseded curve."

"An ill-advised step in Mann's statistical analysis may have created the hockey stick, Wegman said."

Statistical choices, ill-advised steps, fake but accurate, what difference would it make, flawed doesn't mean wrong. The betrayal-of-science establishment has adopted the standards of Dan Rather and Reuters and should be equally trusted.

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Global Warming, Global Myth

"Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen." - Sir John Houghton, first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead editor of its first three reports

During the 20th century, the earth warmed 0.6 degree Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit), but that warming has been wiped out in a single year with a drop of 0.63 degree C. (1.13 F.) in 2007. A single year does not constitute a trend reversal, but the magnitude of that temperature drop - equal to 100 years of warming - is noteworthy. Of course, it can also be argued that a mere 0.6 degree warming in a century is so tiny it should never have been considered a cause for alarm in the first place. But then how could the idea of global warming be sold to the public? In any case, global cooling has been evident for more than a single year. Global temperature has declined since 1998. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has gone in the other direction, increasing 15-20%. This divergence casts doubt on the validity of the greenhouse hypothesis, but that hasn't discouraged the global warming advocates. They have long been ignoring far greater evidence that the basic assumption of greenhouse warming from increases in carbon dioxide is false.

Manmade emissions of carbon dioxide were not significant before worldwide industrialization began in the 1940s. They have increased steadily since. Over 80% of the 20th century's carbon dioxide increase occurred after 1940 - but most of the century's temperature increase occurred before 1940! From 1940 until the mid-1970s, the climate also failed to behave according to the greenhouse hypothesis, as carbon dioxide was strongly increasing while global temperatures cooled. This cooling led to countless scare stories in the media about a new ice age commencing.

In the last 1.6 million years there have been 63 alternations between warm and cold climates, and no indication that any of them were caused by changes in carbon dioxide levels. A recent study of a much longer period (600 million years) shows - without exception - that temperature changes precede changes in carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around. As the earth warms, the oceans yield more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, because warmer water cannot hold as much carbon dioxide as colder water.

The public has been led to believe that increased carbon dioxide from human activities is causing a greenhouse effect that is heating the planet. But carbon dioxide comprises only 0.035% of our atmosphere and is a very weak greenhouse gas. Although it is widely blamed for greenhouse warming, it is not the only greenhouse gas, or even the most important. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas and accounts for at least 95% of any greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide accounts for only about 3%, with the remainder due to methane and several other gases.

Not only is carbon dioxide's total greenhouse effect puny, mankind's contribution to it is minuscule. The overwhelming majority (97%) of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere comes from nature, not from man. Volcanoes, swamps, rice paddies, fallen leaves, and even insects and bacteria produce carbon dioxide, as well as methane. According to the journal Science (Nov. 5, 1982), termites alone emit ten times more carbon dioxide than all the factories and automobiles in the world. Natural wetlands emit more greenhouse gases than all human activities combined. (If greenhouse warming is such a problem, why are we trying to save all the wetlands?) Geothermal activity in Yellowstone National Park emits ten times the carbon dioxide of a midsized coal-burning power plant, and volcanoes emit hundreds of times more.

In fact, our atmosphere's composition is primarily the result of volcanic activity. There are about 100 active volcanoes today, mostly in remote locations, and we're living in a period of relatively low volcanic activity. There have been times when volcanic activity was ten times greater than in modern times. But by far the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions is the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It produces 72% of the earth's emissions of carbon dioxide, and the rest of the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the other oceans also contribute. The human contribution is overshadowed by these far larger sources of carbon dioxide. Combining the factors of water vapor and nature's production of carbon dioxide, we see that 99.8% of any greenhouse effect has nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions from human activity. So how much effect could regulating the tiny remainder have upon world climate, even if carbon dioxide determined climate?

Since carbon dioxide is a very weak greenhouse gas, computer models predicting environmental catastrophe depend on the small amount of warming from carbon dioxide being amplified by increased evaporation of water. But in the many documented periods of higher carbon dioxide, even during much warmer climate periods, that never happened. During the time of the dinosaurs, the carbon dioxide levels were 300-500% greater than today. Five hundred million years ago, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 15-20 times what it is today. Yet the catastrophic water-vapor amplification of carbon dioxide warming never occurred. Today we're told catastrophic warming will result if carbon dioxide doubles. But during the Ordovician Period, the carbon dioxide level was 12 times what it is today, and the earth was in an Ice Age. That's exactly opposite to the "runaway" warming that computer models predict should occur. Clearly the models are wrong; they depend upon an assumption of amplification that is contrary to the climate record of millions of years. There is no reason to trust the computer predictions - or base public policies on them. Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has stated, "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."

There are other examples where the computer models fail to agree with reality. According to the greenhouse hypothesis, the warming should occur equally during day and night. But most of the warming that has been observed has occurred at night, thus falsifying the models.

All of the models agree - for sound theoretical reasons - that warming from a greenhouse effect must be 2-3 times greater in the lower atmosphere than at the earth's surface. This is not happening. Both satellites and weather balloons show slightly greater warming at the surface. These atmospheric temperature measurements furnish direct, unequivocal evidence that whatever warming has occurred is not from the greenhouse effect.

Everyone knows the sun heats the earth, but the public is generally unaware that the sun's heat is not uniform. Solar radiation is affected by disturbances on the surface of the sun, called "sunspots," which correspond to the sun's 11-year magnetic cycle. There are also several solar cycles of longer duration. Superimposed, these cycles might augment or cancel each other. There are also periods when sunspots "crash," or almost disappear, which can lead to dramatic cooling of the earth for several decades. This is what happened 400 years ago during the Maunder Minimum, which was the coldest part of the Little Ice Age. During one 30-year period during the Maunder Minimum only about 50 sunspots were observed, compared to a typical 40-50 thousand.

Sunspots have now virtually vanished. You can check out pictures of the sun day after day after day for the last few years here. Very few show more than one sunspot and many show none. We are currently at a solar minimum, awaiting the start of the next solar cycle. If sunspot activity does not pick up soon, we could be in for some seriously cold climate. The jury is still out on sunspot numbers.

In any case, some climate scientists believe the length of past solar cycles points to a cool phase in this century. Professor Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory in Russia, believes a slow decline in temperatures will begin as early as 2012-15 and will lead to a deep freeze in 2050-60 that will last about 50 years. Climatologist Tim Patterson thinks that by 2020 the sun will be starting its weakest 11-year sunspot cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on earth. He says, "If we're to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

The global warming advocates make all sorts of false claims about dire consequences of global warming. They claim it will result in the spread of malaria, food shortages, more human deaths, more violent weather, and a loss of biological diversity through the extinction of species. All untrue. The largest number of species - the greatest biological diversity - is in the tropics. As you move away from the equator, you find fewer and fewer species, until you reach the earth's poles, where there is zero diversity because nothing can live there.

Agricultural productivity is also reduced by cold climate, not a warmer one. That's why Siberia and Alaska are not noted for agricultural abundance. A warmer climate would mean longer growing seasons and would make agriculture possible in areas where it isn't today. And there are at least 300 studies showing plants and forests grow faster and more luxuriantly under conditions of increased carbon dioxide.

Our bodies require heat. We are warm-blooded and have no fur. We wear clothes, build homes, and heat them with fires, all as protection against the cold. Far more people move to Florida, California, or Arizona because of warm climate than move to Alaska, North Dakota, or Montana. Canada is the world's second largest country, but 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of its southern border. Worldwide, far more people die every year from cold than from heat. So why should global warming be bad for us?

Global warming will not result in the spread of malaria. Paul Reiter, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, is one of the world's foremost experts on insect-borne diseases. He says, "The global warming alarm is dressed up as science, but it is not science. It is propaganda. I was horrified to read the [IPCC] 2nd and 3rd Assessment Reports because there was so much misinformation." For example, the IPCC states "mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18 degrees C." This is "clearly untrue," says Reiter. "In fact, mosquitoes are extremely abundant in the Arctic. The most devastating epidemic of malaria was in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. There were something like 13 million cases a year and something like 600,000 deaths, a tremendous catastrophe that reached up to the Arctic Circle. Arkhangel [a city 300 miles further north than Helsinki, Finland] had 30,000 cases and about 10,000 deaths. So it's not a tropical disease. Yet these people in the global warming fraternity invent the idea that malaria will move northward."

New York City and Boston had long histories of malaria. In 1933, when President Roosevelt authorized the Tennessee Valley Authority, a third of the population in the area had malaria. Malaria was not eliminated in the United States until 1951. It was done through the use of DDT - which the environmentalists prevailed upon the United States to ban, resulting in 40-50 million unnecessary deaths from malaria since 1972.

The environmentalists have also invented the idea that the polar bear is threatened by global warming. Today there are 22-25 thousand polar bears, compared to 8-10 thousand 40 years ago and only 5,000 in 1940, before the big rise in carbon dioxide. Eleven of the 13 polar bear groups in Canada today are stable or increasing. The two that are decreasing are in an area where the climate has gotten colder! Furthermore, the polar bears survived many periods of much warmer temperatures, some lasting thousands of years. They survived the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, when the Vikings settled both Iceland and Greenland. Greenland actually was green then and could support agriculture; but when the cold returned a few centuries later, the people there all starved to death. Today Greenland is covered by a sheet of ice. Six thousand years ago the earth's climate was much warmer than now, and the polar bears survived. Ten thousand years ago the earth's climate was a whopping six degrees C (11 degrees F) warmer than now, and the bears survived. Polar bears have been a distinct species for 125,000 years (they descended from grizzly bears) and they've survived far warmer climates than anything they face today or in the foreseeable future. A Canadian polar bear expert, Mitch Taylor, says, "They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected."

The argument that a warmer climate will bring more violent weather can only be made by people who have no knowledge of climate history or simply dismiss it because it contradicts their propaganda. And they rely on the public - and the media - being uninformed enough and gullible enough to believe them. There is abundant historical evidence that the earth had far more violent weather in times of colder climate, such as the Little Ice Age, than in warmer times. It is well known, too, that what determines violent weather is the temperature differential between the equator and the poles. All the computer models predict the greatest warming from the greenhouse effect will be at the poles, which will reduce that differential and violent weather.

There are four sources of global temperature measurements: NASA, The UK Meteorological Office's Hadley Center for Climate Studies, the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems). NASA is out of step with the other three. The others show global temperatures declining since 1998 while NASA shows them increasing at a record pace. How can that be? Statistician Steve McIntyre tracks climate data closely at www.climateaudit.org. Recently he ran an article titled "NASA is Rewriting History, Time and Time Again." It explains that NASA has "adjusted" recent temperatures upward and older temperatures downward, which creates the appearance of warming.

The man behind these changes is James Hansen, the scientist who started the whole global warming hysteria by testifying before a Senate committee in June 1988 that he was "99% sure" greenhouse warming was already under way. The same media which scarcely a decade earlier were touting a coming ice age now seized upon Hansen's unsupported testimony and began touting global warming. Hansen has been trying ever since to come up with evidence to support his claims, now even tampering with the actual temperature record. Steven Goddard asks, "How could it be determined that so many thermometers were wrong by an average of 0.5 degrees in one particular year several decades ago, and an accurate retrofit be made? Why is the adjustment 0.5 degrees one year, and 0.1 degrees the next?" Statistically, the odds are 50/50 of an error being either up or down. But Hansen adds an upward correction to the average of thousands of temperature measurements annually across the globe in more than 55 years out of 70. That's like flipping a coin 70 times and having it turn up heads 55 times. The odds of that happening are about one in a million.

