How the GW myth is perpetuated

[Walter]

One Cooler Head

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: When new facts emerge, the open-minded tend to alter their views. This is what has happened to a Hungarian environmental scholar whose position on global warming has been transformed.

Until his Damascus moment, Miklos Zagoni, a physicist and environmental researcher, had been touted as his nation's "most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol." But then this activist saw the work of a fellow Hungarian scientist. His world was rocked. "I fell in love" with the theory, he told DailyTech.com.
Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Langley Research Center with three decades of experience, had found that researchers have been repeating a mistake when calculating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on temperatures. We're not scientists, but it looks to us like Miskolczi found that the Earth does a good job of adapting and self-regulating.
As has been noted elsewhere, Miskolczi's theory could explain why the warming that models have been predicting for decades has never materialized.
NASA's response to the new results? It refused to publish them, reports DailyTech.com. Miskolczi quit, citing in his resignation letter a clash between his "idea of the freedom of science" and NASA's "practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."
The space agency isn't inclined to fund research that refutes the Al Gore view that has eaten away reasoned thinking and been adopted uncritically by much of the public.
While cooler heads stand athwart the runaway train of climate-change hysteria and yell stop, other elements continue their tireless efforts to take the world backward.
Just last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development apocalyptically warned the world that it must immediately begin to deal with global warming.
Naturally, the only solution is green taxes and other measures that would choke commerce in developed nations. All that would do is slow the mighty U.S. economy and provide an opportunity for those who believe themselves to have a higher social conscience.
The unfortunate truth is that to many activists, those things are more important than science.

 

[Extrafire]

So, you know what the SST was during the Medieval warm period? It was certainly warmer in some areas, but there's no compelling evidence that says the globe was warmer.

Oh please!:roll: First they tried to pretend there was no MCO or LIA. Then they tried to pretend it was just a localized anomaly. I haven't heard any later explanation. Perhaps they;re trying to just ignore it in the hopes that it will just fade out of public consciousness. The evidence for a warmer globe is overwhelming. Historical evidence in Europe and Asia where historical records have been kept. Geological evidence from all over the world, both northern and southern hemispheres. Your denial is pathetic for one who claims to champion science and fact.

All I said a while back was nothing needed to be "massive" to be a problem. Do you get that?

I did. And all I said was that if mankind could actually change the global temperature to the extent the alarmists claim, that would be a massive accomplishment indeed. Did you get that?

Case in point, thresholds, like the large coral die off I mentioned. And if you want a more complete answer, the warming now is accompanied by other factors, acidification, overfishing and other pollutants, which only exacerbates the problem.

Well we know warming isn't a problem since they've evolved or adapted sufficiently to have survived much warmer temperatures than they're experiencing now. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous. However, if you'd merely said that such things as overfishing and pollution were causing the problems, that I would have accepted without question.

If it's a NASA finding as you said, it's not subject to copyright laws.

But the article containing the information is.

That's not even remotely true. Something tells me you don't remember what we're discussing...I'll give you a hint, it was warming ocean releasing carbon dioxide.

Yes, I know, you claim it's part of a feedback loop. And yes, it's very true. The more CO2 that accumulates in the atmosphere, the (exponentially) less effect any additional CO2 will have.

Anyways, we can actually measure the water vapour feedback from the anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The doubling of CO2 for example brings about more temperature from increased water vapour than it does from direct CO2. That's been validated by satellite data as far back as 1991.

It's also been validated that the increased cloud cover from additional water vapour cancels out that effect.

Tithe. A shot at you for calling me a follower of orthodoxy.

I typed thith. Must have been more tired than I thought. Couldn't even copy from the line directly above where I was typing.:-?

The time line? The current timeline where we have lived for the past 200,000 years, but more succinctly, the past few thousand years. No, of course we aren't. You said natural emissions, that would include volcanoes wouldn't it? Volcanoes do not put out more than we do. That's just plain wrong. Our emissions of CO2 are about 150X that of volcanoes. I bet you don't have a link for that either. Of course coal is in the stream if we go back far enough. This goes back to geology, that coal is millions of years old. So we're helping push the carbon cycle to a time when there was much more carbon in the system. What do you know about the climates during the Cretaceous and the Eocene?

I know that if AGW hypothesis were true we would have had runaway global warming many times in the past. If it didn't happen then, it won't happen now with the little extra we add. Physics doesn't change with epochs.

 

[Tonington]

Oh please!:roll: First they tried to pretend there was no MCO or LIA. Then they tried to pretend it was just a localized anomaly. I haven't heard any later explanation. Perhaps they;re trying to just ignore it in the hopes that it will just fade out of public consciousness. The evidence for a warmer globe is overwhelming. Historical evidence in Europe and Asia where historical records have been kept. Geological evidence from all over the world, both northern and southern hemispheres. Your denial is pathetic for one who claims to champion science and fact.

Right.... Spotty evidence of warming, without any synchronism, and any warm anomalies happening during the time ranging from 800-1300 AD. That's solid stuff Extra. The evidence for warm times is not global, and nor do they coincide on the same time scales.

Since you seem to know this so well, how about you list me those geologic samples, and what period they reference.

I did. And all I said was that if mankind could actually change the global temperature to the extent the alarmists claim, that would be a massive accomplishment indeed. Did you get that?

This line of discussion is pointless.

Well we know warming isn't a problem since they've evolved or adapted sufficiently to have survived much warmer temperatures than they're experiencing now. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous. However, if you'd merely said that such things as overfishing and pollution were causing the problems, that I would have accepted without question.

You have no way of knowing where these species were thousands of years ago. What we know from laboratory experiments is that these species have critical temperature ranges. Species move around all the time, time permitting. That doesn't mean they can't die when a warm spell comes along. You obviously don't know what a threshold value is. I said an unusually warm period caused massive bleaching and death. I'd hazard a guess that it has happened in the past as well. Pollution is playing a part as well. I've told you of acidifying oceans many times now. Do you know what chronic stress means?

But the article containing the information is.

In that case, you are allowed to print quotes. Blogs do this all the time, publications do this all the time. You just cite it. I don't need the whole article.

In any case, this appears to be another impasse.

Yes, I know, you claim it's part of a feedback loop. And yes, it's very true. The more CO2 that accumulates in the atmosphere, the (exponentially) less effect any additional CO2 will have.

Yes, I know it will cause less the more there is. That's a good thing. I said it's a logarithmic scale, which is what you're saying. What I'm discussing with you is what you said when I called it a feedback loop. You said it only would be if it "were the warming agent that the alarmists claim." It still warms when we release it, it's still a feedback loop.

It's also been validated that the increased cloud cover from additional water vapour cancels out that effect.

Proof please.

I typed thith. Must have been more tired than I thought. Couldn't even copy from the line directly above where I was typing.:-?

Meh, it happens.