Nor is that the only example of manipulation of data for the good of the cause. The centerpiece of the IPCC Third Assessment Report was the "hockey stick" graph by Michael Mann, et al. It showed a thousand years of "reconstructed" global temperatures as a long horizontal trend looking like the long handle of a hockey stick - with a sharp rise since 1900 looking like the blade of the hockey stick, due to global warming. This work has now been thoroughly discredited. It was the product of multiple inaccuracies from errors, omissions, obsolete data, and manipulations in "reconstructing" data, all of which was then processed through an invalid statistical procedure. That procedure was found to produce a "hockey stick" even from random inputs, and Mann himself later admitted it would find a "hockey stick" where there wasn't one. The National Academy of Sciences found a "validation skill not significantly different from zero."

The issue was presented to the National Academy of Sciences by the Wegman Panel, consisting of three independent statisticians chaired by an eminent statistics professor, Edward Wegman, who also testified about it at a congressional investigation. After explaining the incorrect mathematics in Mann's procedure, Wegman stated: "I am baffled by the [Mann] claim that incorrect mathematics doesn't matter because the answer is correct anyway[!]" Ideology trumps mathematics! (Incidentally, this graph is still being used on TV programs on global warming. I was on one such program less than a year ago that displayed this graph four or five times in an hour and allowed Mann plenty of airtime to tout it, and the program provided no rebuttal. And I have been told by students and parents that the "hockey stick" graph is still being used in schools.)

Here's an example of the global warming alarmists completely ignoring contrary data, or even denying it exists. Some scientists assert that the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (about 380 parts per million) is the highest in 800,000 years. The media sucks this up and broadcasts it all over the airwaves and the newspapers, and the public, not knowing any better, believes it must be true. But how could such learned men be so ignorant in their own field of expertise as to not know of the abundant temperature records that give lie to their claim? How could they not know of the monumental compilation by Ernst-Georg Beck of more than 90,000 direct carbon dioxide measurements, between 1812 and 1961, from 175 published technical papers? Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., says these measurements were ignored for three decades "not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by top scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, using techniques that are standard textbook procedures. . . . The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time."

What about the ice core samples? Same story: omission or denial of whatever doesn't fit the global warming doctrine. The 2007 IPCC Summary report states: "The global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from a pre-industrial value of about 280 ppm to 379 ppm in 2005. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2005 exceeds by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years (180 to 300 ppm) as determined from ice cores." In fact, the ice cores show measurements of over 400 ppm as recently as about 1700 A.D. and 420 ppm about 200 A.D. Ice cores show similar carbon dioxide levels intermittently over the last 10,000 years. So who is wrong, the ice cores or the IPCC? Just who are the "deniers" of reality?

Jaworowski has studied climate for over 40 years, organized 11 glacier expeditions researching 17 glaciers in the Arctic, Antarctic, Alps, Norway, Himalayas, Peruvian Andes, and other mountainous regions. He has also published about 20 papers on climate issues, most of them about ice cores. He writes that the ice core information in the 2007 IPCC Summary Report was "plagued with improper manipulation of data, an arbitrary rejection of high readings from old ice, and an arbitrary rejection of low readings from young ice, simply because they did not fit the preconceived idea of man-made global warming ."

Furthermore, from over 90,000 direct measurements of carbon dioxide, Beck graphed five-year averages, which further discredit the IPCC claim. These show 440 ppm carbon dioxide for the years 1820 and 1940, and 390 ppm for 1855. Can there be any doubt that the IPCC is distorting science for political purposes?

Why is it that the global warming advocates are unfazed by any contrary evidence, no matter how strong? All their claims of disasters from global warming have been debunked. All their computer models have been shown to be false, to be based on flawed assumptions, incapable of being reconciled with the observable facts. Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and a university professor before he became president, is the author of a book on global warming and has spoken often on the subject. He says, "What frustrates me is the feeling that everything has already been said and published, that all rational argument has been used, yet it does not help." It does not help because global warming alarmism is not based on rational argument. It is not based on science. It is not based on reality. It is based on political ideology. If rational argument doesn't fit, then phony arguments must be invented: the spread of malaria, the loss of biological diversity, polar bears disappearing, etc. If computer models can predict disaster scenarios only by programming unrealistic assumptions, then that will be done. If global warming does not fit the observable temperature measurements, then a new "reality" must be invented to fit the ideology: the actual temperature records must be altered or dismissed. The global warming advocates are not disturbed by all this because, in their view, ideology trumps reality.

Patrick Moore, a cofounder and director of Greenpeace, resigned because of its "trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas." After the failure of communism, he says, there was little public support for collectivist ideology. In his view, a "reason environmental extremism emerged was because world communism failed, the [Berlin] wall came down, and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement bringing their neo-Marxism with them and learned to use green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalism than they do anything with ecology or science." "I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically," said Judi Bari, principal organizer of Earth First!

James Hansen revealed his hatred of capitalism in an impassioned email denouncing the attention paid to errors in NASA temperature data: "The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable . . . the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children."

Klaus states:

We succeeded in getting rid of communism, but along with many others, we erroneously assumed that attempts to suppress freedom, and to centrally organize, mastermind, and control society and the economy, were matters of the past, an almost-forgotten relic. Unfortunately, those centralizing urges are still with us. . . . Environmentalism only pretends to deal with environmental protection. Behind their people and nature friendly terminology, the adherents of environmentalism make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior and our values. . . .

The followers of the environmentalist ideology, however, keep presenting us with various catastrophic scenarios with the intention of persuading us to implement their ideas. That is not only unfair but also extremely dangerous. Even more dangerous, in my view, is the quasi-scientific guise that their oft-refuted forecasts have taken on. . . . Their recommendations would take us back to an era of statism and restricted freedom. . . . The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical - the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of the proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. . . . We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. . . . It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.

Do you ever wonder how communism could last for 70 years in Russia? Surely there was plenty of evidence, for decades, that the system was failing: food shortages, declining life expectancy, increased infant mortality, low standards of living, primitive hospitals, and sanitation facilities lagging far behind those in Western Europe and America - not to mention pollution far worse than in the West. But to diehard communists, the facts did not matter. All the observable negatives of collectivism were trumped by ideology. The same is true of the ideology behind global warming.

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

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9 August, 2008

The two sides of the global warming debate

The story below from "The Australian" gives a much more comprehensive account of the realist view than one normally sees in a major newspaper

Has global warming stopped? The question alone is enough to provoke scorn from the mainstream scientific community and from the Government, which says the earth has never been hotter. But tell that to a new army of sceptics who have mushroomed on internet blog sites and elsewhere in recent months to challenge some of the most basic assumptions and claims of climate change science. Their claims are provocative and contentious but they are also attracting attention, so much sothat mainstream scientists are being forced torespond.

The bloggers and others make several key claims. They say the way of measuring the world's temperature is frighteningly imprecise and open to manipulation. They argue that far from becoming hotter, the world's temperatures have cooled in the past decade, contrary to the overwhelming impression conveyed by scientists and politicians. As such, they say there should be far greater scepticism towards the apocalyptic predictions about climate change. Even widely accepted claims, such as that made by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong that "the 12 hottest years in history have all been in the last 13 years", are being openly challenged.

"She is just plain wrong," says Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs. "It's not a question of debate. What about the medieval warming period? The historical record shows they were growing wine in England, for goodness sake; come on. It is not disputed by anyone that the Vikings arrived in Greenland in AD900 and it was warmer than Greenland is now. What Penny Wong is doing is being selective and saying that is a long time ago."

But selective use of facts and data is fast becoming an art form on both sides of the climate change debate now that real money is at stake as the West ponders concrete schemes to reduce carbon emissions. So what is the validity of some of the key claims being made by these new blogger sceptics? Their first claim is that the most basic aspect of climate change science - the measurement of global warming - is flawed, imprecise and open to manipulation.

The earth's temperature is measured using land-based weather stations - in effect, a network of thermometers scattered unevenly across the globe - as well as via satellites and ocean-based weather sensors. There are four agencies that measure the world's temperatures and each has different methodology and produces varying, although not dramatically different, results.

Sceptics accuse climate change believers of always quoting the agency that shows the highest level of warming, the US National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies run by prominent climate change scientist and activist James Hansen. An independent study by Yale University in the US shows GISS says the earth has warmed by 0.025C a year during the past eight years while the other best-known measurement agency, London's Hadley Centre, says it warmed by only 0.014C a year during the same period. Not surprisingly, the Hadley figures are the most quoted by climate change sceptics while the GISS figures are most popular with climate change believers.

David Evans, former consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office, says Hansen's GISS is unreliable because it is the only measurement agency that relies almost wholly on land-based data instead of satellites. "Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the urban heat island effect," he says. "Urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars and houses." As such, he alleges that the GISS figures - which are enormously influential in the climate change debate - are "hopelessly corrupted" and may even be manipulated to suit Hansen's views on global warming.

A group of weather buffs in the US also has attacked GISS's methodology, putting together an online photo gallery of US weather stations at website www.surfacestations.org that shows some thermometers situated next to asphalt runways and parking lots where they would pick up excess warming.

But GISS says the distorting impact of this urban warming is negated because data from these stations is modified to remove these effects and give a true reading. Hansen acknowledges there may be flaws in the weather station data because temperature measurement is not always a precise science. But he says this does not mean big-picture trends can't be drawn from the data. He says: "That doesn't mean you give up on the science and that you can't draw valid conclusions about the nature of earth's temperature change."

Hansen has been infuriated by the attacks on GISS by climate change critics. Last year Canadian blogger and retired businessman Stephen McIntyre exposed a minor mistake in Hansen's figures that had caused GISS to overstate US temperatures by a statistically small 0.15C since 2000. Sceptics were energised. "We have proof of man-made global warming," roared conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh. "The man-made global warming is inside NASA."

Hansen struck back, saying he would "not joust with court jesters" who sought to "create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story".

What the bloggers have succeeded in doing is to highlight that measuring climate change is an evolving science. But their success has been at the margins only. So far they have failed to prove that these discrepancies negate the broader core arguments about the trends of global warming.

However, the second argument being put forward by blogger sceptics is more accessible to the public and therefore is having a greater impact. They argue that, contrary to the impressions given about global warming, the earth's temperatures have plateaued during the past decade and may have cooled in recent years. This, they argue, should not be happening when carbon emissions are growing rapidly. This was not what the climate change modellers predicted. Their conclusion therefore is that carbon emissions are not the driver of warming and climate change and that the earth is not heading for a climate change apocalypse caused by greenhouse gases.

"All official measures of global temperature show that it peaked in 1998 and has been declining since at least 2002," says climate change sceptic Bob Carter, a science adviser to the Australian Climate Science Coalition. "And this is in the face of an almost 5 per cent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1998. Spot the problem?"

A careful analysis of global temperature graphs from each of the measurement agencies confirm that - despite variations between them - there has not been any notable warming since 2000. Depending on which graphs you use, global temperatures since 2000 have been more or less flat. Some, such as the GISS data, show a modest rise, while others show negligible movement and even a small fall in recent years.