I know that if AGW hypothesis were true we would have had runaway global warming many times in the past. If it didn't happen then, it won't happen now with the little extra we add. Physics doesn't change with epochs.

Why would we have runaway warming? I know the physics doesn't change. That's a patently obvious statement.

You can call it a hypothesis all you want. Your mis-characterizations don't negate the fact that it has a wealth of observational evidence, enough that it is a theory. Do you even know what a theory is?

 

[Walter]

Posted on Mar. 20, 2008
By Roy W. Spencer

The Sloppy Science of Global Warming

While a politician might be faulted for pushing a particular agenda that serves his own purposes, who can fault the impartial scientist who warns us of an imminent global-warming Armageddon? After all, the practice of science is an unbiased search for the truth, right? The scientists have spoken on global warming. There is no more debate. But let me play devil’s advocate. Just how good is the science underpinning the theory of manmade global warming? My answer might surprise you: it is 10 miles wide, but only 2 inches deep.
Contrary to what you have been led to believe, there is no solid published evidence that has ruled out a natural cause for most of our recent warmth – not one peer-reviewed paper. The reason: our measurements of global weather on decadal time scales are insufficient to reject such a possibility. For instance, the last 30 years of the strongest warming could have been caused by a very slight change in cloudiness. What might have caused such a change? Well, one possibility is the sudden shift to more frequent El Niño events (and fewer La Niña events) since the 1970s. That shift also coincided with a change in another climate index, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
The associated warming in Alaska was sudden, and at the same time we just happened to start satellite monitoring of Arctic sea ice. Coincidences do happen, you know…that’s why we have a word for them. We make a big deal out of the “unprecedented” 2007 opening of the Northwest Passage as summertime sea ice in the Arctic Ocean gradually receded, yet the very warm 1930s in the Arctic also led to the Passage opening in the 1940s. Of course, we had no satellites to measure the sea ice back then.

Complete article: http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=828

 

[Walter]

Posted on Mar. 18, 2008

By Alexander Cockburn

Global Warming: the Climate of Fear

Although the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in carbon dioxide levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.
In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors having to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the Medieval Warming Period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.
Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as man-made, and many have made this opinion the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.
This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political program. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact, play into the hands of the sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sped up its licensing process, and there is an imminent wave of new nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl in the story about carbon dioxide causing climate change.

Complete article: http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=821

 

[Walter]

Mar 25, 2008
Misleading Reports About Antarctica

Last year when Antarctic set a new record for ice extent, it got no media attention. They focused on the north polar regions where the ice set record low levels. This summer when unprecedented anomalous cover continued in the Southern Hemisphere again no coverage. Then this report in the news today. You probably saw it on your favorite network or internet news site (pick one, anyone).
Vast Antarctic Ice Shelf on Verge of Collapse - Latest Sign of Global Warming’s Impact Shocks Scientists
Andrea Thompson Livescience
A vast ice shelf hanging on by a thin strip looks to be the next chunk to break off from the Antarctic Peninsula, the latest sign of global warming’s impact on Earth’s southernmost continent. Scientists are shocked by the rapid change of events. Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles (37 square miles) that appeared to have broken away from the shelf. Scambos alerted colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) that it looked like the entire ice shelf - about 6,180 square miles (about the size of Northern Ireland)- was at risk of collapsing. The region where the Wilkins Ice Shelf lies has experienced unprecedented warming in the past 50 years, with several ice shelves retreating in the past 30 years. Six of these ice shelves have collapsed completely: Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf. See MSNBC version of this story here.
Icecap Note: Lets put this in perspective. The account may be misinterpreted by some as the ice cap or a significant (vast) portion is collapsing. In reality it and all the former shelves that collapsed are small and most near the Antarctic peninsula which sticks well out from Antarctica into the currents and winds of the South Atlantic and lies in a tectonically active region with surface and subsurface active volcanic activity. The vast continent has actually cooled since 1979.

See full image here
The full Wilkins 6,000 square mile ice shelf is just 0.39% of the current ice sheet (just 0.1% of the extent last September). Only a small portion of it between 1/10th-1/20th of Wilkins has separated so far, like an icicle falling off a snow and ice covered house. And this winter is coming on quickly. In fact the ice is returning so fast, it is running an amazing 60% ahead (4.0 vs 2.5 million square km extent) of last year when it set a new record. The ice extent is already approaching the second highest level for extent since the measurements began by satellite in 1979 and just a few days into the Southern Hemisphere winter and 6 months ahead of the peak. Wilkins like all the others that temporarily broke up will refreeze soon. We are very likely going to exceed last year’s record. Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica’s ice sheet is also starting to disappear.

See full image here
One Icecap reader points also to a paper (Glasser et al, 2008) identifying some of the other natural processes that can lead to these ice sheet breaks, in this case Larsen B.

 

[Walter]

March 28, 2008

The red, red Koyapigaktoruk comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along

One of the most well-known and beloved harbingers of spring is the appearance of our feathered friend, the red-breasted robin. And as is the case with virtually every other cute species, it is the subject of climate change speculation from time to time. But in the robin’s case, it doesn’t surround global warming pushing the robin to extinction. Quite the contrary, global warming is expanding the robin’s range into never-before-seen-territory.
How is this bad news, you may wonder? Well the creative minds behind the global-warming-makes-all-things-worse mantra must have been working overtime, but finally, they did manage to come with a good one—the appearance of robins in high northerly latitudes is a sign the global warming is impinging upon the Earth’s sacred Arctic regions, and robbing them of their uniqueness. Case and point, there is no Eskimo word for ‘robin.’