Sceptics like to use graphs that date from 1998 because that was the hottest year on record due to El Nino influences and therefore the temperature trends for the decade look flattest when 1998 is the starting point. But ultimately this is a phony war because most mainstream scientists do not dispute that global temperatures have remained relatively flat during the past decade. Where they differ with the sceptics is on how this outcome should be interpreted.

"The changes in temperature over the past 10 years have basically plateaued," says Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW. "But scientists did not anticipate a gradual year-by-year warming in temperature. What matters is the long-term trend. This outcome does not change any of the science but it does change the spin climate deniers can put on it."

The sceptics are having a field day with this trend. The IPA's Marohasy says: "In the last 10 years we have seen an increase in carbon dioxide levels yet temperatures are coming down. That, if anyone looks at the actual data, is not disputable. Carbon dioxide is not driving temperatures because there are other important climatic factors at play."

Most scientists are adamant that any assessment of climate change based on only 10 years of data is not only meaningless but reckless. "From a climate standpoint it is far too short a period to have any significance," says Amanda Lynch, a climate change scientist at Melbourne's Monash University. "What we are seeing now is consistent with our understanding of variability between decades. If we hung about for another 30 years and it kept going down, then you might start to think there is something we don't understand. But the evidence at this point suggests this is not something we should hang around and wait for."

Climate change scientists say we must go back much further than the past decade and pay attention to the longer-term trend lines that run through the temperature data and clearly trend upwards. Lynch says other factors beyond temperature are also relevant. "In the last 10 years there has been a catastrophic and massive Arctic sea ice retreat. We've seen glacial retreat, permafrost thaw and ocean thermal expansion, so temperature is not the whole story."

But the sceptics are undeterred. "It is widely alleged that the science of global warming is settled," says the US-based Science and Public Policy Institute. "This implies that all the major scientific aspects of climate change are well understood and uncontroversial. The allegation is profoundly untrue ... even the most widely held opinions should never be regarded as an ultimate truth."

Matthew England, from the Climate Change Research Centre, describes the latest blog war by climate change sceptics as an amazing phenomenon. "Climate change is a robust area of science and there is plenty that is still being debated and new discoveries are still being made," he says. "It is a topic (that) will keep attracting different opinions from enthusiasts and from bloggers. They are a minority but they are proving to be a very vocal group."

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Global Warming: It isn't a hoax and it isn't a crisis

An interview with Iain Murray by Chillingeffect.org

The Chilling Effect: We ran into you at the Americans For Prosperity/RightOnline event, where you were on speaking a panel regarding global warming. Some in the audience were certain that global warming is a hoax, while others were agnostic on the science. Given your review of the issue, what's your best guess on climate change?

Iain S. Murray: I think it's pretty conclusive that, all other things being equal, more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere leads to a warmer atmosphere. However, it's clear from the recent plateau in temperatures, while GHGs have continued to accumulate, that all other things are not equal. We really don't know very much about the other "forcings," as they call them, that go in to deciding the global temperature, and clearly need more research on them. We also don't know very much at all about the history of climate beyond 400 years ago. We need to know not just what regulates the atmosphere, but whether temperature swings are unusual or not.

TCE: What frustrates you most, then, about the current debate over climate change?

ISM: There are a lot of things we can do - the so-called "no regrets" policies - that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or create a global economy more resilient to change that would be beneficial even if global warming doesn't turn out to be a problem. However, these policies are ignored by the global warming industry because they require a little lateral thinking and don't create massive bureaucracies and central control. Meanwhile, there are many who deride such policies because they see global warming as a hoax. The truth is it isn't a hoax, not is it a crisis. It's a risk to be managed. So let's manage it!

TCE: It doesn't take long to understand the thesis of your book, since the title does a great job of summing it up. One of the most interesting arguments you make is that "Gore's vision of greater state control over the economy has already produced some of the greatest environmental disasters in history." Can you give our readers a quick idea of what you mean?

ISM: The central insight of free-market environmentalism is that people with an ownership stake in the environment generally take care of their asset. Yet the Goreite approach to the environment seeks to take control out of the hand of the owner and give it to the commons either by regulation (forcing or even "nudging" the owner to do something he wouldn't otherwise) or by direct public ownership. This leads to what ecologist Garret Hardin called "The Tragedy of the Commons," as far back as 1968. So it was nationalization of the nation's waterways that led to the Cuyahoga catching on fire, biofuel subsidies and mandates that have led to food crises and deforestation, public management of forests that led to Yellowstone almost burning down 20 years ago, the de facto ban on DDT that led to the failure to control malaria in Africa and, worst of all, the Soviet direct management of waterways in Asia that led to the destruction of the Aral Sea.

TCE: When you get feedback from people who have read your book, what is the most common thing that they mention? What strikes or surprises them most, or what pushback have you gotten from critics?

ISM: The people I thought would criticize the book have largely ignored it, which seems to be the liberal environmentalist approach these days to things they don't like. They regard such arguments as literally unspeakable. Of those open-minded enough to read the book, the thing that has gotten the most attention is the revelation of the environmental movement's silence over a number of issues that plainly affect the environment by their own lights - the effects of the contraceptive pill on the nation's freshwater fish, the encouragement of mass immigration to the US and so on. And, of course, everyone wants to know about global warming. In fact, if I'd written my book purely on global warming I'm sure it would have sold more copies, but there are plenty of other books out there doing that. I wanted to stress how global warming alarmism is just the latest in a series of environmentally-based power grabs.

TCE: There are a lot of us who want to keep the world in good order but think the evidence just isn't there on global warming. For someone who cares about the environment, what are the best practical ways to keep our world clean and improve energy for the future?

ISM: The best practical steps, I think, are to exercise traditional virtues of thrift and conservation. Turn you lights off when you're not using them. Don't drive too far for something that isn't really worth it. Spend time with your children rather than leaving them in front of a TV or video game. All these activities will lower your bills and lower emissions. Better sources of energy will come as the market responds to them. If people are willing to pay more for "cleaner" energy, the market will respond. However, we must recognize that this is a luxury purchase. So were TVs 30 years ago. We must allow people to get richer, around the world, so that such energy sources cease to be luxuries. However, that, ironically, requires access to affordable energy. So the last thing we should do is seek to raise the price of energy for everyone.

TCE: Do you have any pet projects or quirky arguments/ideas that you wish policymakers or the think tank community would latch onto when it comes to the global warming and energy debate?

ISM: Reform the Air Traffic Control system! The current system is based on a 1920s system of beacons and is ridiculously labor-intensive in the days of GPS navigation. Simple reforms could reduce the amount of fuel used - and emissions generated - by 0.4 million barrels of oil per day. That's a great example of the sort of no regrets policy I mentioned earlier. Oh, and we need to remove all the regulatory barriers we have put in the way of energy innovation, but that's a longer argument for another day.

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Climate change computer models are limited

Computer models that predict climate change have improved during the past decade, but they still have deficiencies such as predicting precipitation over specific regions, according to a report released recently by a unit of the Energy Department. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program's report, "Climate Models: An Assessment of Strengths and Limitations," examined some computer models of the earth's climate and their ability to simulate current climate change.

To assure that future climate projections are used appropriately, it's important to understand what current models are able to simulate effectively, the document said. "This report makes an important contribution in helping to describe and explain the current state of high-end climate modeling for the non-specialist," said David Bader, with DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the coordinating lead author for the report.

The report described complex mathematical models used to simulate the earth's climate on powerful supercomputers and assesses the model's ability to reproduce observed climate features. It also studied the model's sensitivity to changes in conditions such as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Despite progress in modeling over the last 10 years, a number of systematic biases remain, particularly in the simulation of regional precipitation, the report said. On smaller geographic scales, when compared to the current climate, the simulated climate varies substantially from model to model, it added. "No current model is superior to others in all respects, but rather different models have differing strengths and weaknesses," the report stated.

To develop the report, DOE chartered a Federal Advisory Committee comprised of 29 members drawn from academia, the government scientific community, nonprofit and for-profit organizations that drafted and oversaw the review of the report.

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Hydrogen-Wind-Nuclear Plant in Ontario Not Currently Worthwhile, Study Shows

A recent case study on using hydrogen to store the electricity generated by a mix of wind and nuclear power in Ontario, Canada, has shown that the hydrogen addition won't be worth the cost, at least not at the current state of hydrogen technology development. Bruce Power - Canada's first private nuclear generating company - is considering including a hydrogen storage and distribution component to go along with a large scale wind farm, all presently sharing the main electrical transmission line in Bruce County, Ontario.

The province's first commercial wind farm, Huron Wind, is located on the shore of Lake Huron. Its five wind turbines provide a maximum output power of 9 MW. Additional large scale wind farms are located close by, using the same transmission lines.

Bruce Power's nuclear power plant, located about 250 km northwest of Toronto, consists of six reactors. Together, the reactors generate a total output power of 4,830 MW, which supplies more than 20% of Ontario's electricity.

Using hydrogen as a storage and distribution method for the electricity generated by the wind farm and nuclear plant from the same region could have several potential benefits. When the cost of electricity is low, for example, the company could store part of its electricity production as hydrogen, and then sell it back to the electricity market when the price increases. Similarly, electricity could be stored as hydrogen when there is not enough line capacity to transfer it all at once. In periods of low winds, hydrogen storage could help make up for the variability and in periods of high winds and constrained transmission capacities, hydrogen could be used to store the electricity. In the future, the hydrogen itself could be sold to a hydrogen market, which could be more profitable than selling it back to the electricity market.

However, costs of the initial investment, production, and operation won't be matched by the profit solely from storing electricity as hydrogen, according to the study by Gregor Taljan and Gregor Verbi? from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Claudio Ca¤izares and Michael Fowler from the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

Even with an optimistic hydrogen production efficiency of 60% through electrolysis, the researchers' evaluation shows that the electricity stored as hydrogen would need to be sold to the electricity market at a high price that rarely happens in order for the scheme to be profitable. As the researchers demonstrate, the selling price of electricity would need to be about four times the buying electricity price for the hydrogen system to profit from storing electricity.

"This study is very important from the viewpoint of finding synergies between electrical energy and chemical energy stored in hydrogen," Taljan told PhysOrg.com. "The study shows that currently, hydrogen is not profitable solely for electricity storage. On the other hand, it might be economically acceptable to produce hydrogen from electricity at advantageous electricity/hydrogen prices. Furthermore, hydrogen is shown to be a highly favorable option when there are electricity transmission constraints in the area, limiting sales of electricity of a power producer."

As the researchers explain, hydrogen storage might be an economically feasible option for storing electricity in times of insufficient electricity transmission line capacities, which would otherwise be dumped. This could be especially true in cases where the upgrade of transmission systems is not an option due to various reasons (such as remote location, resistance of local population, etc.).

The study also showed that a hydrogen sub-system for producing hydrogen could be profitable if there is sufficient hydrogen demand. For instance, transportation applications (such as cars, trains, and planes) could provide a market for buying hydrogen produced by a mixed wind-nuclear plant.

"Hydrogen production might become profitable when the Hydrogen Economy becomes fully mature, i.e. when the demand, and correspondingly prices, for hydrogen increases (expected mainly from the transportation sector)," Taljan said. "This might happen when the prices of fossil fuels rise as a result of many different possible factors (e.g. shrinking reserves, higher demand, political instabilities, CO2 emissions trading schemes). In this scenario, hydrogen might become a real fossil fuel substitute option which will drive up the hydrogen demand and prices, making the hydrogen production a lucrative business.

"In this context, it is also important that research into hydrogen production, storage, transmission, distribution and consumption components `wins the battle' with the electron economy, where the energy carrier is considered to be electricity. Those two economies compete in many different areas, such as efficiencies, durability, and prices. Currently, hydrogen is advantageous in terms of higher energy density and durability but still lags in efficiencies."

The team's investigation into the feasibility of hydrogen is further elaborated in two other recent studies. "Hydrogen storage for mixed wind-nuclear power plants in the context of a Hydrogen Economy," which is published in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, deals with how the excess oxygen and heat utilizations would improve the economics of hydrogen systems primarily designed for storing of electricity.

The second study, "Study of Mixed Wind-Nuclear-Hydrogen Power Plants," which is going to be presented at this year's North American Power Symposium in Calgary, demonstrates that hydrogen is not economically feasible for the sole purpose of storing electricity, in spite of residual heat and oxygen utilization, and based on current hydrogen production and utilization technologies.

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Global warming: Where is the heat and science?

What the mainstream media has been feeding our nation on the issue of global warming is more hype than heat and more scam than science. Thus, for a change, we shall look at the facts. First question: Where is the heat?

Scientist Robert Balling Jr., director of the Laboratory of Climatology at Arizona State University, examined the temperature records from European ground stations over the last 250 years. What were his findings? He said,

"There had been no warming in Europe during the past 65 years. Europe warmed only .58 degrees Celsius during the past 250 years, with all of the warming taking place between 1890 and the mid-1930s and at the same time as an increase in the output of the sun.

An in-depth study released by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine states: "The average temperature of the Earth has varied within a range of about 3 degrees Celsius during the past 3,000 years. It is currently increasing as the Earth recovers from a period that is known as the Little Ice Age. ... "Compiled U.S. surface temperatures have increased about 0.5 degrees Celsius per century, which is consistent with other historical values of 0.4 to 0.5 degrees Celsius per century during the recovery from the Little Ice Age. ... Three intermediate trends are evident, including the decreasing trend used to justify fears of `global cooling' in the 1970s.

"While the average temperature change taking place as the Earth recovers from the Little Ice Age is so slight that it is difficult to discern, its environmental effects are measurable. "Greenland, for example, is beginning to turn green again, as it was 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Climate Optimum. Arctic sea ice is decreasing somewhat, but Antarctic ice is not decreasing and may be increasing, due to increased snow.

"All of the observed climate changes are gradual, moderate and entirely within the bounds of ordinary natural changes that have occurred during the benign period of the past few thousand years. "There is no indication whatever in the experimental data that an abrupt or remarkable change in any of the ordinary natural climate variables is beginning or will begin to take place."

The facts tell us that the average temperature increase over the past 100 years is 0.5 degrees C and this is all in the range of normality. So where is the heat? It is minimal and in the range of normality. Second question: Where is the science?

In 1996, The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, a United Nations Organization, released its report "The Science of Climate Change 1995." It addressed the issue of the human impact on the earth's climate and was hailed by the media as the latest and most authoritative statement on global warming. Soon after its release, there was a protest by some scientist of the handling of this document and the version of it that was released to the media. The Wall Street Journal carried this article titled "A Major Deception on Global Warming"˜ by Frederick Seitz. In the editorial, Seitz had this to say:

"In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.

"A comparison between the report approved by the contributing scientists and the published version reveals that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version.

"If they lead to carbon taxes and restraints on economic growth, they will have a major and almost certainly destructive impact on the economies of the world. Whatever the intent was of those who made these significant changes, their effect is to deceive policy makers and the public into believing that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming."

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel and a television meteorologist for more than 54 years, has called global warming alarmism "The Greatest Scam in history˜."Scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long-term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming," he said.

The truth is, there has been scientific manipulation of the facts for a desired outcome. That is the reason Dr. Frederick Seitz and several other credible scientists started the "Petition Project"˜ that states that global warming is not a crisis and that we should all oppose higher energy tax schemes as well as the Kyoto Treaty. How many have signed this "Petition Project"?˜ More than 31,000 American scientists have signed the Petition!

Where is the heat? It is little, normal and natural. Where is the science? It is limited and manipulated, to be certain, and used to promote a certain political and economical outcome.

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Aggressive Greenie "protesters" in England

Coercion and self-publicity are the stock in trade of the Green/Left. They NEED to be noticed

Hundreds of riot police pushed back protesters at the Kingsnorth coal power station "climate camp" in Kent yesterday, as officers raided the site and made eight arrests. Kent Police seized four men aged between 24 and 45 for public order offences in dawn skirmishes. A 27-year-old man was also arrested for obstructing police and a 40-year-old man was held on suspicion of possessing a prohibited weapon.

Scuffles broke out as shield-carrying officers moved in to surround protesters in the afternoon after the high-profile arrival of five campaigners who are trying to breach a court order banning them from entering the site. Police also stopped food deliveries to the camp.

The five protesters - Paul Morozzo, Jonathan Stevenson, Ellen Potts, Mel Evans and Oli Rodker - were among 29 that were arrested in June for stopping a coal delivery train outside Drax power station in North Yorkshire. Their bail conditions ban them from going near any British power station and from attending the climate camp but they phoned ahead to warn the local police commander of their arrival aboard the 1.33pm train from London Victoria to Chatham, Kent.

Mr Morozzo, 41, was arrested after being identified as a bail-breaker but the other four managed to sneak inside the camp despite the police sealing off the perimeter and holding identity checks. Another man was arrested at the time. Lawyers warned the group they are likely to face prison by entering the site. A spokeswoman for Kent Police said: "Police are investigating the arrival of campaigners believed to have breached their bail conditions but we cannot confirm how many arrests have been made."

About 700 protesters were on site yesterday; police sources said they expect about 2,000 this week, gathering to show their disapproval at plans by the plant's owners, E.ON, to build a new coal-powered station on the site. Protesters have promised to shut down Kingsnorth on Saturday.

Before arriving at the site, Mr Morozzo said: "I'm pretty nervous about being arrested because I've never been to prison. It will be bad but the worst thing about being arrested will be that I won't get to go to an event that I have been planning for a long time. This is one of the most important issues of our generation and it's vital that we are allowed to discuss it. It's tragic that the police seem to want to stop that."

Mr Stevenson, 26, who remained at large last night, had prepared for arrest by posting his father a birthday card and texting his parents: "I'm sorry I haven't said anything before, but I didn't want to worry you. It looks like I might be arrested at climate camp. It is my choice and it's something I feel strongly about. Please don't be angry." Ms Potts, 32, added: "We are also doing this because we feel our bail conditions are disproportionate to our supposed offences. I can see the logic in keeping us away from power stations, but to keep us away from this event, where people are meeting to discuss how to tackle climate change, is wrong."

Source

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8 August, 2008

Hurricanes pesky -- so try rain

All the claims about global warming causing hurricanes have by now been very widely debunked so the Warmists have to find some alternative disaster. So now they turn to rain. It's basic physics that warmer seas will lead to more precipitation but Warmists don't care about basic physics so they have to "discover" the same thing by some more roundabout route. "Powerful rainstorms" are now said to be a problem caused by warming.

A problem?? What it wrong with heavy rain? It is great for crops. I grew up in the tropics, where we measured our annual rainfall not in inches but in yards. And the rain was so heavy we used to say that it came down "in sheets". All that rain was slightly pesky at times but the environment sure was lush and all the crops grew like mad. We had fields of grass that was over 6' high. And the grass concerned (sugar cane) was and is the world's cheapest source of sugar and ethanol. Heavier rain would be GREAT!

And India and much of Asia have lived with monsoonal rain for millennia. They seem to have survived somehow. People actually welcome the monsoon there, funnily enough

Climate models have long predicted that global warming will increase the intensity of extreme precipitation events. A new study conducted at the University of Miami and the University of Reading (U.K.) provides the first observational evidence to confirm the link between a warmer climate and more powerful rainstorms.

One of the most serious challenges humanity will face in response to global warming is adapting to changes in extreme weather events. Of utmost concern is that heavy rainstorms will become more common and more intense in a warmer climate due to the increased moisture available for condensation. More intense rain events increase the risk of flooding and can have substantial societal and economic impacts.

To understand how precipitation responds to a warmer climate, researchers in this study used naturally-driven changes associated with El Ni¤o as a laboratory for testing their hypotheses. Based on 20 years of satellite observations, they found a distinct link between tropical rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. "A warmer atmosphere contains larger amounts of moisture which boosts the intensity of heavy downpours," said Dr. Brian J. Soden, associate professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science.

The report, "Atmospheric Warming and the Amplification of Precipitation Extremes," previewed in Science Express this Thursday, August 7, and published in an upcoming issue of Science, found that both observations and models indicated an increase in heavy rainstorms in response to a warmer climate. However, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes was found to be substantially larger in the observations than what is predicted by current models. "Comparing observations with results from computer models improves understanding of how rainfall responds to a warming world" said Dr. Richard P. Allan, NERC advance fellow at the University of Reading's Environmental Systems Science Centre. "Differences can relate to deficiencies in the measurements, or the models used to predict future climatic change"

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Could the Earth be cooling its heels?

One thing could quash the debate over "global warming" real quick - global cooling - and it could be on the way. This brave, against-the-grain prognostication that the Earth's average temperature could be actually starting to decrease comes from agricultural meteorologist Drew Lerner, who in circles of the global warming in-crowd is known as a "denier."

Apparently this is because his opinion is based on a well-grounded theory that global warming and cooling are largely affected by factors such as solar radiation, Arctic winds, water vapor and the El Ni¤o/La Ni¤a phenomena, and less by the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.

Lerner's opinion runs contrary to those of "alarmists" such as Al Gore - who blames man-made global warming for increased hurricane activity, rising sea levels and making him tell a fib about creating the Internet. Lerner doesn't say that global warming has not been occurring over the last two to three decades, or that man's activity has not had an impact on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's just that carbon dioxide doesn't play as big a role in climate change as other factors do. And those factors, surprisingly, are now pointing toward the Earth cooling its heels.

Lerner is definitely outnumbered by detractors. Recently, the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change estimated that global temperatures will rise 2 to 10 degrees by 2100. A scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., projected a 5-degree increase by the end of the century. And Gore, pre-eminent para-scientist that he is, warns that warming will result in a rise in sea level of 20 feet over the next 20 years, which would put much of the current U.S. coastline under water.

Lerner bases his cooling forecast on cycles of the sun - the single driving force for the entire energy equation on the planet. How much energy we receive from the sun determines how warm or cold temperatures are in the oceans and polar regions, which in turn affects climate.

The amount of energy emitted by the sun started a downward cycle around 1983, according to Lerner. If information Lerner has gathered is correct, there is evidence that a decline in the sun's energy will correlate to a decline in Earth's temperatures within 25 to 30 years. If it's 25 years, the cooling off process should be starting this year and will continue over the next 10 to 15 years. His theory is that it will take a few years before the cooling is uniform throughout the atmosphere. "We could start seeing actual cooler temperatures in 2013 and beyond."

Lerner qualifies his forecast of cooler weather saying that he nor anyone really has a handle on what moves the global climate, a stand more reputable scientists should take. If Lerner does prove correct, I doubt it would chill Al Gore and his friends, who would simply rev everyone up for the coming Ice Age - while finding a way to blame global warming for it.