Apparently, this picture seemed to play well with some folks, including Senator John McCain who seems to have had, at least at one time, an unusual interest (seeing that he is the Senator from Arizona) in Arctic matters. In fact, back in 2004, after a hearing on the subject that he organized as chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, he was quoted by Andrew Revkin, science writer at the New York Times as being particularly disturbed by the rapid pace of warming in the Arctic adding, as way of an illustration, “The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin, and now there are robins all over their villages.”
Horrors of horrors, robins all over the place!
Always interested in a good global warming hook, the press was all over this. In fact, the BBC was so enamored with the idea that they titled their program looking at climate change in the Arctic “No Word for Robin: Climate Change in the Canadian Arctic.”
Alas, as with most over-simplified global warming claptrap, more thought goes into coming up with the alarmist concept than in actually looking into whether or not it is true (look no further than our last World Climate Report for another example—this one about global warming killing frogs).
In this case of the pronounced lack of an Inuit word for robin, we came upon the contrary evidence while thumbing back through some old scientific journal articles on Arctic climate in the local university library. It turns out though, that we could have remained in the comfy confines of our office and avoided the CO2 emissions produced by our journey to the library and the descent into the stuffy journal stacks, because the damning evidence is also freely available on-line.
The article that caught our eye was titled “The Naming of Birds by Nunamiut Eskimo” by Laurence Irving of the Arctic Health Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service in Anchorage, Alaska. It appeared in the March 1953 (Vol. 6, pp. 35-43) issue of the aptly-named journal Arctic (available as a pdf here). In the article, Irving describes his time spent among the Nunamiut Eskimo living in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska comparing English names for birds with the Nunamiut Eskimo names of the birds they encountered. Irving believes that the Eskimo names were from usage of older Nunamiut people and not recent additions. In Irving’s article, he provides the complete list of some 103 bird species.
And, what will obviously come as a surprise to some including Sen. McCain and the BBC producers (not to mention New York Times’ readers and BBC viewers), included among Irving’s list is the Nunamiut Eskimo word for ‘robin.’ For those interested it is “Koyapigaktoruk”—apparently a derivative of the sound of the robin’s song. Irving designates the robin’s status in the region as “NM” for “nesting” and “migrant.”
Further, in his article Irving refers to an earlier compilation of Eskimo names for birds, “The most complete list of Eskimo bird names for this part of Alaska so far published” that can be found in the book My Life with the Eskimo by V. Stefansson published in 1913. As it so happens, the contents of this book are accessible through Amazon.com. If you visit the link http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1417923954# , and enter the search term “robin” and read the contents of page 493, you will see a description of where robins have been sighted in the Canadian Arctic prior (obviously) to 1913, including along the far northern coast. Accompanying these location descriptions are the word for ‘robin’ in several other Eskimo tongues, including (phonetically) “Kre-ku-ak’tu-yok” (Mackenzie Eskimo) and “Shab’wak” (Alaskan Eskimo).

 

[Walter]

[FONT=PalatinoLinotype,BoldItalic]

Scientific consensus on
climate change?​

[/FONT]

Klaus-Martin Schulte​

[FONT=TimesNewRoman,Bold]

Abstract​

[/FONT]

FEAR of anthropogenic “global warming” can adversely affect patients’ well-being. Accordingly, the state of the scientific consensus about climate change was studied by a review of the 539 papers on “global climate change” found on the Web of Science database from January 2004 to mid-February 2007, updating research by Oreskes (2004), who had reported that between 1993 and 2003 none of 928 scientific papers on “global climate change” had rejected the consensus that more than half of the warming of the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic. In the present review, 31 papers (6% of the sample) explicitly or implicitly reject the consensus. Though Oreskes said that 75% of the papers in her sample endorsed the consensus, fewer than half now endorse it. Only 6% do so explicitly. Only one paper refers to “catastrophic” climate change, but without offering evidence. There appears to be little evidence in the learned journals to justify theclimate-change alarm that now harms patients.

​

​

RECENTLY, patients alarmed by the tone of media reports and political speeches on climate change have been voicing severe distress, for fear of the imagined consequences of anthropogenic “global warming”. In my clinical practice patients with benign and malignant disorders are concerned that their disease may be caused by “climate change” and that they might have remained healthy without it. In discussions, they are often specifically distressed that inefficiency or carelessness of policy makers could thus be the origin of their individual suffering. This experience coincides with the results of a survey based on a random sample in 600 Canadian households by Plotnikoff (2004),
who showed that Albertans are highly concerned, particularly about health
problems related to the environment and air pollution. This prompted me to review the literature available on “climate change and health” via PubMed
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez).

The search identified 787 articles of which 346 related to the issue. Of these, 86 were classified by PubMed as reviews, 92 as under the categories of comment, letter, editorial, news or similar. Few produced new data substantially indicating a scientific relation between climate change and a
named health hazard. However, there were a number of items with highly alarming titles. For instance, the Lancet, published “Climate change – the
new bioterrorism” (2002) and with “Climate change likely to prove deadly, says United Nations report” (2001).

The WHO bulletin issued an article which outlines that “human-induced climate change threatens ecosystems and human health on a global scale” (1997). The British Medical Journal has said that “Climate change is likely to affect the health of millions, report warns.” (2007) and has published an editorial by
Stott entitled “What should we do about climate change? Health professionals need to act now, collectively and individually.” (2006). Most of the 346 articles on the health impacts of climate change are written by healthcare professionals. Many have adopted the assumption that climate change is a fact and many suppose that it is driven by man. In the light of the relative scarcity
of hard facts about the connection between climate change and specific health hazards it became necessary to examine the underlying hypothesis.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/schulte_two_colmun_fomat.pdf​

 

[Walter]

It's getting warmer? Oops

More bad news for climate change Chicken Littles
Contrary to what Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio say, the global warming debate is not over. Hysterical warnings about flooded coastlines and boiled polar bears remain nothing more than hot-air predictions. Their belief in an approaching apocalypse is based on nothing more than theory and blind faith, when the measures they advocate -- the dismantling of capitalist economies and making energy unaffordable for the masses -- demand hard evidence.
Well, the latest data on climate change is in and, not surprisingly, it favors the "deniers."
The United Nations World Meteorological Organization, the body that provides climate models to the U.N.'s alarmist global warming panel, reported last week that not only have world temperatures remained stable for the past decade, but that global average temperatures for 2008 will be cooler than those of 2007.
Call us crazy, but that has to make it hard to sell the public on giving up their cars and detached homes in favor of mass transit and high-rise tenements.

Let's put it this way: If a sports betting tout told you to wager the mortgage payment on a supposedly "hot" basketball team that had, in fact, lost 10 games in a row -- that had done nothing the so-called experts predicted -- would you at least ask a few questions before buying the ticket?
The global warming gurus assure us that a decade without, you know, global warming, has a perfectly rational explanation, and that humanity's wasteful standard of living is still a sure bet to replace Canadian winters with Las Vegas summers by the end of the century. The Pacific Ocean's La Nina current, a cooler-than-normal expanse of water, is responsible for milder temperatures in the normally balmy equatorial region. China and West Asia have cooled off as well, the WMO reported.
The La Nina current is expected to hang around the rest of the year. After that, we're back on the express elevator to Hades.
"For detecting climate change you should not look at any particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently long period of time," said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. "And the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming."
The La Nina current is "part of what we call 'variability,' " he said.
But as Investor's Business Daily wrote in a Friday editorial: "Why can't the Pacific's El Nino current, which played a large part in the warm reading for 1998, simply be seen as a 'variability' and not part of a greater warming trend?" Variability is code for "data that don't support our cause."
To wit: Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Gore and others were quick to contend that the 2005 super-storm resulted from global warming, and that such devastating hurricane seasons would be the norm for years to come. The relatively uneventful 2006 and 2007 seasons? Those must be "variability."
In fact, if the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were your local weatherman, a pink slip would have landed in its mailbox a long time ago. A study in last year's International Journal of Climatology determined the temperature increases predicted by the hyperpolitical body's climate models have already been proved unreliable, throwing every doomsday theory the greens can muster into question.
That won't stop the greens from preaching the gospel of global warming. And it certainly won't stop their media enablers from reporting it as truth -- witness the lack of news reports on the WMO data.
But bit by bit, cold, hard, scientific fact is deflating many assertions of the climate change alarmists.

 

[darkbeaver]

World Bank Climate Profiteering

By Daphne Wysham and Shakuntala Makhijani

Global Research, April 9, 2008
Foreign Policy in Focus

The World Bank’s long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a “knowledge bank” didn’t work, it devised a new identity as a “Green Bank.” Really? Yes, it’s true. Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold.
How exactly, does this work, you ask?
Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it’s taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13% cut, and everyone is happy.

Everyone, that is, who is cashing in on this deal. If you’re after a real solution to the climate crisis, these shenanigans can and should make you unhappy.
Aiding the Tata Group
Consider a project the International Finance Corporation (IFC) had scheduled for board consideration on March 27, but is now, according to its press office, slated for approval in April. (The World Bank Group’s boards virtually never reject anything sent to them). The IFC, the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, plans to back a massive coal-fired power plant in Mundra, a town in the Indian state of Gujarat. The complex of five 800 megawatt plants will cost $4.14 billion to build and be owned and operated by Tata Power Company Limited, a scion of India’s largest multinational corporation, the Tata Group.
To put this in perspective, Tata Motors, a division of the same conglomerate, recently announced plans to buy the luxury car companies, Jaguar and Range Rover from U.S. automaker Ford for $2.3 billion. And Tata Power’s 2007 revenues totaled $1.6 billion. So, it’s hard not to ask how much help Tata needs from the World Bank, which has as its motto: “our dream is a world free of poverty.” Several other corporations are involved. Toshiba, for example, will supply the steam turbine generators.
Once operational, the Mundra power plant will be India’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it doesn’t stop there. Now, the World Bank has planned for the Tata coal burner to be eligible for carbon credits under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism. Carbon credits for a coal burner, you ask?
In the bizarre logic of the carbon market, a market the World Bank is both shaping and investing in, yes, Country B can get credits for helping a corporation, even one of the world’s wealthiest corporations such as Tata, capture a few carbon emissions, as long as these emissions are captured in a “poor” country, like India, regardless of how rich the company involved may be.
Indonesian Coal
And it gets stranger still. One would hazard a guess that the IFC is lending $450 million, “considering investing up to $50 million in equity as part of its exposure to the project,” and possibly helping Tata obtain $300 from other sources at favorable rates for the Tata burner because India has no other choice but to burn its own abundant supply of coal. But, no, the IFC plans to import coal from Indonesia to fuel the plant in India. In fact, Tata bought a 30% stake in two Indonesian coal-mining units for $1.3 billion in April 2007 in order to secure the coal resources for the Mundra plant.
On its Website, the World Bank division offered this feeble justification for this transaction: “IFC is supporting thermal power projects which have better GHG (greenhouse gas) and environmental performance than the average plants in India, given the country’s large needs for incremental electricity supply.”
Surely, if the Bank is involved, the poor, if not in India, then somewhere else are better off as a result of this project? Well, in a word, no. Indonesian coal regulations are largely incoherent and open to manipulation, giving often-corrupt local officials control over the resource wealth, stripping local communities of their resources, and leaving them with a legacy of environmental problems.
Indeed, Indonesia’s coal sector is the rule, not the exception, in its posture toward the poor: A three-year review of the World Bank’s investments in the extractive industries, the Extractive Industries Review, launched under former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, found that the poor were worse off as a result of investments in extractive industries, and recommended the World Bank get out of coal immediately. (That was back in 2004.)
The Extractive Industries Review, ironically, was developed with input from industry, government, and civil society participants, and overseen by former Indonesian environment minister under Suharto, Emil Salim, who himself sat on the board of a large coal company. Nevertheless, Salim was unequivocal that the World Bank should cease lending for coal, and phase out of oil by 2008. The World Bank’s board voted to overrule these recommendations.
Sadly, the IFC isn’t the only powerful international financial agency backing the Mundra power project. The Asian Development Bank, The Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), and the Korea Export Insurance Corporation are also involved.
Climate Change Mitigation?
O.K. The poor are worse off, the corporations are better off, and the Bank is double-dipping on carbon trading. Bad enough. But here’s a final, scary twist: The World Bank is increasingly being given a leadership role in various climate investment funds by the world’s wealthy countries. In an initiative with pledged contributions from the United States, the UK, and Japan, the Bank will oversee $7-$12 billion for “climate change mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries.” The funds - the Clean Technology Fund, the Forest Investment Fund, the Adaptation/Climate Resilience Pilot Fund, and the Strategic Climate Fund - are moving forward despite having come under fire from developing countries as well as from environment and development organizations. They are concerned that the funds will, once again, give wealthy Northern governments, and, in particular, their bank of choice, the World Bank, more control over funds intended to “help” developing countries.
Rather than a “Green Bank,” the World Bank is revealing itself to be a banker for the super-powerful corporate elite. In addition, it’s turning into a climate change profiteer. If the Bank were the only one fooled by its new identity, the image would be pathetic if not outright laughable. Unfortunately, the Bank has seemingly fooled some of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Or maybe, when they look at the Bank, what these wealthy countries really see is not “green” but “greenbacks.”
Daphne Wysham is a fellow and Shakuntala Makhijani is an intern with the Institute for Policy Studies. They are both contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus.

 

[Walter]