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Britain: Suddenly being green is not cool any more

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

So the salad days are over; it's the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence. But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by "toffs": it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

Only a year ago, according to MORI, 15 per cent of those polled put the environment in their top three concerns. That figure has dropped by a third to 10 per cent this month. Now that people are fighting for their own survival rather than their grandchildren's, they put crime, the economy and rising prices at the top of their list.

According to Andrew Cooper, director of the research company, Populus: "There is a direct correlation between how people perceive the economy and the importance they place on the environment. When times are tough people resent paying more to salve their conscience." This means that fewer people are now buying organic chickens from smart supermarkets when they can pay œ3.99 at Lidl. With all food prices rising, the organic market is being credit-crunched. Demand for it grew by 70 per cent from 2002 to 2007; now it has stalled, according to the consultancy Organic Monitor. The vast new organic Whole Foods Store on Kensington High Street in London is so quiet you can hear the cheese breathe in the specially designed glass room. Meanwhile the demand for takeaway pizzas and McDonald's has risen as people find the cheapest way to eat.

When David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party he said that green issues were at the top of his agenda. His slogan for the local elections last year was "Vote Blue, Go Green". But in the past few months he has realised that voters have lost the appetite for their greens. He has only given one environmental speech since Christmas. Once he used to talk about putting a $6,000 windmill on top of his house. Now the message is not about conserving the planet but preserving his bank balance. He wears catalogue clothes, grows his own vegetables and holidays barefoot in Britain because it is less extravagant, not because he is trying to reduce his global footprint.

In fact, when the Tory leader's bicycle was stolen a week ago, the message of the story was not how green he was for riding his bike, but how broken our society has become when a politician finds his bike nicked from under his nose.

Boris Johnson was the first to realise that the tolerance for green taxes may have peaked. When he became Mayor of London, he dropped plans to charge a $50 congestion fee on gas-guzzling cars.

The Tories have quietly been reviewing many of their green policies. A range of measures designed to penalise motoring and other polluting activities has been put on hold in case they alienate families struggling to pay their bills. A proposal to tax the highest emitting cars up to œ500 more than the greenest vehicles has been quietly shelved, as has the plan to raise taxes on short-haul flights. Instead George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, has promised to cut tax on fuel when oil prices rise.

Gordon Brown has also stopped discussing his solar panels and compost heap in Scotland and is trying to dissociate himself from local council rubbish taxes - even though they have been driven by central government plans to put up landfill charges.

Both parties are looking at ways of rewarding people for being green rather than penalising them for throwing out their yoghurt pots with their teabags. Mr Osborne, in a speech last month, admitted: "When people are feeling the pinch, we need to make it pay to go green. Instead of being fined for not recycling, households should be paid for recycling."

When Barack Obama first decided to run for the presidency, he embraced the green cause. Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming had just become the biggest grossing documentary in history and Mr Gore had won the Nobel prize. But recently Mr Obama has been talking more about thrift than trees. Instead of showing off his recycling skills, he explains that his children don't receive Christmas or birthday presents.

It's not just the economic downturn that has harmed the green order. People have become wary of environmental causes that can turn out to do more harm than good. They don't want wind turbines marching across Britain's moors when nuclear power stations can do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They worry that washing and bleaching all those non-disposable nappies may be damaging the ozone layer, that the massive incentives for biofuels have distorted the world food market, and that green taxes are actually stealth taxes.

But paradoxically, just as Britain is turning its back on the environment, the country is finally becoming greener. Fewer people are moving house so they are buying fewer new white goods such as washing machines and fridges. They may not be queueing up for $18 organic Poilane bread, but for the first time in a decade they are discarding less food. They buy less impulsively and think more carefully before their weekly shop. Children are wearing hand-me-down uniforms rather than new ones made in sweatshops.

Bottled water sales have fallen. Garden centres have reported a 10 per cent rise in the sales of vegetable seeds in the past 12 months. People are saving money by growing their own potatoes and carrots. They are turning off their central heating for a few more months of the year and ditching their second car rather than buying an electric runaround. And instead of carbon-offsetting their holidays, they are simply going on fewer of them. It's the downturn that has made greenery look unappetising - but it may yet prove to do more than anything to save the planet.

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Enviromania

For years, hyperactive environmentalists have burned votive candles to the spirit in the sky, hoping she'd levitate energy prices high enough to make alternatives to oil economically feasible. That day has come. Result: The oil has hit the fan. With gasoline over $4 and with life as they love it in the suburbs being shut down, did people call for the windmills? Nope. A heavy majority want to drill the bejeezus out of anywhere in America we can find familiar black slop.

No one has been hit harder by this unexpected truth than Nancy Pelosi and her green brigades. Fearful of an up-or-down vote on drilling for oil in, of all places, our own country, the Pelosi House and Harry Reid's Senate shut down Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner calls drilling the greatest issue Republicans have had in his political lifetime. A party flat on its back is ready to run on oil pumps. Why stop there?

Republicans shouldn't settle for making the world safe for SUVs. What's going on here is about more than $4 gasoline. When Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats spent a week holding the people's chamber under house arrest, they made plain a political vulnerability beyond drilling. To achieve greenhouse gas goals in the out-years, they are willing to risk a slowdown now in the American economy. How else can you interpret what happened this week? These Democrats aren't environmentalists. They're enviromaniacs.

An environmentalist with two feet on the planet is someone who admits that fixing what economists call "externalities," such as air pollution or climate effects, requires a balance between those goals and protecting the productive economy. An enviromaniac is the sort of person who would say: "Breaking our oil addiction . . . will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy."

The complete transformation of our economy? So said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in his major energy statement this Monday. Though the speech had hedged bows to oil, coal and nuclear, it was overwhelmingly a Goreian jeremiad about "building" a new economy on a promise called renewables.

"We can see shuttered factories open their doors to manufacturers that sell wind turbines and solar panels that will power our homes and our businesses," he said. "We can watch as millions of new jobs with good pay and good benefits are created." This will "meet our moral obligations to future generations."

Whoa. "Millions" of new jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, and this is to "meet our moral obligations?" Virtue aside, here's the biggest problem with Sen. Obama and Democratic enviromania: It's a risky roll of the dice with the U.S. economy. The economy we've got works. We know that carbon makes the U.S. economy run like a Swiss watch (transportation, distribution, production, commuting). The bet between carbon inputs and growing American outputs is virtually 1:1.

Mr. Obama and his Democratic colleagues in Congress want a "complete transformation" of an already successful economy. Not partial. complete. Can any of them say what the odds are that all this economic activity, including the nation's electrical grid, will work as well with their new fuels? Assuredly, growth's odds aren't as good as the ones we have now. Sen. Obama: "I will not pretend we can achieve [my goals] without cost or without sacrifice." Might this mean foregoing some GDP for five to 10 years? "Growth" appears in Mr. Obama's speech only to describe the "clean energy sector."

The problem with Democratic enviromania is that it's uncoupled from the realities of a nation whose economy has to compete now with the Chinas and Indias of the world, whose high growth rates use proven energy sources.

Republicans this fall should push their argument beyond drilling. Drilling is mainly a proxy for one's understanding of the U.S. economy. The Democrats and Mr. Obama showed this week they are so in thrall to Al Gore's big climate bet that they'd risk having a slow-growth economy. The GOP should run on High Growth America as a better bet than Democratic Slow Growth. Instead of enviro-messianism, they should propose a drill-to-transition for whatever energy source can prove it works at a nonsacrificial price -- shale, coal gasification, nuclear, solar or some combination. (Windmill farms are a pox on the land.)

Don't be oil-industry deniers. Mr. Obama and Rep. Pelosi want to hammer and punish the only players on the field who actually know how to put massive amounts of energy on the grid. Don't we want them using their resources to drill here, rather than off in some godforsaken place producing gushers of cash for people who want to pound us into a hole? We need Smart Oil on our side for at least 10 years. Democrats this week chose the prayer of alternative energy over proven prosperity. They've handed prosperity in the here-and-now to the Republicans. Run with it.

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Brainwashing the children with lies

Stalin's Young Pioneers? The Hitler Youth? Warmism is just another socialist cult

As the climate change challenge becomes increasingly worrying, children of HSBC staff were given hands-on tips on the best environmental practices for a sustainable lifestyle.

The initiative is part of HSBC's Global Climate Partnership Programme, a $100 million initiative spread over five years.

Children between the ages of seven and 12 learned about the causes of global warming and its impact on earth. The emphasis of the presentation, prepared by HSBC staff who received training during a two-week field trip to Oxford, in the UK, was on alternative energy and ways to improve fuel efficiency, good practices to reduce water consumption and proper disposal of waste through reduction, reusage and recycling.

"Children are the best ambassadors of the environment; their love of nature and care for its creatures prompt them to go to great lengths to ensure harm is avoided, making them the best guardians of our planet for the future," said Ray Cassar, participant of the Climate Partnership Programme in Malta who conducted the educational session at HSBC's Call Centre in Swatar. "Children absorb what is good and bad and are usually the ones to point out, in the family, at school and in the community, behaviour which is unfavourable to the environment."

The HSBC Climate Partnership programme is about pledging time and resources of HSBC staff to get involved and do their own bit against the urgent threat of climate change. As part of this initiative, HSBC staff are making presentations in schools, including summer clubs, associations involved in community work and local councils.

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Guardian Scientist (and leftist activist) Watson Predicts 4C Rise

Today's headline grabber is part-time scientist, part-time Obama and leftwing activist, Professor Robert Watson. Watson's latest prediction, in a long line of alarmist climate statements, is that the world is set for a four degree C rise in temperatures unless the world listens to him and stops that very nasty carbon emitting business.

Now you might think that yet another doom and gloom prediction from any 'scientific' source would elicit a yawn from most people - not least given the latest cycle of temperature rise ended 10 years ago and that global temperatures are already dropping and set to drop further. Not so the climate alarmist's intrepid flag-waver, The Guardian, which broke today's scary story. Bravely sidestepping the facts and evidence once again it has given a scaremongering platform designed to set the mass media sheep running - not to mention spiking sales. But why Robert Watson?

Well Watson is no ordinary scientist. He makes a living from climate alarmism not only in his taxpayer-funded 'laboratory' but also, in the cause of leftwing politics in the US and UK. The Guardian describes him as a 'chief advisor to the UK government'. Prior to that, of course, he was a senior advisor to Bill Clinton's administration, was a would-be chairman of the alarmist IPCC (till the Vast-Rightwing Conspiracy 'conspired' to unseat him) - who now spends his off-duty hours writing op-eds to get that Obarmy chap elected. Spot the politics here? Are we talking 'fair and balanced'?

Well Watson likes to do more than talk science in his op-eds. Take the one he wrote in May for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel papers in May in which he attempted to re-write history. In his 'politically neutral piece 'Obama Needs Support of Jewish Voters' Watson claimed that Harry Truman was not, as history has it, a blatant anti-semite at all, but was, in fact, sensitive to the "plight of the Jews". As this outraged Jewish reader noted, Truman was in fact an antisemite. And Truman's autobiography makes it perfectly clear that Truman "...was proud of the fact that not one Jew had ever set foot into the homes he shared with his wife."

Good to know The Guardian has maintained its usual high standard of journalistic integrity via such an a-political, 'scientific' source. But wait! Watson ... The Guardian ... Bill Clinton ... Obarmy ... scaremongering for a living ... re-writing anti-semitic history ... could it all just be a Vast Leftwing Conspiracy? Perhaps I'll write a letter to The Guardian ...