April 09, 2008
The slick trick behind global frauding

By James Lewis


In Stalin's Russia any dissenter from the Party Line was guilty. Innocence had to be proved. It's a standard tyrant's trick. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England, witchhunters did not have to prove that their victims were guilty. The accused witches had to prove their innocence.
That's what Al Gore has done to science: He and his friends have flipped innocence and guilt from normal science to Stalinist science.
In Al Gore's America, any "global warming denier" is guilty until proven innocent. He or she must have been bought off by Big Oil. Skeptics, no matter how well-qualified, must prove the negative about really silly alarmist hogwash. And whenever some prediction is falsified, the warm mongers have an explanation: it's just a temporary glitch in the data. Oh, yes, we were wrong about 1998, but just wait till 2050! The excuses are endless.
...
In normal science the burden of proof is on the proposer. Albert Einstein had to prove in his historic 1905 paper that there was a fundamental flaw in classical physics. The distinctive predictions of Relativity Theory had to be verified for decades afterwards. Some are still being tested today. His predecessor Max Planck remarked that he encountered so much skepticism that he had to wait for the older generation of physicists to die off before his work was accepted. Darwin said the same thing.
A healthy scientific community is extremely skeptical. It needs to see more and more evidence, over and over and over again, before it adopts some wild-eyed new idea. It takes all the time it needs; good science is very patient. Einstein himself was a complete skeptic about quantum mechanics, and never accepted it over the last forty years of his life. He had a perfect right to question it, as long as he had rational arguments, and he did. (He was wrong on QM, but he was right on Relativity.)
"Catastrophic global warming," caused by human beings, is a really wild-eyed idea, given the fact that animals have survived on earth for half a billion years, with thousands of massive volcanic explosions, giant meteors hitting the earth, drifting continents, and great biomass changes that would have perturbed the climate, if the hypothesis were true. Just imagine the amount of C02 that must have been released with the Cambrian explosion of animal life. If the earth really saw superfast global ups and downs in temperature, no animals could have survived those 500 million years. The Ice Ages drove animals and people south, but they were not superfast, global events, or you and I would not be here today. Animals and plants are able adapt to temperature changes. Polar bears grow layers of fat and long, dense fur. Camels can stay cool in the desert.
In biology, "catastrophism" has been treated with intense skepticism since Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century. Except today, when biological catastrophism is the in thing. Why would that be, do you suppose?
How have Al Gore and the fraudsters pulled it off? It's really simple. They just flipped the burden of proof and put it on the "deniers" --- the skeptics, who don't believe the computer models. With the Left in control of the media, you can do it.
So now it's prove to me you're not a witch! Because there is no decisive evidence. There are 21 computer models that "prove" global warming over the next century. By the time 2050 rolls around, most of the modelers will be dead.
To answer the biggest con trick in the history of science, you just have to address a single question to True Believers: What's your evidence for this barmy idea? (Not: Here's my evidence against it. That's not how it works).
And the answer is: There are no facts robust enough, consistent enough, and verified enough to support the mass hysteria. The climate system is hypercomplex, nonlinear and poorly understood. The media spinners are immensely ignorant about real science, and just care about the next scare headline. There's a lot of wild speculation and a mob of self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and media types who stand to gain a ton of power and money by suckering millions of taxpayers. Al Gore just started a 300 million dollar PR campaign to convince everybody. When was the last time you saw 300 million bucks being spent to promote a scientific hypothesis that was already proven? We're not spending millions to prove the existence of gravity. The uproar and money involved in this fraud is in direct proportion to the lack of solid facts.
The last ten years have seen global cooling, not warming.
Temperatures over the last hundred years look like the stock market: ups and downs, a very slow rise of a fraction of a degree until the late 1990s, then a drop for the last ten years, with so much cooling in the last year as to cancel out a century of warming. Why? Nobody really knows, but Mr. Sun is the logical suspect.
Look it up. But don't get caught in the trap of proving the negative. In normal, healthy science, the skeptics ask questions. It is the proponents who carry the burden of proof.
Now can we talk about 9/11? That's a fact. But Al Gore doesn't think it's a big deal, compared to his favorite science fiction story. Al Gore just wants power, fame, money, and the US Presidency. Well, three out of four ain't bad.
Oliver Cromwell and his witchhunters would have understood perfectly.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

 

[Walter]

More Global Warming Nonsense

By PAUL REITER and ROGER BATE
April 10, 2008; Page A14

Today, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the implications of climate change for human health. Malaria will top the menu, but so will ignorance and disinformation.
The lead witness will be Dr. Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has suggested that U.S. energy policy may be "indirectly exporting diseases to other parts of the world." Dr. Patz, the World Health Organization (WHO) and others claim that global warming is now spreading disease and may be the cause of some 160,000 deaths a year.
In 2007, for example, WHO pointed to rising temperatures in an outbreak of a mosquito-borne virus, Chikungunya, in Italy. Yet WHO misdiagnosed the problem. Modern transportation, not climate change, caused the outbreak.
In that case, the transmitter of the disease, or vector, was the Asian Tiger mosquito. It is native to Asia, but exported world-wide in shipments of used tires. It is now abundant in parts of U.S. and in 12 countries in Europe. In cities, it breeds in man-made containers of water, such as saucers under flower-pots, water barrels, blocked gutters and so on. The virus was carried to Italy by an infected Indian who flew from Delhi, where an epidemic of the disease was then raging.
So the real technological villain in that case was the jet airplane. It was irresponsible, then, for WHO to state "although it is not possible to say whether the outbreak was caused by climate change . . . conditions in Italy are now suitable for the Tiger mosquito." And it was absurd for environmental alarmists to chime in with apocalyptic pronouncements.
The globalization of vectors and pathogens is a serious problem. But it is not new. The Yellow Fever mosquito and virus were imported into North America from Africa during the slave trade. The dengue virus is distributed throughout the tropics and regularly jumps continents inside air passengers. West Nile virus likely arrived in the U.S. in shipments of wild birds. These diseases are spread by mosquitoes and therefore difficult to quarantine.
It may come as a surprise that malaria was once common in most of Europe and North America. In parts of England, mortality from "the ague" was comparable to that in sub-Saharan Africa today. William Shakespeare was born at the start of the especially cold period that climatologists call the "Little Ice Age," yet he was aware enough of the ravages of the disease to mention it in eight of his plays.
Malaria disappeared from much of Western Europe during the second half of the 19th century. Changes in agriculture, living conditions and a drop in the price of quinine, a cure still used today, all helped eradicate it. However, in some regions it persisted until the insecticide DDT wiped it out. Temperate Holland was not certified malaria-free by the WHO until 1970.
The concept of malaria as a "tropical" infection is nonsense. It is a disease of the poor. Alarmists in the richest countries peddle the notion that the increase in malaria in poor countries is due to global warming and that this will eventually cause malaria to spread to areas that were "previously malaria free." That's a misrepresentation of the facts and disingenuous when packaged with opposition to the cheapest and best insecticide to combat malaria – DDT.
It is true that malaria has been increasing at an alarming rate in parts of Africa and elsewhere in the world. Scientists ascribe this increase to many factors, including population growth, deforestation, rice cultivation in previously uncultivated upland marshes, clustering of populations around these marshes, and large numbers of people who have fled their homes because of civil strife. The evolution of drug-resistant parasites and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes, and the cessation of mosquito-control operations are also factors.
Of course, temperature is a factor in the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases, and future incidence may be affected if the world's climate continues to warm. But throughout history the most critical factors in the spread or eradication of disease has been human behavior (shifting population centers, changing farming methods and the like) and living standards. Poverty has been and remains the world's greatest killer.
Serious scientists rarely engage in public quarrels. Alarmists are therefore often unopposed in offering simplicity in place of complexity, ideology in place of scientific dialogue, and emotion in place of dry perspective. The alarmists will likely steal the show on Capitol Hill today. But anyone truly worried about malaria in impoverished countries would do well to focus on improving human living conditions, not the weather.
Mr. Reiter is director of the Insects and Infectious Diseases Unit of the Institut Pasteur, Paris. Mr. Bate is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

 

[Walter]

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Krupp's "Warming" meets Ponte's "Cooling" [Henry Payne]
Michigan, like the Midwest in general, has endured a brutal winter with record cold temperatures, snow two feet above normal as of March, six inches of snow in Detroit on Easter, 26 inches in Marquette on April 5, and more snow predicted for Detroit Metro this weekend as temperatures maintain their sub-normal trend.
But like their news-media brethren, bookstore shelves are strangely at odds with the world outside. While Michigan freezes, local sellers are showcasing Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp’s acclaimed new book about the warming apocalypse called Earth: The Sequel — The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming.
Krupp gets right to it in Chapter One, warning of warming calamity even as current temperature data suggests recent temperature trends have moderated:

The scientific consensus is that inaction will change the earth within a few decades into a place unlike any ever inhabited by humans. Business as usual will open the door to catastrophe: flooding and dislocation of millions of people; chronic drought and mass malnourishment in Africa; wildfires, deadly heat waves, and coastal destruction; the extinction of half the world’s living species.
​

The words are eerily similar to another acclaimed book on my shelf published 32 years ago.
In 1976 Lowell Ponte — like Krupp, an influential think-tank figure with the International Research Technology Corp. — published a book called The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can we Survive It? It too was written at the apex of a frightening (in his case, cold) climate trend. Here’s Ponte in Chapter One:

In 1975, the U.S. National Academy of Science issued . . . a warning by some of the world’s most prestigious, cautious scientists that an Ice Age (was) beginning in the near future. The tone of the report was one of repressed alarm. A study completed in 1971 by Drs. S. I. Rasool and S. H. Schneider of NASA’s Goddard Institute estimates that man’s potential to pollute . . . could increase the atmosphere’s opacity by 400 percent. That would reduce sunlight enough, say the scientists, to drop the Earth’s surface temperature by 3.4 degrees C, which would almost certainly bring on an Ice Age. (The consequences) will hamper world food production as weather gets progressively worse. The damage this can cause is already apparent in global food shortages and the recent deaths of more than 400,000 people in Africa and Asia. If global famine arises, we can expect world war.
​

Warming, cooling . . . choose your fad. The prevailing weather is simply an excuse to scare us silly.

 

[Walter]

Friday, April 11, 2008 ... / / / / /

Sun-climate link: a reply to Sloan and Wolfendale
Three weeks ago, we mentioned three recent preprints about cosmoclimatology, a theory in which galactic cosmic rays create clouds just like in a bubble chamber (and cool down the Earth unless they are filtered away).
Two of them supported the theory but the third, a paper written by Sloan and Wolfendale (paper, PDF),didn't. Even without looking at the papers, you may guess which of these three preprints was reported by the media, for example by the Telegraph, UPI, and the BBC: 'No Sun link' to climage changeRecall that the paper argued that the cosmic influence on the climate is probably insignificant because the effect seems to have a wrong "fingerprint" - i.e. the dependence on the latitude.

Second, the British critics argued that the cloud cover leads the cosmic ray flux variations by three months or so. As a bonus, the critics also question the correct behavior of the theory during the so-called Forbush events. We will mention this additional subtle "fingerprint", too.

Skeptics are familiar with both types of these arguments - fingerprints and lags - in a different context, namely in the context of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect has a completely wrong fingerprint (see also Douglass, Christy, Pearson, Singer) and the historical CO2 concentrations lag behind the temperature by 800 years.

But seemingly similar arguments don't have to be equally valid. The main link of this article goes to Prof Nir Shaviv: Is the causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover really dead??
A flaw in the fingerprint argument

He explains that the fingerprint argument of the "skeptics" ;-) is incorrect because the cosmic rays relevant for cosmoclimatology are very high-energy (above 10 GeV or so), charged (ionizing) cosmic rays that are able to penetrate the atmosphere. These rays don't exhibit much variation caused by the Earth's magnetic field. It means that cosmoclimatology doesn't predict too strong a dependence on the magnetic latitude. It is only a few percent and the agreement was shown by Usoskin et al. (2004).

On the other hand, Sloan and Wolfendale incorrectly compare the cloud cover with the relatively low-energy cosmic rays that are absorbed in the upper layers of the atmosphere and that consequently have much stronger dependence on the latitude. These cosmic rays are almost exactly proportional to the flux of neutrons near the surface because the neutrons produced at higher layers of the atmosphere reach the surface almost without interruption. But they are also unable to ionize the atmosphere and create clouds.

Their failure to distinguish the different types of radiation - analogous to a naive skeptic's confusion between infrared and ultraviolet rays in the greenhouse effect - is the main reason for their faulty prediction of large latitude variations.

The lag

Another counter-argument by the "skeptics" is the lag. Well, in this case, it is only argued to be around 3 months which is slightly less impressive a separation than those 800 years observed during the glaciation cycles, but 3 months is still a positive number.

This lag would indeed kill the causal relationship between cosmic rays and clouds if the cosmic rays were the only effect influencing the clouds. However, there are other effects, too. Only crazy people would like to argue that there only exists one cause of climate changeLearning-to-Love-Global-Warming

and Nir Shaviv is not one of these crazy people. Nir goes well beyond the handwaving above. In fact, he quantitatively estimates the lag and his prediction turns out to be compatible with observations. The essence of his calculation is simple. The cloud cover oscillations are assumed to have two components. One of them is a direct consequence of the cosmic rays, as dictated by cosmoclimatology. It has virtually no lag and induces changes of the cloud cover by roughly 1.5% (Nir shows that this follows from the sensitivity corresponding to 1 - 1.5 per CO2 doubling).

However, the other component of the cloud cover is dictated by temperature which is known from Shaviv (2005) to lag by 1/8 of the solar cycle behind the solar activity and it induces fluctuations of the cloud cover by roughly 0.17-0.35%, about 5-10 times smaller than the zero-lag component.

It follows that the lag of the mixture will be 1/8 times (1/5 or 1/10) of the cycle which is between 1.8 and 3.5 months, fitting Sloan & Wolfendale's figure beautifully. The lag has the opposite sign because the two components have the opposite signs from one another, too. The major component - direct cosmoclimatology - reduces clouds during the solar maxima while the subleading component adds clouds near the solar maximum through an increased temperature and increased evaporation. If you want a numerical model behind the idea, cos(x) - cos(x+1/8)/5 = a cos(x-1/(8*5)b) where a,b are numbers close to one. 1/8 should have been 2.pi/8 but you surely get the idea and you can refine the equation. ;-)

There is no paradox here.

Note that you can't use the same argument to get rid of the 800-year-lag problem of the greenhouse effect. What's the difference between the two situations? The difference is that in cosmoclimatology, both the temperature and the cloud cover depend on external (solar, cosmic) perturbations that are primary and the strongest ones and such an effect doesn't contradict any data.

On the other hand, the temperature in Al Gore's graphs is claimed to be driven by CO2 itself, not by external "third" effects, and such a hypothesis is falsified by the temperature-CO2 lag. The lag either means that a "third" external quantity independently drives both the temperature and the CO2 (that don't interact with each other much) - which seems unlikely - or that the temperature's effect on the carbon dioxide is stronger than the opposite (greenhouse) effect. The latter option is almost certainly correct and the mechanism behind this relationship is called outgassing.