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7 August, 2008

Hertzberg refutes the jug man on Global Warming?

"Krug" is German/Yiddish for "jug". Krugman Excerpt: "The only way we're going to get action, I'd suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral. [.] Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who has been driving much of the recent high-level debate, offers some sobering numbers. Surveying a wide range of climate models, he argues that, over all, they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit). As Mr. Weitzman points out, that's enough to "effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it." It's sheer irresponsibility not to do whatever we can to eliminate that threat".

Dr. Martin Hertzberg is a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry. His letter to the jug man follows:

Dear Prof Krugman:

I have generally found myself in strong agreement with most of the opinions expressed in your columns dealing with politics and the economy. I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a scientist. In your interview with Keith Obermann last night, there was an implication that somehow those of us who are human-caused global warming skeptics were all supported by big-oil money. In the 20 years that I have been studying this issue and expressing my skepticism, I have never received a cent from either big-oil or the government to study the problem. You failed to mention the 50 billion being spent by governments to finance research that supports the human-caused global warming theory. In this morning's article "Can This Planet Be Saved", you simply regurgitated the typical fear-mongering hysteria that the Gore-IPCC-Hansen clique promulgate without any serious consideration of the fact that that hysteria is based on half-baked computer models that have never been verified and that are totally our of touch with reality. I am sure that as an Economist you have seen similar econometric models that are similarly out of touch with reality coming from the likes of "the Chicago boys" or the Heritage Foundation.

I have taken the liberty of attaching copies of Alexander Cockburn's articles that appeared in the Nation Magazine last year. They are based, in part, on my studies of the issue. Also attached is a recent talk I gave on the subject. It has been published in the Australian web-site: http://www.carbon-sense.com. Also attached is a list of web-sites of global warming skeptics.

I can only hope that you will read the attachments with an open mind and consider the possibility that you might need an informed and objective science adviser before making any further pronouncements on the subject. I will also forward under separate cover, a letter I sent to the President of the American Physical Society about their treatment of a well known global warming sceptic, Lord Monckton. If you might recall, he had routinely advertized in the N. Y. Times, challenging Gore to a debate on the issue, which Gore ignored. You can always tell the difference between a propagandist and a scientist. If a scientist has a theory, he looks diligently for facts that might contradict his theory so that he can test its validity or refine it. The propagandist on the other hand selects only those facts that agree with his theory and dutifully ignores those facts that contradict it.

Source

Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation and serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee, also criticizes the jug man. Excerpt:

Krugman advocates: painting those who do not agree with him as not just wrong but immoral. That is to say, not just wrong, but evil. Krugman, limited in imagination as he is, cannot conceive that anybody could possibly disagree with him, nor look at the same data and come to a different conclusion. People that fail to accord with him are not just making a mistake, they are being mischievous. Krugman is not the first to suffer from this kind of delusion. La Shawn Barber has written an article called Is Climate Change. Racist? He looks at liberal Congressman James Clyburn, who has written a report echoing the old joke: "World Ends Due to Global Warming: Poor Blacks Hardest Hit." The gist is that those who disagree with the end-time visions risk being called a racist, a frightening term in today's USA. University of Amsterdam "philosopher" Marc Davidson has even written a peer-reviewed paper in a prominent journal alluding that those who disagree with Weitzman-like claims are no better than slave holders (no, I'm not kidding).




Another scientist reverses view, now climate SKEPTIC - 'I was appalled at how flimsy the case really is'

The article below was written by Dr. Roger W. Cohen, an American Physical Society (APS) fellow who earned a doctorate in physics, worked in the electronics industry and retired in 2003 from ExxonMobil as manager of strategic planning. That Exxon connection will give the Warmists a horn or two

I have been involved in climate change for nearly 30 years. In 1980, a few of us in the research organization of a large multinational energy corporation realized that the climate issue was likely to affect our future business environment. We subsequently started the only industrial research activity in the basic science of climate change. The move was justified by the fact that the best way to really understand a complex technical issue is to actually work in the area, interacting with other scientists. I have supervised climate scientists working in the area of climate change and have followed the area closely. Over the years our researchers have served as authors of key IPCC report chapters. I would like to share some perspectives with you.

I retired four years ago, and at the time of my retirement I was well convinced, as were most technically trained people, that the IPCC's case for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is very tight. However, upon taking the time to get into the details of the science, I was appalled at how flimsy the case really is. I was also appalled at the behavior of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it. In particular I am referring to the arrogance; the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defense of bogus science, and the politicization of the IPCC process and the science process itself.

At this point there is little doubt that the IPCC position is seriously flawed in its central position that humanity is responsible for most of the observed warming of the last third of the 20th century, and in its projections for effects in the 21st century. Here are five key reasons for this:

1. The recorded temperature rise is neither exceptional nor persistent. For example, the earth has not warmed since around 1997 and may in fact be in a cooling trend. Also, in particular, the Arctic and contiguous 48 states are at about the same temperature as they were in the 1930s. Also in particular the rate of global warming in the early 20th century was as great as the last third of the century, and no one seriously ascribes the early century increase to greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Predictions of climate models are demonstrably too high, indicating a significant overestimate of the climate sensitivity (the response of the earth to increases in the incident radiation caused by atmospheric greenhouse gases). This is because the models, upon which the IPCC relies for their future projections, err in their calculations of key feedback and driving forces in the climate system.

3. Natural effects have been and continue to be important contributors to variations in the earth's climate, especially solar variability and decadal and multidecadal ocean cycles.

4. The recorded land-based temperature increase data are significantly exaggerated due to widespread errors in data gathering and inadequately corrected contamination by human activity.

5. The multitude of environmental and ecological effects blamed on climate change to date is either exaggerated or nonexistent. Examples are claims of more frequent and ferocious storms, accelerated melting of terrestrial icecaps, Mount Kilimanjaro's glacier, polar bear populations, and expansive mosquito-borne diseases. All of these and many others have been claimed and ascribed to global warming and by extension to human activity, and all are bogus or highly exaggerated. I would be pleased to provide details on any of these five key reasons. Many others can do so as well.

As contrary evidence has accumulated, proponents of strong AGW have begun to display signs of cognitive dissonance. The famed social psychologist Leon Festinger, developer of the concept of cognitive dissonance, conducted early studies of the phenomenon. One study looked at people who bought bomb shelters during the cold war. It was found that such people tended to exaggerate the threat of nuclear war, and nothing could dissuade them. Good news about relaxed tensions and peace initiatives was rejected. Such developments brought about cognitive dissonance, bizarrely almost as if they were invested in nuclear war. The psychological model is that their belief system became part of their identity, their self, and information at odds with that belief system became an attack on the self. This helps explain why such people can be resistant to information that would be judged positive on a rational basis. Festinger's book, When Prophecy Fails, tells of a group of doomsday believers who predicted the end of the world on a particular date. When that didn't happen, the believers became even more determined they were right. And they become even louder and proselytized even more aggressively after the disconfirmation. So we can expect ever more extreme, opaque, and strange defenses from proponents as evidence continues to mount. For example we are now told that even cooling fits in with global warming.

Having said all this, it does not mean that there is no threat or that we should not debate some kind of action to control atmospheric CO2. It does mean that the case for immediate draconian measures that will have the effect or restricting world economic growth is poor. It does mean that the climate is unpredictable, even with modern tools, and this implies that continuing to load the atmosphere poses imponderable risks to terrestrial life. I believe that the way to a solution lies with new technology for both energy supply and for directly controlling net emissions. In this regard the role of governments is not to enact restrictive economic measures via market interventions, or to choose the winners in a technology race. Its proper role is to encourage the development and deployment of new technology through direct funding of R&D and through tax incentives for industries that research, develop, and deploy such technology.

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The Green Hornet

Al Gore said the other day that "the future of human civilization" depends on giving up fossil fuels within a decade -- and was acclaimed as a prophet by the political class. Obviously boring reality doesn't count for much these days. Even so, when Barack Obama wheels out an energy agenda nearly as grandiose as Mr. Gore's, shouldn't it receive at least some media scrutiny?

On Monday, Mr. Obama said that the U.S. must "end the age of oil in our time," with "real results by the end of my first term in office." This, he said, will "take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy." Mark that one down as the understatement of the year. Maybe Mr. Obama really is the Green Hornet, or some other superhero of his current political myth.

The Senator calls for $150 billion over 10 years to achieve "energy independence," with elevated subsidies for renewable alternatives and efficiency programs. He also says he'll "leverage billions more in private capital to build a new energy economy," euphemistically referring to his climate plan to tax and regulate greenhouse gases. Every President since Nixon has declared "energy independence," as Mr. Obama noted. But this time, he says, things will change.

They won't. And not because of "the old politics," or whatever. Currently, alternative sources -- wind, solar, biomass, hydroelectric and geothermal -- provide less than 7% of yearly domestic consumption. Throw out hydro and geothermal, and it's only 4%. For the foreseeable future, renewables simply cannot provide the scale and volume of energy needed to meet growing U.S. demand, which is expected to increase by 20% over the next two decades. Even with colossal taxpayer subsidies, renewables probably can't even slow the rate of growth of carbon-based fuel consumption, much less replace it.

Take wind power, which has grown rapidly though still only provides about two-thirds of 1% of all U.S. electricity. The Energy Department optimistically calculates that ramping up merely to 20% by 2030 would require more than $2 trillion and turbines across the Midwest "wind corridor," plus multiple offshore installations. And we'll need a new "transmission superhighway system" of more than 12,000 miles of electric lines to connect the wind system to population centers. A mere $150 billion won't cut it. Mr. Obama also didn't mention that this wind power will be more expensive than traditional sources like coal.

Wind, too, is intermittent: It isn't always blowing and can't be accessed on demand when people need electricity. Since there's no cost-effective way to store large amounts of electricity, wind requires "spinning reserve," or nonalternative baseload power to avoid blackouts. That baseload power is now provided largely by coal, nuclear and natural gas, and wind can't displace much. The same problem afflicts solar energy -- now one-hundredth of 1% of net U.S. electric generation. One of the top uses of solar panels is to heat residential swimming pools.

Mr. Obama also says he wants to mandate that all new cars and trucks are "flexible fuel" vehicles, meaning that they can run on higher concentrations of corn ethanol mixed with gasoline, or second-generation biofuels if those ever come onto the market. Like wind and solar, this would present major land use problems: According to credible estimates, land areas larger than the size of Texas would need to be planted with fuel feedstocks to displace just half the oil America imports every day. Meanwhile, the economic distortions caused by corn ethanol -- such as higher food prices -- have been bad enough.

And yet there's more miracle work to do. Mr. Obama promises to put at least one million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2015. That's fine if consumers want to buy them. But even if technical battery problems are overcome, this would only lead to "fuel switching" -- if cars don't use gasoline, the energy still has to come from somewhere. And the cap-and-trade program also favored by Mr. Obama would effectively bar new coal plants, while new nuclear plants are only now being planned after a 30-year hiatus thanks to punishing regulations and lawsuits.

Problems like these are the reality of "alternative" energy, and they explain why every "energy independence" plan has faltered since the 1970s. But just because Mr. Obama's plan is wildly unrealistic doesn't mean that a program of vast new taxes, subsidies and mandates wouldn't be destructive. The U.S. has a great deal invested in fossil fuels not because of a political conspiracy or because anyone worships carbon but because other sources of energy are, right now, inferior.

Consumption isn't rising because of wastefulness. The U.S. produces more than twice as much GDP today per unit of energy as it did in the 1950s, yet energy use has risen threefold. That's because energy use is tethered to growth, and the economy continues to innovate and expand. Mr. Obama seems to have other ideas.

Source




Hawaiian chill: Maui breaks record for coldest temps

The return of the trade winds should temper the temperature extremes that occurred around the state over the weekend, but it will be increasing the wildfire threat, Maui weather analyst Glenn James said Tuesday. Even as a brush fire broke out at Pulehu on Tuesday (see related story below), a fire- weather watch was issued giving notice of an increased fire hazard. "The National Weather Service issued a watch, which means we all have to be very, very careful about not lighting any fires right now," he said.

It may appear to be an abrupt change in conditions, after Maui County experienced a record low 64 degrees on Sunday that combined with steady afternoon showers to provide another near record 65 degrees on Monday, before the daytime temperature zipped up to a high of 91 degrees that afternoon. It was all brought on by a low-pressure trough that was sliding north of Kauai, cutting off the normal trade wind flows, said James, senior weather analyst with the Pacific Disaster Center. "That trough has moved off to the west and opened the floodgates for a stronger brand of trade winds. At Maalaea (Tuesday) afternoon, we had 40 mile-per-hour gusts. We should be having another few days of stronger-than-normal trade winds," he said....

James, who produces the www.hawaiiweathertoday.com Web site and "Maui Weather Today" at 7:45 a.m. Monday to Friday on cable Channel 55, said the temperature fluctuations over the weekend were the result of the slack winds, which allowed cold air to drain from higher elevations of Haleakala and the West Maui Mountains, while clear skies Monday allowed more ground heating. The cloud cover and showers that eased the drought conditions in Maui County on Sunday were the remnants of Hurricane Genevieve, a tropical cyclone that dissipated before it reached Hawaii but remained a soggy air mass as it moved over the islands.

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CLIMATE, CLIMATE, CLIMATE IN AUSTRALIA

The looming costs of Prime Minister Rudd's climate mania are focusing a lot of minds in Australia at the moment. Three recent climate articles from Australia below

Emission Trading Scheme paints Rudd Government into a Corner

Lord Christopher Monckton has written to Australia's Climate Change minister Penny Wong warning that pressing ahead with an Emissions Trading scheme will see Labor thrown out of office.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new Labor Government in only 9 months has painted itself into a corner with its proposed Carbon Reduction Scheme that it may never get out of. In it's first 9 months in office Australia's economic condition has deteriorate form arguably the strongest it's ever been to talk in todays press of it quickly sliding into recession. Fuel prices, Interest rates and food prices have all soared whilst consumer spending, house prices, private and business borrowings and confidence has plummeted.

While Australians were flush with wealth and money they might have been keen for the good of the environment too endure the extra costs (read tax) that an emissions trading scheme would impose on them. However no populace that is struggling financially to pay a mortgage will accept an environment tax with very dubious environmental benefits. Mr Rudd may well learn first hand that committing to a scheme that hobbles ones own economic growth is indeed only the prerogative of a wealthy society.

He may learn why it is folly for him to believe that he can ever convince developing nations like China & India with their millions of people just emerging from a lifetime of poverty to stymie their economic growth with a carbon emissions scheme.

Increasing world wide media coverage that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are linked to climate change coupled with the fact that whatever actions we take as a nation are meaningless unless the big emitters like China, India and the US take similar action is starting to permeate into the Australians conscious. In fact if we were to cut our emissions to zero tomorrow China's growth in extra emissions alone would make up our CO2 reduction from the global balance in just 270 days.

Lord Christopher Monckton is chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute. Below is a copy of an email he sent to Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.

Dear Senator Wong,

Greetings from Scotland! One of your constituents, Mr. John Cribbes, has asked me to drop you a short email about emissions trading and "global warming".

I have recently conducted some detailed research into the mathematics behind the conclusions of the UN climate panel on the single question that matters in the climate debate - by how much will the world warm in response to adding CO2 to the atmosphere? My research, published in Physics and Society, a technical newsletter of the American Physical Society this month, demonstratres that the IPCC's values for the three key parameters whose product is climate sensitivity are based on only four papers - not the 2,500 that are often mentioned.

Those four papers are unrepresentative of the literature, in which a low and harmless climate sensitivity is now the consensus.

Therefore I should recommend extreme caution before any emissions-trading scheme is put in place. Such schemes will damage Australia's competitiveness, perhaps fatally; they are prone to corruption in that they incentivize over-claiming by both parties to each trade and by the regulator; they are addressing a non-problem; and, even if the problem were real (as a few largely-politicized scientists persist in maintaining), adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper than emissions trading or any other attempt at mitigating the quantities of carbon dioxide that we are (harmlessly) adding to the atmosphere.

Therefore I strongly urge you to reconsider your support for this or any emissions-trading scheme. I have read the Australian Government's paper on the proposed scheme, and the science in it is, alas, largely nonsense.

Politically, of course, the fatal damage that emissions trading will do to the Australian economy will greatly favour the enemies of the free West, which is why I, as an ally, have locus standi to approach you.

Climatically, your emissions-trading scheme will not make any significant difference. There are many other environmental problems that are real: I recommend that the Australian Government should tackle those.

As for the climate, it is a non-problem, and the correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Similar warnings are being sent to other legislators worldwide by those of us - now probably in the majority among the scientific community, not that one should do science by head-count - who have studied climate sensitivity and have found the UN's analysis lamentably wanting.

The UN's predictions are already being falsified by events: global temperatures have been falling for seven years, and not one of the climate models relied upon so heavily and so unwisely by the IPCC predicted that turn of events. If you introduce an emissions-trading scheme, when it transpires that the scheme and its associated economic damage had never been necessary - and it will, and sooner than you think - you and your party will be flung from office, perhaps forever. It is, therefore, in the long-term vested interest of your party to think again.

Monckton of Brenchley

Source

Global Warming Religion Eroding Human Rights

Have you ever noticed that the champions of global warming are not scientists. Al Gore (ex politician), Nicholas Stern (economist), Ross Garnaut (economist) Kevin Rudd (diplomat / politician). Oh it's it a fact that 2,500 ICCP scientist have formed a consensus that humans are causing global warming. However Arthur B. Robinson, president and professor of chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, is one of 31,000 scientists who have signed a petition to disagree.

"Robinson said that in recent years the U.N. and a group of 600 scientists, representing less than one percent of the scientific population, reached a "consensus" that global warming is happening. This has never been done before, Robinson insists.

Dennis Avery, Director for the Center of Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, agrees with Robinson. "Nobody can do science by a committee. You do science by testing," said Avery. "To me it is appalling that an international organization of the stature of the U.N. would ignore the evidence of past climate changing."

The signers of Robinson's petition, including 9,000 Ph.Ds, all have one thing in common. They believe that human rights are being taken away.

Thats an interesting proposition and one that Australian Farmers have already experienced first hand. Arthur Herman a historian and author in a great article in today's Australian agrees:

"IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle. The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.

Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, describes how even in civilised societies the mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions when real worries are missing. As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, like today's greenhouse gases, people try to propitiate them by ceremonies, observations, mortifications, sacrifices such as Earth Day and banning plastic bags and petrol-driven lawnmowers.

Fear and ignorance, Hume concludes, are the true source of superstition. They lead a blind and terrified public to embrace any practice, however absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends."

Now think about the Australian farmers who have had their property rights taken from them with the tree clearing bans so Australia could meet its Kyoto obligations, without a cent of compensation!

Both articles go into detail how human rights will be sacrificed to the alter of the climate change religion. Well worth a read.

Source

Bullsh*t Watch: The winner is Graham Readfearn

In the tradition set by the Rudd Government with Fuel Watch, Grocery Watch, Water Watch we are launching Bullsh*t Watch. Todays Bullsh*t award goes to Brisbane's Courier Mail Journalist Graham Readfearn for his article: "Call to Act by Pioneer on Climate".

American Scientist Professor Gene Likens is speaking at the invitation-only presentation at Griffith University's Nathan campus. The presentation is on problems being faced around the globe with drought and climate change. He and other like minded people, that is climate change believers will be delivering their message to policymakers and politician including Queensland Minister for Climate Change Andrew McNamara, National Water Commissioner Chloe Munro and water commissioners from Queensland and NSW.

"Does the climate change problem exist? Yes," Professor Likens said. "The scientific consensus is so strong and so universal - there are just a handful of doubters on this. "Yet (those doubters) get such high media attention and a lot of support."

That statement lit up my "Bullshit" metre straight away. Would the "handful of Doubters" the good professor is referring too be the 31,072 AMERICAN Scientist including 9,021 PhD's who signed this petition:



The Courier Mail's Graham Readfearn would have to live under a rock to have not know that this petition exists. But wait - it gets better, turns out Graham Readfearn is none other than the author of The Courier Mails own Green Blog. It is a classic. His profile reads -

"Graham Readfearn

Environment blogger Graham Readfearn sorts the green from the green-wash and the eco from the no-go - one climate-friendly posting at a time. Green news, views and the odd shot-down eco-skeptic."

This guy is a rabid greenie, supporter of WWF (World Wildlife Foundation), Greenpeace etc, just have a look at his first article - 100 months left or try this classic - How much is enough - Eco-sinner? No mention in the paper's byline that Graham Readfearn is a rabid one eyed greenie - no the bi-line would have the average reader believe that is is just an unbiased major newspaper reporter, searching for the truth and writing a balanced article. Apparantly Not. Shame on the Courier.

What the good Readfearn also forgets to tell us is that the good professor Likens is an ecologist - not a climatologist.

Source

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

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6 August, 2008

APS Paper on Global Warming Debate by Atmospheric scientist Dr. Blick

Below is a preview of a paper submitted to the American Physical Society for publication. The preview below does not include graphics or reference citation details. It is reproduced with permission from Prof. Blick. The author is retired Air Force atmospheric scientist Dr. Edward F Blick [edblick@cox.net] Professor of Meteorology and Engineering at University of Oklahoma. He has 54 years' scientific experience. He is the author of 150 publications in engineering, meteorology, and cardiology, and has also written two engineering textbooks. He is the co-developer of a medical patent, and is the inventor of a new type of windmill.

Since Prof. Blick argues that manmade global warming is a hoax, the probablity of the paper being published in its intended outlet seems low. Full copies of the paper (complete with graphics and references) are now in the hands of many people (including myself), however so it will not sink without trace

Abstract

World temperature records show no evidence of anthropogenic global warming ("AGW"). Solar activity in the late 20th century was extremely high. Atmospheric CO2 levels rose as the sea surface warmed. Henry's Solubility Law, with mass balances of carbon and its isotopes, show the total increase in atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial times is less than 4%. Burning all our remaining fossil fuels, cannot double the CO2, but only increase it by 20%. Beck cataloged 90,000 chemical measurements of CO2 in the 1800s, some as high as 470 ppm (greater than the current Mauna Loa value of 385 ppm). These data exposed as false the UN IPCC's 280-ppm ice core values during the 1800s. IPCC's ice core measurements of CO2 were incorrect owing to their inability to correct for problems with gas solubility and the extreme pressures in glaciers. Not man but nature rules the climate.