Forbush events

Finally, Sloan & Wolfendale complain that one more fingerprint is not seen. During the so-called Forbush events when the cosmic ray flux drops by 15-20%, they don't observe a huge enough decrease of the cloud cover.

However, the Forbush decreases only last for a few days while the "skeptics" determine the cloud cover from the weekly and monthly average data. The average weekly or monthly decrease of the cosmic ray flux is much smaller even during weeks or months with the Forbush decreases - because the latter only take two or three days - and the corresponding weekly or monthly decrease of the cloud cover is actually small enough that it can't be isolated from the noise.

To do it right and to see some signal, one would have to consider daily averages of the cloud cover data. And indeed, it was done by Harrison and Stephenson (2006) who have apparently confirmed the drop of clouds over Britain.

After reading Nir Shaviv's answer in detail, I seem to have a very clear opinion who knows what he is talking about and who knows it a little bit less. ;-) Unfortunately, Terry Sloan who happens to be a member of the LHC's ATLAS collaboration belongs to the latter category.

 

[Walter]

Iwo Jima Veterans Blast Time's 'Special Environmental Issue' Cover
Time editor tells MSNBC 'there needs to be a real effort along the lines of World War II to combat global warming and climate change.'

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
4/17/2008 5:24:05 PM


For only the second time in 85 years, Time magazine abandoned the traditional red border it uses on its cover. The occasion – to push more global warming alarmism.

The cover of the April 21 issue of Time took the famous Iwo Jima photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag and replaced the flag with a tree. The cover story by Bryan Walsh calls green “the new red, white and blue.”

Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”

Mates also said making the comparison of World War II to global warming was erroneous and disrespectful.

“The second world war we knew was there,” Mates said. “There’s a big discussion. Some say there is global warming, some say there isn’t. And to stick a tree in place of a flag on the Iwo Jima picture is just sacrilegious.”

According to the American Veterans Center (AVC), Mates served in the 3rd Marine Division and fought in the battle of Iwo Jima, landing on Feb. 24, 1945.

“A few days later, Mates’ eight-man patrol came under heavy assault from Japanese forces,” Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the AVC, said. “During fierce-hand-to-hand combat, Mates watched as his friend and fellow Marine, Jimmy Trimble, was killed in front of his eyes. Mates was severely wounded, and underwent repeated operations for shrapnel removal for over 30 years.”

Lt. John Keith Wells, the leader of the platoon that raised the flags on Mt. Suribachi and co-author of “Give Me Fifty Marines Not Afraid to Die: Iwo Jima” wasn’t impressed with Time’s efforts.

“That global warming is the biggest joke I’ve ever known,” Wells told the Business & Media Institute. “[W]e’ll stick a dadgum tree up somebody’s rear if they want that and think that’s going to cure something.”

Time managing editor Richard Stengel appeared on MSNBC April 17 and said the United States needed to make a major effort to fight climate change, and that the cover’s purpose was to liken global warming to World War II.


“[O]ne of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change,” Stengel said. “It seems to me that this is an issue that is very popular with the voters, makes a lot of sense to them and a candidate who can actually bundle it up in some grand way and say, ‘Look, we need a national and international Manhattan Project to solve this problem and my candidacy involves that.’ I don't understand why they don’t do that.”

Holbert, a speaking on behalf of the American Veterans Center, said the editorial decision by Time to use the photograph for the cover trivialized the cause the veterans fought for.

“Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,” Holbert said. “The Japanese Empire in February of 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history. War analogies should be used sparingly by political advocates of all bents.”

Stengel also appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on April 17 and had no difficulty admitting the magazine needed to have a “point of view.”

“I think since I’ve been back at the magazine, I have felt that one of the things that’s needed in journalism is that you have to have a point of view about things,” Stengel said. “You can’t always just say ‘on the one hand, on the other’ and you decide. People trust us to make decisions. We’re experts in what we do. So I thought, you know what, if we really feel strongly about something let's just say so.”

Time has been banging the global warming drum for some time now. In April 2007, Time offered 51 ways to “save the planet,” which included more taxes and regulation.

 

[Walter]

March 27, 2008
Burlington, Washington
Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University, author of 8 books, 150 journal publications with focus on geomorphology; glacial geology; Pleistocene geochronology; environmental and engineering geology.​

Don J. Easterbrook: ​

​

Some people say that global warming skeptics think the moon shot was staged and the earth is flat… ​

Ken L. Coffman: ​

​

Funny you should mention that, here it is, I have the exact quote.
Al Gore: You're talking about Dick Cheney. I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority 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. ... That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off. ​

1. CBS-TV, 60 Minutes, March 30, 2008

KLC: ​

​

I was going to ask for your opinion on it… ​

DJE​

​

: Online, you will find ten talking points about what Gore has said and it essentially points out that what he’s saying is a bunch of hogwash. It’s been refuted by the scientists who work in such things. ​

KLC: ​

​

I wanted to talk to you about Al Gore because you seem, in general, to have been supportive of him. ​

DJE: ​

​

Actually, I’m not. The irony is that I voted for him [in 2000]; I’m neither a Democrat or a Republican. I dislike the Democrats only slightly less than I dislike the Republicans, so I’m one of those independents who think the government is totally corrupt in both parties. The point being, simply, I don’t have a political agenda one way or the other. ​

KLC: ​

​

In some of the stuff I’ve read, you seemed to be defending him. Like you said, you voted for him… ​

DJE: Actually, it’s not that at all. For a number of interviews, especially in the national news media, they ask ‘Are you a Republican?’ and I say ‘No, I’m not, as a matter of fact, I voted for Al Gore. I don’t want to pick on him because he’s not a scientist.’ The nonsense he spews comes from the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], so in a sense I don’t condemn him as much as I do the so-called climatologists like [James] Hansen, who says things that are idiotic. They’re the ones giving him all this stuff. He’s a propagandist, not a scientist, so I cut him a little slack. But, the things he does, the things he says, are so outrageous, I don’t forgive him anymore. For example, when he says things like ‘people like me are right in there with the flat earth theory’. He says the debate is over. The debate is not over—it’s just getting started. There’s a huge uproar in the scientific world because in the last ten years, the climate has cooled slightly, but the media won’t tell you that. This year is a big downturn, you can’t miss it. Global warming simply ended in 1998, but the public doesn’t know it.

Complete article; a good read: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DonEasterbrookInterviewTranscript.pdf

 

[Walter]

The Great Global Warming Race
By Steven Milloy
May 1, 2008

Can global warming’s vested interests close the deal on greenhouse gas regulation before the public wises up to their scam? A new study indicates alarmist concern and a need to explain away the lack of actual global warming.

Researchers belonging to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in Nature (May 1) that, after adjusting their climate model to reflect actual sea surface temperatures of the last 50 years, “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations… temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”

You got that? IPCC researchers project no global warming over the next decade because of Mother Nature.