Introduction

The recent American Physical Society (APS) debate on anthropogenic global warming was welcomed by many like myself, who believe "global warming" to be exaggerated. I have never seen any convincing evidence for it. The paper by Hafemeister and Schwartz depended upon petitio principii, in that the emissivity value was set to produce the desired climate sensitivity. The considerable evidence presented by Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in his APS article "Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered" was convincing. The rebuttal by Dr. Smith was not.

This paper addresses two key elements in the APS global warming debate: are, first, the scientific credibility of the UN, and, secondly, the truth about the minimal increase in the amount of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2.

The UN

The UN set up the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference entitled "The Earth Summit". It was attended by Vice President Al Gore. At this conference Maurice Strong, a UN advisor, stated, "The Earth Summit will play an important role in reforming and strengthening the UN as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance."

Al Gore is a politician, not a scientist. He had two college natural science courses. He made a "D" in one, and a "C+" in the other. He made an "F" on his College Board physics exam and a "D" in chemistry. Gore ducks all challenges to debate (including Christopher Monckton) on AGW.

Strong and the UN set up the 1997 Kyoto conference on global warming. All countries were urged to sign a treaty to reduce their CO2 output in order to save the planet. China, India and the U.S. refused. Most of Europe joined, but have done little in the way of lowering their CO2 output. The National Review magazine, Sept. 1, 1997 quoted Strong: "The only way of saving the world may be for industrial civilization to collapse, deliberately seek poverty, and set levels of mortality". We're starting to see the collapse of U.S. trucking and airline industry as our government limits oil drilling. Timothy Wirth, former president of the United Nations Foundation, stated: "We have to ride the theory of Global Warming even if it is wrong." Richard Benedict, former advisor to Kofi Annan stated: "A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no evidence of global warming." In the words of H.L. Mencken: "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

In 1988, the UN politicians set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC). There was no scientific evidence then or now of any significant AGW. Sir John Houghton, the first chairman of the UN's IPCC stated: "Unless we announce disaster, no one will listen." Here is the summary the scientists wrote for the 1995 IPCC Draft Report:

1) None of the studies have shown any clear evidence of climate changes due to greenhouse gases.

2) No study has positively attributed any climate change to anthropogenic causes.

3) Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate are reduced.

The UN removed all three of its scientists' conclusions, inserting the following text in the final 1995 Summary Report for policy-makers: The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.

Many of the IPCC scientists quit, and threatened the UN with a lawsuit in order to have their names removed from the IPCC final report.

The UN's method of preparing IPCC reports is non-standard. They first publish a "Summary Report for Policy-makers". Then several months later they publish the Scientific Report so as to assure its consistency with the Summary Report. After the 1995 IPCC report, this procedure was repeated in 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports.

Temperature

In the United States, the hottest years of the 20th century were in the 1930s (Fig.1). Twenty-four states had their high temperature records set in the 1930s. Only seventeen had their temperature records set in last 50 years of the 20th century! Where is the fingerprint of anthropogenic global warming?

During the 20th century the Earth warmed ~0.7 0C. The warming culminated at about the same time as the solar Grand Maximum during the 70 years centered on the mid-1960s (Fig.2). Similarly, astronomers discovered that Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto all warmed up in the 20th century. (Archibald, 2008). Since 1998, admittedly a strong El Nino year, "global warming" has ceased. We've had global cooling from reduced sun spot activity (Archibald, 2008).

The oceans "breathe" carbon dioxide in and out with cooling or heating. CO2 is less soluble in water as it warms and more soluble as it cools. The warming during the 20th century caused the oceans to emit more CO2 into the atmosphere (Endersbee, 2008, Fig. 4).

A miniscule amount of global heating of ~0.5 W/m2 is due to an increase of 2% to 4% of atmospheric CO2, owing to the burning of fossil fuels since the late 1800s (Segalstad, 1996). This corresponds to a tiny 0.50 C rise in temperature, using the climate sensitivity parameter of ~1 0C per W/m2 (Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997). This climate sensitivity parameter of ~1 0C per W/m2, adopted by the UN, is an order of magnitude greater than eight natural experiments (Idso 1998). It results in exaggerated predictions of future global temperatures.

Archer (2008) assumed a rise in atmospheric CO2 of 380 to 420 ppmv in the next 20 years. Using the University of Chicago's ModtranS facility, he obtained a 0.4 W/m2 increase in global warming. Using Idso's 0.1 0C per W/m2 sensitivity value, he predicted a 0.040C increase in temperature due to the CO2 greenhouse effect.

In 1995, the UN IPCC report included a global temperature anomaly chart shown in Fig.3. This chart agreed with hundreds of scientific papers which dealt with this Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age which followed. From about 900 to 1350 AD, the Earth was approximately 20 C warmer than now. The Vikings colonized Greenland, and many of the great cathedrals were built in Europe. The Little Ice Age which followed lasted about 400 years (Soon & Baliunas, 2003). At the principal Viking settlement of Hvalsey in SW Greenland, the bodies of the Viking colonists are now buried under Greenland's permafrost. Yet, six years after this correct chart (Fig.3), the UN's 2001 IPCC report featured a new, radically different "hockey stick" chart (Fig. 5). It showed essentially a flat temperature for the 1000 years prior to the 20th century, followed by a rapid rise of earth's temperature in the 20th century. The UN blamed the rise on AGW. Subsequently, however, McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) found statistical discrepancies that led to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences that, while finding the hockey-stick no more than "plausible", described it as having "a validation skill not significantly different from zero". A report by three statisticians for the US House of Representatives (Wegman et al., 2005), also found the graph unfit for its purpose. To this day, dozens of papers from all over the world attest to the existence of the mediaeval warm period, with temperatures up to 3.75 oC greater than the present in some places.

CO2: a natural trace gas essential to all life on Earth

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is the gas of life for plants, man, and animals. All plant life is sustained by photosynthesis, where CO2 plus water plus chlorophyll plus the Sun's energy form carbohydrates plus Oxygen. Humans and animals breathe in Oxygen and exhale CO2.

If atmospheric CO2 drops as low as 220 ppm, plants get sick. They die at 160 ppm. In a field of corn on a sunny day, unless wind currents stir up the air, all of the CO2 is consumed within one meter of the ground in 5 minutes. (Personal communication, Daryl Smika, Plant Physiologist, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture), In order to increase their yield, commercial greenhouse owners increase the CO2 levels to 600 - 1000 ppm. According to the Mauna Loa observatory the present atmospheric CO2 is about 385 ppmv, but in times past it was as high as 2450 ppmv. (Jaworoski, 1992a, 1992b). In the Cambrian era the atmospheric concentration of CO2 reached ~7000 ppmv, 18 times today's concentration (IPCC, 2001).

The most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Its mass is 54 times greater than CO2. Dr. Reid Bryson, former director of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, says: "The first 30 feet of water vapor absorbs 80% of the earth's heat radiation. You can go outside and spit and have the effect as doubling CO2!"

150 years ago, the atmospheric CO2 contained 700 Gt of carbon (1 Gt = 1 billion tons), and the earth contained 7000 Gt of carbon in the form of fossil fuels. It is estimated that man has burned 1000 Gt of the original 7000 Gt. (Segalstad 1998). For water, at normal temperature, Henry's Law of Solubility dictates there will be 50 parts of CO2 in solution, for one part of gaseous CO2 above the water. Experimental measurements have shown that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 5-10 years. The UN, using a confused and widely-criticized definition of residence time, says it is 50-200 years. Hence today, after 150 years, the amount of CO2 added by man to the atmosphere is (1/50) x1000 = 20 Gt, and the increase in atmospheric CO2 is (700+20)/700 = 1.03 or a 3% increase!! (Segalstad, 1998). The UN, assuming 278 ppmv as the pre-industrial concentration said the increase is 21%.

Segalstad (1998) developed an alternative method of determining how much of the atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuels is by an isotopic mass balance of Carbon 12, C-12, and the heavier isotope Carbon 13, C-13. During photosynthesis more of the C-12 is absorbed by the plant than C-13. Ratios between C-12 and C-13 stable isotopes are commonly expressed as in permil by a so-called delta-13-C notation multiplied by 1000. CO2 from combustion of fossil fuel have delta -13-C values of (-26 permil). Natural CO2 has a delta-12-C value of( -7 perm). Keeling (1989) reported a 1988-measured atmospheric delta-13-C value of (-7.807permil). Using a simple isotopic mass balance equation of [26X +7(1-X) = 7.807] produces an X value of 0.042. Hence the earth's atmospheric CO2 is made up of approximately 4% CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. This is close to the 3% computed above by the alternate mass-consumed method of Segalstad. Revelle & Suess (1957) using Carbon-14 data computed the amount of atmospheric CO2 derived from fossil fuel combustion was 1.2 to 1.73 %. UN IPCC reports assume that, at present, 21% of CO2 is from fossil fuel burning!

Using Henry's Law, and assuming all the remaining 6000 Gt of carbon in our fossil fuel reserves has been burned, the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be [{(7oo+ (7000/50)}/700 =1.2], a 20 % increase over what the atmosphere contained in the mid nineteenth century (Segalstad, 1998). The UN predicts a 170% increase. Even burning all fossil fuels (7000 Gt of carbon) will have no meaningful effect on global climate. CO2 in the atmosphere cannot increase more than 20%. It cannot double!

The Earth receives about 1368 W/m2 of radiative heat from the sun. The total amount of heat withheld is about 146 W/m2, +/- 5 to10 W/m2 due to natural climatic variations. Clouds can reflect up to 50 W/m2 and can absorb up to 30 W/m2 of the solar radiation. Less than 0.5 W/m2 is produced by anthropogenic CO2, making it much smaller than the Earth's average greenhouse effect (water vapor, etc), which varies naturally across the interval [96, 176] W/m2. (Segalstad, 2006)

The total internal energy of the whole ocean is 3.3 x 1027 Joules, about 3500 times greater than the total energy of the entire atmosphere, 9.4 x 1023 joules. The global climate is primarily governed by the enormous heat energy stored in the oceans and the latent heat of melting of the ice caps. From a thermodynamic heat balance, the small amounts of heat generated by anthropogenic CO2 could not possibly cause significant increases in sea level. (Segalstad, 1995; Moerner, 2004)

1400 years of study found approximately 10 inches of difference in sea level between the thermal expansions the Medieval Warm Period and thermal contractions of the Little Ice Age. (van de Plassche, [date?])

The sharpest January-January fall in global temperatures since records began in 1880 occurred between January 2007 and January 2008 (Fig. 6) The drop in temperature was about equal to the net gain in average temperature for the 20th century.

Figure 7 -- Does the atmospheric CO2 correlate with temperature? It should if AGW were correct, for absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. But Figure 7 shows it does not always correlate. Fig. 4 shows CO2 does correlates very well with sea surface temperature.

Figure 8 --The long temperature record at Armagh, Ireland shows a strong correlation of temperature with sunspot-cycle length. The longer the sunspot cycle the colder the temperature. Presently we are in Solar cycle 23 which is 12 ® years long and Archibald (2008) predicts it will last to 13 ® years, though the first sunspot with reversed polarity, indicating the approach of Solar Cycle 24, has now been observed. Solar physicists here and in Russia are predicting globally 20-30 years of cold weather, after the end of Solar Cycle 24, based on the recently-observed slowing of the magnetic convection currents beneath both hemispheres of the Sun.

Figure 9-High temperature records from all the continents and Oceania indicate that all except one high-temperature record occurred before 1943!