Although the result seems stunning in that it came from IPCC scientists who have always been in the tank for manmade global warming, it’s not really surprising since the notion of manmade climate change has never lived up to its billing.

When NASA’s James Hansen sounded the alarm in Congress 20 years ago, he predicted that rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) would drive global temperatures higher by 0.34 degrees Celsius during the 1990s. But surface temperatures increased during that decade by only 0.11 degrees Celsius and lower atmosphere temperatures actually decreased. Global temperatures remain well below an El Nino-driven 1998 spike despite ever increasing atmospheric CO2.

Global warming hysterics purport that manmade emissions of CO2 are the primary driver of global climate and that controlling emissions will favorably affect climate. While this is obviously not so since it virtually supposes that without human activity climate change would not occur, it nevertheless remains their viewpoint.

The Nature study, however, reasserts Mother Nature in her rightful place as our climate dominatrix.

Although there is no evidence that manmade CO2 emissions play any detectable role in climate change, the very idea that Mother Nature may cool the planet despite humanity’s furious output of greenhouse gases should be even worse for the climate alarmists’ way of thinking. It would mean that greenhouse gas emissions are actually beneficial since without them, Mother Nature’s cooling could be quite damaging.

The last time the Earth significantly cooled was during the 14th to 19th centuries -- a period known as the Little Ice Age. Among other things during that period, the Vikings were forced to withdraw from a freezing Greenland and cooler Northern Hemisphere temperatures were responsible for, and or contributed to, numerous famines and much-related social upheaval.

So will the Nature study dump climate alarmism into the ash can of history? Doubtful.

Just this week, Al Gore drummed up $683 million dollars for an investment fund that aims to profit from government-subsidized global warming-related technologies. A few weeks ago, Gore launched a $300 million global warming ad campaign. Do you think he’s at all interested in returning that money to investors and contributors? Or that he and the IPCC are interested in returning their Nobel Peace Prizes?

The federal government has been doling out more than $5 billion annually for research into climate change and alternative energy. A generation ago, there were only a handful of climatologists around the world. Now there are legions of taxpayer-funded climatologists, and scientists and public health professionals from many disciplines also hooked up to the climate gravy train.

What about the private sector profiteers? Will the carbon footprint industry give up its CO2-offset ATM? Will companies who have been lobbying to receive trillions of dollars of free carbon credits from Congress -- including Alcoa, Dow Chemical, and Dupont -- stop pushing for all that free money?

How many outspoken politicians and celebrities will be willing to acknowledge that they have made fools of themselves? I suppose that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Madonna and others could at least jet on back to their hypocritical Green lifestyles with a clear conscience of sorts.

Finally, there’s the environmental movement which is now just a November presidential election away from their dream of turning the U.S. into a centrally-planned “Green” state, where the under the guise of saving the planet, the Green elites would get to pick-and-choose who gets to use how much energy and at what cost.

The bottom line of global warming -- and that is why so many are behind it -- is that its many vested interests are on the verge of a financial and political bonanza, something that scientific facts and climatic realities are likely only to spoil.

So when global temperature doesn’t behave as predicted, excuses and explanations must be found to prevent the almost-mature golden goose from being roasted for dinner.

The spin on the Nature study provided by its authors to the New York Times is that, “We’re learning that [natural] climate variability is important and can mask the effects of human-induced global change. In the end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections.”

The attempted logic here is that even though the alarmists have been wrong in the past -- been there, done that -- their failure somehow sets them up for more certain future success.

We look past this logical fallacy at our own peril. I can’t wait for their Orwellian pronouncement that global cooling is the new global warming.

For the next 10 years, while alarmists ram through their misanthropic agenda, their time-buying story line will be “aren’t we lucky that Mother Nature has given us a temporary reprieve.” This will no doubt be followed ten years later by “Whew, aren’t we glad we spent trillions to prevent catastrophic global warming?”

Meanwhile for trained observers, it will simply be a matter of realizing that the global warming apocalypse never materialized because it was simply never going to happen anyway.

 

[Walter]

Global warming on hiatus

New research suggests ocean currents will offset rising temperatures -- cue the hysterics

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

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Let's call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily.
German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015.
In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore's simplistic and propagandistic An Inconvenient Truth, global temperatures aren't moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn't settled and we don't know everything we need to know.
Based on new, computer-generated climate models that factor in natural ocean currents, the researchers conclude: "Our results suggest that global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming."
Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said if their calculations are correct, the 0.3 degree Celsius global temperature rise predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change over the next decade won't happen.
"We believe that ocean currents and systems could, in the short term, change global warming patterns, and even mean temperatures," he told National Geographic News.
TWO DECADES
Since there has actually been no global warming since 1998, that means there would be an almost two-decade span where concentrations of GHG emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, continued to intensify in the atmosphere, without global temperatures following suit.
These researchers aren't climate "deniers." They say their findings -- based on cutting-edge computer modelling techniques still in their infancy -- are a refinement of existing climate models.
They also calculate that after 2015, global warming will resume, as the warming caused by man-made GHG emissions is no longer masked by the cooling effect of ocean currents. They aren't suggesting man-made global warming has permanently stopped.
And that's all fair enough. But let's not kid the troops.
Prior to this study, anyone impertinent enough to point out, contrary to the Al Gore Nation, there hasn't been any global warming for a decade was apt to have their head shot off by climate hysterics.
As astrophysicist and award-winning former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse -- who made exactly that point in the British magazine New Statesman last Dec. 19 in an essay titled "Has Global Warming Stopped?" observed in the wake of this new research:
"Not long ago, anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused of seeing what they wanted to see ... Then, if they had the effrontery to point out that even the U.K.'s MET (British Meteorological Office) agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line, they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental 'activist' damned my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic, whilst at the same time implying I was lying)".
HIT FROM ALL SIDES
Indeed, Whitehouse got hit from all sides, including a brutal follow-up essay in New Statesman by its "environmental correspondent" who wrote: "I'll be blunt. Whitehouse got it wrong -- completely wrong ... readers of my column will know that I give contrarians, or skeptics or deniers (call them what you will) short shrift ... So a mistaken article reached a flawed conclusion. Intentionally, or not, readers were misled, and the good name of the New Statesman has been used all over the Internet by climate contrarians seeking to support their entrenched positions."
There's only one problem. Whitehouse isn't a denier.
As he wrote in his original essay, "Certainly the working hypotheses of CO2-induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles, but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far, or that the working hypotheses is a sufficient explanation for what is going on ... we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth's atmosphere's interaction with sunlight ... We know far less than many think we do, or would like you to think we do."
Indeed.

 

[typingrandomstuff]

Wow, you guys are still at it. Yes Walter, oceans do cool down the process of global warming. My question is, is earth more powerful than the sun's warming period?

 

[typingrandomstuff]

I think the times mean water plants. The only mistakes to that is they are confused.